“mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.”
Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, 1875-1961.
Quoted from Wikipedia entry on Carl Jung:
“Jung stressed the importance of individual rights in a person’s relation to the state and society. He saw that the state was treated as ‘a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected’ but that this personality was ‘only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it’, and referred to the state as a form of slavery. He also thought that the state ‘swallowed up [people’s] religious forces’,and therefore that the state had ‘taken the place of God’—making it comparable to a religion in which ‘state slavery is a form of worship’. Jung observed that ‘stage acts of [the] state’ are comparable to religious displays: ‘Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fire to scare off demons’. From Jung’s perspective, this replacement of God with the state in a mass society led to the dislocation of the religious drive and resulted in the same fanaticism of the church-states of the Dark Ages—wherein the more the state is ‘worshipped’, the more freedom and morality are suppressed; this ultimately leaves the individual psychically undeveloped with extreme feelings of marginalization.“
To add to that, in his profound little book called “The Undiscovered Self,” Jung writes:
“Only, the suggestive parade of State power engenders a collective feeling of security which, unlike religious demonstrations, give the individual no protection against his inner demonism. Hence he will cling all the more to the power of the State, i.e., to the mass, thus delivering himself up to it psychically as well as morally and putting the finishing touch to his social depotentiation. The State, like the Church, demands enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, and love, and if religion requires or presupposes the “fear of God,” then the dictator State takes good care to provide the necessary terror.”
