Modern Psychopolitical Thought
The concept of the 'Collective Unconscious' coined by Carl Jung, refers to certain unconsciously held instinctual and archetypal frames, shared among various peoples or groups. These shared understandings of particular frames or ideas can manifest in political understandings or a specific zeitgeist, with a form of emergent egregore, typically difficult to divine during and easier to conceptualise as a student of history. For example, "The Enlightenment" only became understood as "The Enlightenment" era about a century after.
I wish to provide some thoughts accounting for the overlap between political and psychological in a hyperdigital, networked age. An attempt to define the zeitgeist as we live it.
Modern politics provides meaning to anyone locked in a 9–5, the cognitively exhausted and broadly anyone who cannot dedicate time, energy or capacity to derive independent meaning.
Hold on. I'm not saying you're lazy if you're political. I'm saying you may not have enough time.
Time and space are essential to defining our own meaning. Many dream their best ideas, or divine them during a period of solace and retreat in nature, meditation, alone time etcetera. Especially those of an introverted bent, away from the pressures of modern life. Perhaps the more extroverted may elect to find meaning from other sources, especially the people they choose to spend time with and trust. Perhaps we find meaning from a combination of these things. Crucially, the underlying axiom is consistent. We choose to spend time our own way to derive meaning. Yet just as time is essential to deriving meaning, we surrender most of our time to earn a wage, maximise growth or achieve an incessant return to capital for someone else. We sacrifice ownership of our own time to survive. You can't meet your friends, be in solitude, or go to Church as much as you want to because you don't have time.
Modern politics gives an expedient solution. It allows you to outsource meaning to someone who makes crafting meaning their dayjob.
Everyone in a modern, developed country has on demand access through Twitter, Facebook and app based media to instant, digestible summaries of events optimised for readership. The fact that information is endless creates a recursion loop between your wetware and content. You are offered worldviews and seek out a worldview. This is especially addictive to a generation which grew upon on instamedia. One must study the political supply chain closely.
It also drains the freetime you have leftover from your dayjob.
Modern politics prepackages expedient memes around which people can congregate. Politics is a coordination and distribution problem.
Anyone trying to increase political participation or representation is trying to increase participation or representation for their own side.
People will tell you 'it's important' or 'current events' are something everyone should know about. People will also explain some injustice(s) around which their worldview forms as virtually undisagreeable, neglected etcetera. #Campaigns which spread awareness are an Infinite Game.
Remember: Most headlines in mainstream news sources affect most people personally very little.
Politics provides coordinating institutions which encourage the achievement of targeted goals among distributed populations. Politics being buy in, buy out however, is not necessarily a bad thing. Decreasing political engagement is an attempt by people to escape other people's anger. Selective political engagement is healthier.
Modern politics is fundamentally grounded in shared outrage.
Pundits explaining Donald Trump's election in 2016 as fuelled by repressed anger provide a very simple exemplar of this process. Applies to both liberal and conservative. When someone possesses strong views or feels passionately about any issue, they are always angry. Strong views is a byword for unadulterated anger toward the world.
For any Jungians, I'm increasingly drawn to believing politicos are mostly Extraverted Judging (Je) types, whether dominant or auxiliary. This is an intuitive observation of patterns from a sample of interactions and requires deeper consideration.
Likewise, people with Extraverted Feeling (Fe) can be very politically convincing. Their zealous passion and articulated persistence is often quite impressive.
Contention: Monarchism, dictatorship and autocracy obliterate the opportunity for politics to provide exclusive meaning to the individual.
By reducing optionality, they forcibly compel the individual to search for nonpolitical meaning. Political optionality gives people more ideational options to gravitate toward. Autocracies polarise political identities into a zerosum game with restricted tribes, into for or against the autocrat. Restrictions on information feed these tendencies. Divergence is stymied.
Democratisation made politics an identity by fragmenting unity. Cf. Memetic Tribes. Freedom is fragmenting. More tailored identities for people's diverse experiences.
On Call-Out Culture
Older readers may be unfamiliar with this very millennial of tendencies. Call-Out culture or Cancellation culture refers to a tendency which emerges on social media, when a celebrity or otherwise famous person gives an unpopular or supposedly controversial opinion on some subject. The outraged and aggrieved will proceed to 'call out' or 'cancel' the offender by unfollowing them and condemning the act of supposedly heinous aggression. This is a damaging form of boycotting in the attention economy, which may impact upon a person's revenue streams and livelihood.
Cancellation culture is 'Damnatio Memoriae' (Condemnation from Memory) for the networked age. This originally emerged during the Ancient Roman period.
Stalin did this to Yezhov, his NKVD head, after Yezhov's fall from favour.
Mass unfollow campaigns are an attempt to expunge someone's existence from the attention economy, a punishment for betraying some belief system.
This is the purest example of a totalitarian motive (silencing) resting upon a democratic vessel (mass participation).
Modern Politics has morphed into low self-awareness philosophy, masquerading as changemaking, actually a downstream function of a cultural-Memetic War.
'Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.' — Rumi
Despite the above, I still believe it is better to hold political views than not. I suspect the optimum to be holding views loosely enough so one's life is not consumed, yet present so one may effortlessly gain access to a tribe of peers.