Self-Help Fascism: Part 1

The founder of analytic psychology, Carl Jung. Photo: Bettmann

Though political ideologies are inherently a social matter—therefore acted out most visibly on a whole population—their beliefs reach back to the conduct and conception of individuals. There are the familiar, misleading stereotypes of libertine leftists and puritanical reactionaries, but the real differences are better grasped by examining how political ideologies view the self as such, rather than beginning our analysis at the end of the process—i.e. how individuals manifest their politics in their person. This approach is further necessary because it allows us to not only critique the stunted view of the self which fascism promotes, but also to see why people are still enticed by a view which shrouds its stunted nature in the mystique of esoteric language and subversive beliefs.

At the core of the fascist worldview is a pessimism which rebounds back into its view of the self. From Arthur Schopenhauer, to his disciple Friedrich Nietzsche, to the Nazi philosophers which took Nietzsche as a founding father, we see a common thread of animosity towards human reason and its ability to perfect society, a pessimism which manifested first in Schopenhauer’s attitude towards negative emotional experience. In his evaluation of utopia, Schopenhauer went past doubting the achievability of the abolition of human want and conflict to criticize the goal itself:

“Suppose the human race were removed to Utopia where everything grew automatically and pigeons flew about ready-roasted; where everyone at once found his sweetheart and had no difficulty in keeping her; then people would die of boredom or hang themselves; or else they would fight, throttle, and murder one another and so cause themselves more suffering than is now laid upon them by nature. Thus for such a race, no other scene, no other existence, is suitable.”¹

Schopenhauer’s belief in the inescapability of pathological behavior served to legitimate the domination of the bourgeoisie as a natural feature of a society which he presented as sustained, rather than threatened, by the suffering produced by social conflict. He elevated pain, employing a logic which centered disturbances over a state of rest:

“Just as we do not feel the health of our whole body, but only the small spot where the shoe pinches, so we do not think of all our affairs that are going on perfectly well, but only of some insignificant trifle that annoys us. On this rests the negative nature of well-being and happiness, as opposed to the positive nature of pain, a point that I have often stressed.”²

Schopenhauer points out the body and mind’s instinct to fixate on disturbances—an instinct meant to prompt their alleviation—and converts it into an ontological distinction between the supposed depths of negative experience versus the shallowness of positive experience. In doing so, his dismissal of social progress extends into a dismissal of personal elevation. Anti-social behavior is reified as a natural part of human behavior which will always manifest in spite of attempts to suppress it. This trend was furthered by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground, his own criticism of the rational social progress envisioned by Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?³, where his elevation of suffering centered the importance of one’s inner, emotional contemplation:

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact … Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. I hold no brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for ... my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary … And yet I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.”⁴

Where Schopenhauer’s belief in pain manifested itself in his pessimistic philosophy, Dostoevsky more freely lauds irrationality and pathological behavior as an enrichment of one’s inner world. In doing so, he also presents the self as static object whose improvement would rob it of the energy and flexibility that a “consciousness” gains from pain in Dostoevsky’s estimation. Though Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky maintain a certain level of subversive appeal due to their attention to these negative areas, the lauding of suffering alone could not sustain the level of interest in reactionary philosophy which lingers in the modern day. Dostoevsky portrays his protagonist and spokesperson in Notes from the Underground as profoundly pathetic and spiteful, but he makes this patheticness appealing to the reader via the same mechanics that allow self-deprecating humor to reign in modern social circles, with patheticness being presented as preferable to normality:

“Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse.”⁵

Dostoevsky offers his reader entry into an illusory community of tortured individuals of “acute consciousness”, an attractive prospect to those who can find commonality with his spite-driven protagonist. Rather than viewing oneself as an ongoing project of self-improvement, the depths of one’s maladjustment become synonymous with the depths of their emotional existence. Not only is self-improvement firmly thrown out the window, but the elitism endemic to fascist philosophy rears its head. Schopenhauer similarly ushered his readers towards a worldview which invited them to consider their suffering as entrance into an elite community:

“Everyone is punished for his existence and indeed in his own way … What this is like will be known by anyone who is worthy of a better society without my telling him. A fine nature, as well as a genius, may sometimes feel in this world like a noble state-prisoner in the galleys among common criminals; and they, like him, will therefore attempt to isolate themselves.”⁶

Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky unite in this cultivation of an elite community of sufferers, bolstering the ability of reactionaries to entice disaffected people against social progress. Their successors would be no exception, building upon these pessimistic and elitist foundations with increasingly esoteric means. Carl Jung is key in this transition, though his divergence from Sigmund Freud does not absolve the latter psychoanalyst of blame. In his Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud performed his own polemic against progressive politics, setting up psychoanalysis as a proof of the unavoidable, pathological behavior evoked by Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky:

“I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is advantageous and expedient. But I am able to recognize that psychologically it is founded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings—possibly with the single exception of a mother to her male child.”⁷

While Freud was committed to psychoanalysis as a rational method of ameliorating the aggression identified here, his outlook nonetheless followed the common liberal trope that humanity before civilization existed in a state of perpetual conflict. In naturalizing aggression to this degree, Freud set the stage for Jung’s analytic psychology to elevate the id as a glimpse into the true self, spurning Freud’s Enlightenment heritage:

“The key to a healthy personality lay in bringing this substratum of buried experience to the light of consciousness. Like the philosophes of yore, Freud held that rational self-awareness—the goal of the analytic process—was the key to emancipation. Jung’s approach to the unconscious could not have been more different. In many ways he appropriated Freud’s precepts and stood them on their head. According to the structures of analytic psychology, the rational ego represents an obstacle to the goal of individual self-realization rather than an asset. In Jungian terms ‘Enlightenment’ is a question of putting the Self in touch with a more primordial bedrock of human experience: the collective unconscious. Thus, if Freudians seek to reacquaint analysands with their ‘inner child,’ Jungians seek to reconnect them with their ‘inner Fatherland.’”⁸

To this end, Jung increasingly forced connections between dreams and an appropriated mythology of symbols and archetypes which offered his followers an escape from the “repressive” norms of society. Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky assisted this escape by legitimizing pain and pathological behavior, but Jung converted it into a quasi-religious experience, offering himself as the Virgil to his followers’ Dante:

“Thus, Jungian analysis ‘became an initiatory process, a descent into the unconscious mind in order to spark a process of individual transformation through a direct encounter with the transcendental realm of the gods … For those that survived an encounter with the god or gods, Jung promised rebirth as a true ‘individual,’ free from all repressive mechanisms of conventional beliefs about family, society, and deity.’”⁹

The myth, perpetuated by Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, and Freud, that human beings contain an innate and barely contained violence becomes flipped in its implications in Jungian psychology. The original state of violence becomes not only a justification for the pointlessness of human progress, but a goal in and for itself. Jung explicitly derides the “spirit of the times” in favor of the “spirit of the depths”, echoing Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky’s romanticization of negative emotion:

“The spirit of this time in me wanted to recognize the greatness and extent of the supreme meaning, but not its littleness. The spirit of the depths, however, conquered this arrogance, and I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me. It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the spirit of the depths held me, and I had to drink the bitterest of all draughts. The spirit of this time tempted me with the thought that all this belongs to the shadowiness of the God-image. This would be pernicious deception, since the shadow is nonsense. But the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead.”¹⁰

After piercing Jung’s deliberately esoteric language, we encounter a mythically-charged version of the same spirit evoked by Dostoyevsky’s “underground” protagonist. The “spirit of the depths’” employs pettiness and revulsion as a pathway to bringing out one’s “immortal”—i.e. their connection to Jung’s idea of a primordial Godhead in which the positive and negative are combined. Where scientific socialism views the unity of opposites as a step in a dialectical movement which results in a greater synthesis, fascist philosophy crystallizes its dualistic worldview as a justification of suffering for those disaffected by society and a justification of malevolent behavior by those elites “suffering” from boredom. With the end of World War Two and the subsequent rebirth of the Western middle classes in the “Long Boom”, Jung’s offering surpassed the comparative austerity of Freudian psychoanalysis:

“Freud’s vaunted Kulturpessimismus, which had been honed in the precarious calm of interwar Europe, dovetailed poorly with the ever-rising expectations of a society of abundance. As the age of commitment—the 1960s—ceded top the ‘culture of narcissism,’ a cultural breach emerged, which Jungians managed to fill with a vengeance. An era of rising social expectations suggested that the id no longer needed to be feared but could now be safely explored … Jungianism became the alternative religion of choice for New Agers with 401(k)’s and disposable incomes.”¹¹

With its sublimation into the New Age culture of the West, Jungianism acquired a progressive aesthetic seemingly uninhibited by its founder’s antisemitism and affection for the “medicine-man” he identified in Adolf Hitler¹². By arraying its forces against civilization as a corruptive force, Jungians were able to position themselves as subversives against the sexist husk of Freudian psychoanalysis, earning legitimacy through works like Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves. Estés’ progressive intent does not prevent her reliance on Jungian methods from urging the same distance from mass society envisaged by Dostoevsky and Jung:

“Regardless of collective affiliations or influences, our challenge in behalf of the wild soul and our creative spirit is to not merge with any collective, but to distinguish ourselves from those who surround us, building bridges back to them as we choose. We decide which bridges will become strong and well traveled, and which will remain sketchy and empty. And the collectives we favor with relationship will be those that offer the most support for our soul and creative life.”¹³

By framing society as something which can be chosen or spurned, Estés too elevates the individual and their connection to primordial archetypes above a commitment to the betterment of society—a society which is impossible to escape in truth. While Jung and his disciples dress up this false escape from society via esoteric language and mythical references, their method remains erodes under the constant weight of reality. The subversive values of Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, and Jung retain an allure even in the modern day, but their longevity is constantly threatened by the complete inability of these individualist philosophies to address the social roots of human suffering. Their offered escape from society into an esoteric elite gains appeal as capitalism decays, but their actual ability to deliver holds only as much depth as Dostoevsky’s self-deprecation and Jung’s shallow references to mythology. Fascism iterates on its areas of weakness as much as any ideology—albeit in an eclectic manner incapable of cohering into a single dominant method—and in the arena of self-evaluation, fascism found its sequel to Jung in the myth-making of Joseph Campbell.

Part Two of this article will release September 15th - Damon Phos

Bibliography

1. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On the Suffering of the World.” In The Essential Schopenhauer, 1-16. Edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher. New York: HarperPerennial, 2010. (p. 3)

2. Ibid. (p. 1)

3. Weingarten, Caleb. “Book Review: ‘Notes from Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky.” Iowa State Daily, February 20, 2024. https://iowastatedaily.com/290330/opinion/book-review-notes-from-underground-by-fyodor-dostoevsky/.

4. Dostoyevsty, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. Translated by Constance Garnett. Project Gutenberg, 1996. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/600/600-h/600-h.htm.

5. Ibid.

6. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “On the Suffering of the World.” In The Essential Schopenhauer, 1-16. Edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher. New York: HarperPerennial, 2010. (p. 13)

7. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by Joan Riviere. London: Hogarth Press, 1930. (p. 88-9)

8. Wolin, Richard. The Seduction of Unreason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. (p. 64-5)

9. Ibid. (p. 83)

10. Jung, C.G. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019. (p. 121)

11. Wolin, Richard. The Seduction of Unreason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. (p. 65)

12. Ibid. (p. 75)

13. Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. (p. 227)