Though the Second World War had recently ended, Jung still saw threats to the individual continuing to grow: from the proliferation of nuclear weapons to the emergence of a mind-numbing mass society. According to Jung, humanity’s predicament will not improve unless individuals do the brave work of examining their inner lives in order to discover who they are apart from mass society.

The scientific approach to life has gained a preeminence in Western society that it doesn’t deserve. This is a difficult admission for a man of science to make, especially when the field is so revered. Of course the scientific approach helps us and is exceedingly useful in generating statistical models and discovering general principles. But if we take scientific perspective to be the entirety of life, we miss something crucial: the individual, in all his fullness and glorious irregularity. It makes the individual an average social unit and an abstraction. There’s nothing concrete or quirky to him. The scientific picture tends to overlook the inner workings of the psyche and the variation in individual thinking. Thus, it imposes a vision of the world and of people that is unrealistically rational and predictable, and gives the impression that to have seen one person is to have seen them all.

Overconfidence in science can inadvertently do a disservice to the individual and to reality. Statistics give us glimpses into reality, but they are not reality itself. Say you have a collection of pebbles in a bowl, and each weighs an average of 4 ounces. If you pulled a stone out at random, it is highly unlikely that it would weigh exactly 4 ounces. In fact, you could pull out every stone, one after another, and weigh each of them, and it is still possible that none of them will weigh the same as the average.

The average was an attempt to create the rule, but really, the exceptions and irregularities form the rule. The statistical average in some sense led us away from concrete realities. Handling an individual stone in turn tells you something about it that knowledge of the average misses. Examining the individual stone takes us closer to the stone’s real nature, and gives us a truer picture. In the same way, science gives us knowledge of people, but not understanding of individual people. A person’s knowledge of himself or another person doesn’t come through theories, but through exploring a person’s psychic nooks and crannies without the aid of ready theories and universal rules. These will obscure him rather than illuminate who he truly is.

To truly know someone, the theoretical assumptions have to be dropped for a moment. A doctor does not treat an abstraction called “disease”—the doctor treats a sick patient. The psychiatrist or psychotherapist has two goals that are mutually exclusive: identifying the malady plaguing a patient while also meeting, as it were, soul-to-soul, understanding the patient at a human, relational level. He needs to bring both knowledge and understanding to the conversation, never losing sight of one or the other.

The psychological damage imposed by reducing individuals to statistical averages is more extensive than many realize. When our default picture of the individual becomes a nameless, faceless, uniform unit (i.e., an “average,” representative of the mass), he is primed to be part of mass society, another drop in the social blob no different than any other.

The individual’s complexity and flesh-and-blood existence is reduced down to his connection to bigger organizations and groups, the biggest and most abstract of which is the State. The individual’s responsibility to make moral decisions for himself is handed over to the State. As a result, the individual’s life purpose is no longer about becoming a complete individual, differentiated from the masses. All life and action is made subservient to externally imposed directives—in the name of a noble abstraction that pulls everything into its orbit. Decisions are made by outside bodies, rather than a process of internal deliberation within each individual. What begins as public policy becomes doctrine. Individuals become units to be housed, fed, clothed, educated, and directed.

Even the rulers themselves become mere custodians of State doctrine. That they be individuals, each with their own set of preferences and moral intuitions, is irrelevant or even a hindrance to discharging their custodial duties and maintaining State doctrine.

This is mass society: The individual is devalued. He fuses with the mob and obliterates himself. He is the same as anyone else, and is thus a dispensable, replaceable social unit. When the individual feels small and puny and without meaning, he is already—willingly or not, cognizant or not—a slave and devotee of the State. He thinks in terms of cliches. The inevitable outcome of mass-mindedness is a cycle of slavery and revolt, in which the government moves to more ancient forms of governance: communal tribalism ruled by chiefs or an oligarchy. The entire societal organism becomes full of suspicion.

Scientific rationalism is the chief contributor to this phenomenon, and the best way to push against it is for the individual to differentiate and discover who he truly is apart from the mob. 

Our ideas about the world tend to lag behind our actual circumstances in the world. Changes in circumstances, at a personal or societal level, create tension and even crisis in our worldviews. Without these disturbances, the worldview remains intact; it appears adequate to explain what is happening around us. But a crisis occurs when the gulf between our ideas and experiences becomes too wide.

When faced with a crisis, many people attempt to rework their shaken core ideas rationally, but these adjustments tend to be cosmetic. Making such surface adjustments is like tinkering with the outer crust of our humanity; it doesn’t connect well to our deeper core, and can even prevent us from connecting with that core. It takes using myths and archetypes in fresher ways to bridge the gap between worldview and the world itself.

In our modern age, our way of approaching life is much more cerebral and detached than anchored to experience. Our philosophies of life can hardly be called such because they have little to do with our daily experiences—they’re little more than academic gymnastics.

The growing influence of rationality, though not without limitations, presumes usefulness in all cases. As a result of the emphasis on rationality—among a number of other significant changes over the last 500 years—ancient religious rites and customs appear very strange to modern sensibilities—even if they made perfect sense in a medieval era in which they developed. Even still, many people can’t bring themselves to cut the cord. There is some kind of nourishment that religious rites and symbols seem to offer. This is why, even if denominational divides exist, anyone who analyzes and critiques the shortcomings of another denomination’s doctrine must never forget that, underneath the doctrine he disagrees with are deep symbols and practices that have a life of their own—something archetypal that resonates deeply with us as humans.

One of the clearest symptoms of the rift between our worldviews and the world around us is the growing chasm between faith and knowledge. Faith and knowledge take their cues from the same world, but the two lenses seem worlds apart and impossible to bring together. Some theologians use the tools of knowledge to make the case for faith, emphasizing the historicity of Jesus (working miracles, suffering under Pontius Pilate, rising from the dead, and so on). In the process of trying to prove Christianity’s veracity, though, and insisting that it is not just a myth, the mythical, numinous quality so central to religion is inadvertently lost.

The pulling apart of faith and knowledge is the result of a “split consciousness” in society and even within people. It’s like the same person can talk about the world in two completely different ways, switching between mindsets as needed. We do this at a societal level too, but for how much longer, we can only guess. One side pulls one way, and the other group pulls the opposite direction, widening the chasm and inviting more chaos. It’s this kind of psychic stress that brings patients to see therapists.

What would be your response if someone asked you if you have had a religious experience and an accessible connection to “God”? An answer in the affirmative comes only when the individual is willing to submit to a demanding, honest introspection. Doing so will bring self-knowledge, but just as significantly, by submitting he has made an important shift: He dignified himself by considering himself someone who deserves thoughtful and compassionate attention. He’s taken the initial step toward understanding consciousness—and, more importantly, the unconscious foundation on which the conscious rests.

The unconscious is the source of dynamism in a person’s life, as it is the medium through which “God” connects to the individual. “God” is in quotations because, whether or not someone believes in God, one can open himself up to and come near to the source of life. There is no doubt that religious experience is an empirical fact. Whether the theologians and metaphysicians will ever settle the question of God’s existence is more dubious. In a sense, it’s also less pressing, because it gets things backward. Anyone who has ever had an intense encounter with the numinous knows that you don’t have the luxury of grasping it like you do a math problem. It’s quite the opposite: The numinous grasps you, it takes ahold of you. You have been apprehended by something that even your keenest philosophizing and best turns of phrase will fail to apprehend.

Modern society views talk of “the unconscious” with a certain suspicion. People ask, “Can anything good come out of the unconscious?” with the same dismissiveness that someone wondered if anything good can come out of Nazareth. But it is here, in the mysterious unpredictability of the unconscious, that we experience something that is beyond our conscious control, but that illuminates the deepest and most dynamic parts of us. It is here in spontaneous religious experience that we find the foundation of faith worth its salt—not in rational concoctions of the conscious mind. It is here that the individual becomes individuated, here that he becomes himself and not just an appendage of the mass man.