The Dangerous Spread of Ideas: How Psychic Epidemics Shape Societies
All last week it was bitterly cold outside. So my wife and I enjoyed most evenings sitting by the fireplace, talking and doing some reading. Our talks were about the typical things: work, the kids, local news, the political dumpster fire in D.C. As for reading, my wife has decidedly changed from the mystery, thriller novel to strictly non-fiction reading. She can no longer read novels. At least not now. Why read novels when she can get the shock and fear of well crafted fiction from just watching the national news. So now she reads survivalist books. 😉
Unlike my wife’s focused reading style—one book in hand reading intently—I have the reading style of a college kid cramming for multiple final exams. I’m typically reading multiple books at a time. I never have just one book on the table in front of me. It’s usually 2 or 3, and maybe a magazine or two.
I start reading one book, my interest wanes a little or I get to the end of a section, I sit that book down and pick up another, remove the bookmark from where I left off, and read on. I repeat this process on through the rest of the reading materials in front of me, and start over. The whole time looking up and seeing my wife still intently reading the same book. How does she do it!
Anyway, there are times when I’m reading a new book in my stack and I become completely absorbed. I become glued to it. It’s the topic or style or both. Well this happened last week during one of those evenings by the fire. It was the topic this time. But before I talk about what grabbed my attention in this particular book, I need to provide a little background.
This particular book—at least the first few pages—grabbed me because earlier that day, while at the gym, I’d been primed by listening to a pod cast on how diseases have shaped the course of history. I got really interested in the discussion of epidemics. That sudden surge of an infectious disease—virus, bacteria, or parasite—throughout a community or nation. Of course there was a lot of discussion about the recent COVID-19 pandemic, that killed over a million Americans. But what really interested me was when the conversation turned to the types of disease epidemics.
We naturally frame our understanding around epidemics, as viruses, bacterias, and parasites that invade and infect the body. But the pod cast host made an interesting point. What about psychic epidemics? What about a set of ideas or beliefs that cause a psycho-social epidemic that spreads from mind to mind until millions of people are infected with a dangerous ideology? A disease can kill you, but so can an ideology. It can enslave and kill millions and destroy entire societies.
The fascist ideology reduced a modern and highly cultured western democracy (Germany in the 1930s) to a police state run by a psychopath and his criminal gang of extremists, a group responsible for the death and murder of millions of people and the destruction of Germany and large swaths of Europe. Fascism proved a very lethal and destructive ideology.
Yes, fascism is an extreme example of a psycho-social disease epidemic. But these types of epidemics (anti-democratic, authoritarian movements) start small and grow, and unless they’re checked in the early stages, they can lead, socially speaking, to something like what happened in Nazi Germany, or in the former Soviet Union with Communism, or to a lesser degree, but just as corrupt and criminal, like we’re currently seeing in Russia under Vladimir Putin and his gang of oligarchs.
In the 1930s, there were fascist or communist movements (epidemics) throughout Europe and America, but those movements were largely checked by democratic governments and, more importantly, by the simple fact that large portions of the populations in Europe and America cooperated in containing the spread of these psychic epidemics. The people acted collectively to thwart the spread of fascism and communism in order to protect and preserve liberal democracy. But a population’s collective resistance to these epidemics can weaken and fail. And when they do the consequences are a chronicle of suffering.
So the book that grabbed my attention that evening by the fire was the Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung, the founder of analytic psychology. Here are the specific lines in the opening of Jung’s book that got me to thinking about this topic (italics added):
We have no reason to take this threat lightly. Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on a optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about 40 per cent of the electorate.
A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.
Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.
These words were written in 1957, but they’re a perennial reminder of the ever present threat facing all liberal democratic societies.
Say what you will, but there is a valid and well supported argument that we’re experiencing a psychic epidemic of the authoritarian sort in the United States right now. It has festered and grown out of the dark soil of the political far right. It has largely taken over the Republican Party. Our democracy, the voters, failed to contain its spread to national power last November. All that is left now is an active and courageous political resistance, and enduring the chronicle of inevitable suffering that will follow.