Democracy's Little Self-Help Book

The Atom and the Psyche

From my backyard at night I can see across the Rio Grande to the lights of Los Alamos. The shining city on the Pajarito Plateau sits under the Jemez Mountains of north-central New Mexico. Stored somewhere at that beautiful locale are 6,000 pounds of high-grade plutonium, enough perhaps to trigger a second Big Bang.

We need a big bang of sorts, an explosion of self-discovery that blasts away the fossilized paradigm that has us spinning inside pale shadows of ourselves. This big bang would split the psyche, or at least dissect it, and breach its well-defended exterior so we can enter and search for deeper truths about ourselves, our purpose, and our destiny.

It’s not surprising that during the past 100 years the atom has been more accessible to human understanding than the psyche. We know a lot about nuclear reactions but not as much about human reactions. But it is human reactions—in ourselves, the family, community, nation, and world—that are demoralizing, sabotaging, and killing us.

It is a hallmark of self-sabotage (the behavior that accompanies our refusal to learn from our personal and collective history) that we get excited about something that has the potential to destroy us, while we are indifferent or even hostile to what is in our best interest.

Discoveries about the subatomic structure of matter and the applications of E=MC² arouse our pride, while knowledge of the psyche threatens it. I once saw in a magazine a 1950’s photograph that showed three men posing in front of the controls of a just-activated nuclear reactor. One of the men gazed upon the controls with a radiantly triumphant expression, his face a luminous glow, his eyes lit up with kilowatts of pride. How intoxicating to create and control such power!

Carl Jung wrote a short book, published in 1957 and titled The Undiscovered Self, in which he pleaded for humanity to appreciate the vital importance of understanding the unconscious mind. In his view, the unconscious has been ignored “out of downright resistance to the mere possibility of there being a second psychic authority besides the ego. It seems a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy can be doubted.” Jung added presciently, “Underestimation of the psychological factor is likely to take a bitter revenge.”[i]

That bitter revenge is our march of folly, the path of self-sabotage that leads us deep into disharmony. Unresolved conflict in our psyche spills into the environment like radioactive sludge.

When we explore the psyche, we penetrate beyond common sense and access a level of intelligence that has been unconscious. We discover that we have more negativity than we thought—or would like to think. This negativity puts us at a disadvantage as keepers and cultivators of the democratic tradition.

Our psyche offers us an additional source of intelligence to that of reason and common sense. The word intelligence, often used in the context of national security, applies as well to the knowledge that we can extract from our psyche, which is a kind of council of vital intelligence. At this inner council we can begin to sit as a member and at some point preside as its leader. From another point of view, our psyche can be put under a figurative microscope and understood in terms of how it functions and how it influences behaviors and emotions. No wonder it’s been called the engine of the soul!

Our psyche is a nonmaterial realm that the modern age has neglected, in part because neither science nor we as individuals can easily come to terms with its formlessness, obscurity, conundrums, paradoxes, and humbling revelations. Through the knowledge it discloses, we understand how our inner experience is contaminated by radioactive emotions and we begin to see how invested we are in maintaining this core of negative energy. We also understand how inner dynamics affect our politics and our democracy—and finance our folly—and we acquire more effectiveness as reformers because our self-doubt is being vaporized.

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Softcover

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