Political images are shaped and managed with the utmost precision and at great expense. Everything is "spun" (like yarns, tales, and fictions) to achieve whatever qualities are thought to be of desire to the target audience. The psychology and style of this long-standing approach was developed by Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew. To get a sense of the relevance of Bernays' work one need be aware of just this snippet from his 1947 paper, "The Engineering of Consent."

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society ... Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social pattern of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Here Bernays lays bare the importance of the psychological understanding of mental processes and social patterns as a means to manipulate the masses. He brought into the awareness of the small number of persons in control, the central principles of Freud's psychology. Bernays is no fringe figure, but almost invisible to public awareness. He is the father of public relations, the progenitor of seductive and subliminal advertising, the figure most influential in forming the CIA, and many other such "mechanisms" of "those who pull the wires." Puppets do not see their puppeteers.

Keep in mind Bernays' emphasis on "an invisible government as the true ruling power of this country."

There is no reason to doubt that what "Bernays-as-insider" wrote, remains in place and fully operational. Couple this with Walt Disney's influential conviction that the only way to control the masses was through "entertainment" in all its dimensions. Couple this with the necessity to "distract" the masses from "the truth," and you begin to see what is at work on the present "stage."

While I may seem to have wandered away from my topic, what I have described above is essential to understanding my topic in any “deep way.” So, I ask again: What is it we are witnessing?

At the depth of the financial crisis in 2008, Goldman Sachs warned its wealthiest clients that the major threat to their wealth was from the one man/one vote rule. The message was a barely disguised action plan to use wealth to eliminate the threat. In January 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are individuals and that money is speech. Money thus falls under the provisions of the First Amendment and cannot be abridged and therefore corporations are free, without limit, to contribute (not to candidate's campaigns) but to entities that could contribute to candidate's campaigns directly (subsequently referred to as political action committees, PACs, and "super" PACs.) The tortured logic of this decision has shaped politics ever since. Elections can be bought and those elected can be bought and wealth then becomes free to increase itself without being limited by political power.

One might ask, isn't this "business as usual." And the answer, of course, is yes. Yet, it is also the case that "something" is different. What is it we are witnessing?

Previous campaigns for the presidency of the US have been pale affairs compared with the current campaign. I believe this is because prior campaigns have been consciously orchestrated by the various power brokers and for this reason are all "typical." I believe that something unexpected, unpredicted, unknown, and likely uncontrollable has entered into the present campaign.

To put this into context, I must go again in what seems to be far afield, but is not. I need to examine collapse and extremity. There have been several periods in the earth's history in which collapse has reached what is called an extinction event. There have been five previous extinction periods in which the great bulk of all life on earth became extinct. All scientific evidence now points to the sixth extinction that has begun and is progressing rapidly. More and more of the earth's bio-systems are undergoing collapse. A general feature of collapse in any system is the resulting extremity. In extremity, the usual boundaries are broken and the subsequent events become unpredictable. What is so astonishing at the present time is how little humans are dealing with the consequences of systemic collapse. All humans should be working together to deal with this. One form of extremity in this case is the extremity of denial.

Collapse of large systems is not instantaneous. The undeniable symptoms are slow to emerge but then expand exponentially. The slow progression of collapse makes denial possible, but ultimately pointless. As collapse progresses, extremity begins to appear in many dimensions.

I think it is obvious that world order is in a process of collapse, whether one looks at nation states, economies, cultural traditions and institutions, social relations, and every other department of the human enterprise. Extremity is beginning to appear everywhere. Denial is beginning to break up.

Now I don't think for a minute that all of this collapse is the work of "those who pull the wires." Indeed, I see evidence that the wires themselves are becoming frayed, not so easily manipulated, and in many cases, breaking down altogether. The usual systems of power, control and money themselves are subject to the process of collapse.

The connection of Freud's psychology via Bernays to the operation of power structures is based on a personalistic view of the unconscious: the fears, desires, and darkness hidden away in the personal unconscious, but made so much use of by those pulling the wires. But what Freud's psychology has no grasp of whatever is the impersonal collective unconscious. And those pulling the wires have no understanding of this at all. I believe that collapse is bringing forth something "other" from the collective unconscious that humans are unprepared for. Jung called it the Coming Guest, but I think before the Coming Guest arrives, we will see collapse and extremity in major degree.

It is clear that in complex systems being "energized" by archetypal processes (and not just the typical human power processes), attractors are formed. These attractors draw energies to themselves and when the "density" of this energy increases to a certain degree, it will be triggered in such a way as to transform the whole system into something that could not be predicted from what was known about the system before collapse.

What also needs to be kept in mind is that archetypal processes are fractal. This means that the process is "self-similar" at all scales. Thus, what we might see in the consulting room in dealing with an archetypal process on an individual level in one human being, can also be seen at work on a group basis, large social segment basis, nation basis, world basis and cosmic basis. This is not easy to comprehend but it is nonetheless one of the major insights of Jung's psychological work with the collective unconscious.

To return now to our topic of "Trump."

There is some unknown archetypal energy afoot and it is being carried by Mr. Trump more so than by any other figure. He has become an attractor of energies in a way that no one else has. It does not matter whether the energy is positive or negative, sensible or senseless, true or false. This is an attractor within a larger process of collapse and for this reason extremity, more than any other quality, is characterizing the events as they unfold. Attractors when moving toward their triggering expressions will begin to exert qualities of "inevitability" as well as a plethora of “unintended consequences.”

In my next post, I'll be looking into this more deeply.