THE COLLECTIVE SAFETY VALVE IN TIMES OF CRISIS

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I'm sitting with the idea that when you push the psyche out of balance in one direction, you get an equal and opposite reaction. So in the Middle Ages there was just this one truth called Christianity, and it was on the side of the half of the psyche called 'good'. And what you got, for the sake of balance, was this other character called the Devil, created out of psychic necessity, who didn't believe all the things he was supposed to believe, and did what he wanted and stirred up trouble. That is his appeal. 'Please allow me to introduce myself'.

We are still in a situation 1000 years later where there is only one truth, one story (this is not a natural situation for balanced human beings) and it is called Science. You then use that one and only truth to force people to stay in their houses because of an invisible enemy. There will inevitably a push from the psyche in the opposite direction.

So we have mass protests in the US and UK over a major racist incident - which completely undermine the lockdown that our collectives have forced on themselves. (This is not to trivialise the actual issue at stake: there is synchronicity at work.) And we have an explosion of theories that attribute evil to various public figures, and their alleged attempts to control the world through the deliberate creation of the invisible enemy. What you have here is unreason, the very opposite of the reason that Science uses in its one-sided, 'we are the only truth', kind of way. So in this way I see CT (Conspiracy Theory) as a sort of psychic safety-valve against this one-sidedness.  That this is connected to the lockdown is indicated by the explosion of conspiracy posts on Facebook during the most intense period of the lockdown, with a reduction in frequency of the postings as the lockdown has eased.

It is the same with round-earth and climate change: if you insist on one viewpoint too rigidly, the collective will produce equally rigid flat-earthers and climate change 'deniers'. And the more we fight them, the more they will multiply, on a sound trickster/coyote principle.

Instead, we need to look, for example, at our story that the earth is round: has anyone ever seen this? Only a few dozen people, out of billions, when they are in space. So back off, loosen up, that is what the flat-earthers are (unconsciously) telling us. And the same with the current explosion of CTs: most of us can see that reason is not on their side, but what do they tell us about the way we use reason ourselves? And, in their imaginings of evil figures who are trying to control the world, what do they tell us about the over-control in our collectives? We can always learn from these things, they are always part of the complete psychic picture, and to fight them (which I am trying not to do!) is to perpetuate that collective psychic divide.

And the attribution of evil to these public figures says to me that the Christian divide into good and evil is still alive and well amongst us, even though most of us - in the UK, at any rate - do not attend church any more. CT is a form of shadow projection. And, it is said, whatever we attribute to those projections is something to come to terms with in ourselves. Like a secret desire to rule the world! Or to be wealthy and powerful! How much of this is just envy? But also, the intensity behind these 'conspiracy' ideas points to the gap that has opened up between rich and poor in recent decades, the level of inequality. It is, I think, a mixture, as these things usually are. Envy, but also a perception that the rich-poor divide has got way out of balance. Yes, it comes out sometimes in this unreasoning 'conspiratorial' way, but it still needs listening to.

When we back off from judging ourselves - and that is no easy task - then we can be present to our whole psyche. Our judging of ourselves is often not very conscious, and we have to learn to catch ourselves doing it. All these things we feel like a 'bad' person for: not getting up early, not keeping busy, not visiting so-and-so, not being a 'good' parent, not being 'good' with money, feeling inferior generally..... We can be like one big judgment of ourselves that drives our life: it keeps us under control, which the collective wants for its sense of stability: yes it is a collective conspiracy, but an unconscious one. And it can sometimes be a relief to let others carry some of that.

But when we ease off to ourselves, be loving and sympathetic to even our judging of ourselves (and check out the above book as a guide for living this way), then we can become a whole human - not necessarily a 'good' human - but the reason we are here is to become whole, not good. And then we won't be so much part of that collective psychic division into good and bad, and we won't need to be a part of the collective psychic safety valve either, with its crazy but 'necessary' demonisations and unreasonings. And we will have a better chance of understanding the world, instead of being unconsciously swept up in it, in either direction.