The last post described how survival becomes a kind of god that gives people a way to organize their lives. This way of life involves the objectification of the self of individuals by the group. While this subjugation makes sense when the group is surviving it becomes a problem when comfort is achieved.
Follow Along on Miro: Survival Complex Map on Miro
The group empties the individual of its Self for the sake of the survival of the group. Survival wants each individual to be selfless. Selflessness creates an emptiness in the individual but the group fills the emptiness with the values of survival and with value from helping the group survive. The individual is empty but the emptiness is full. Emptiness is present but it is unconscious.
One of the goals of survival is comfort. Comfort is when the group has achieved a safe surplus of all of its needs. The problem of comfort is that when comfort is achieved it ceases to be fulfilling. This lack of fulfillment allows the emptiness created by objectification and sacrificing the self to emerge. The emptiness is present but now it becomes conscious.
The darkness the individual sees when it looks inward contains the neglected and withered self. The self cannot be seen or heard and so the darkness seems empty. This sense of emptiness is the center of most problems in the Survival Complex.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. -Pascal, Pensees
The emptiness causes anxiety which makes looking inward unbearable. The emptiness seems endless and ungrounded; if the individual fell in it might fall forever.
It is easier to look outward than to look inward. There seems to be so much more in the world and so little inside. Because it is too painful the individual turns away from the emptiness and toward the world.
The individual covers its emptiness with a mask to give it form and to have something to present to the world. The mask is an attempt to show the world what the individual thinks the world wants to see. Time is spent improving the mask. The more time that is spent the more ornate it becomes. One way the individual can add to its mask is through what it can do. The individuals spend time adding to their masks and looking at the masks of others.
Adaptation to this collective conscience, which is made possible only by the violence…of the super-ego and the individual’s repression of his own nature leads to…the formation of the ‘persona’ and ‘shadow’… -Neumann, The Child
Persona:
-Latin: mask
-The psychic interface between the individual and society that makes up a person’s social identity. -Stein, Map of the Soul
Shadow:
-The rejected and unaccepted aspects of the personality that are repressed and form a compensatory structure to the ego’s self ideals and to the persona. -Stein, Map of the Soul
[The persona] represented the segment of the collective psyche that one mistakenly regarded as individual. -Jung, The Red Book
The emptiness causes the individual to believe their self has no value or meaning beyond the mask they show to the group. The individual believes all they can offer others is what they can do. This means that value and meaning can only come from what they can do instead of who they are. Therefore, the more the individual does the more value and meaning it thinks it has. The mask and the individual’s sense of value become synonymous. However much the individual works on their mask it is brittle and its security is always precarious.
In a previous article the natural need to consume becomes pathological when the need becomes desperate. The more desperate the individual’s selfless emptiness becomes the more they will search for projects and ways to help that will add to their mask.
This desperate pursuit of consumption and work can continue when the individual becomes a parent. This then leads to the dysfunctional family systems of the Survival Complex.
What’s the difference between what we do and who we are? Aren’t they inexorably linked?
Awesome post btw :)