Mobs and Violence
On the anniversary and indignity of January 6th
While I was working on this article, I noticed how churned up one still is in one’s own psyche and how difficult it is to reach anything approaching a moderate and relatively calm point of view in the midst of one’s emotions. …I must confess that no article has ever given me so much trouble, from a moral as well as a human point of view. I had not realized how much I myself was affected.
-Carl Jung, “After the Catastrophe,” 1945
On January 6th, four years ago, Americans experienced the collective violation of a violent insurrection.
On this day, four years ago, a blood-thirsty, self-righteous mob took over our sacred civic grounds, hunted our elected officials, killed and maimed police officers, stole and destroyed property, and pissed and defecated on desks, floors, and walls. It was a day when white supremacy and toxic masculinity were on full display, no longer hovering everywhere in the shadows.
On January 6th, four years ago today, a president rejected the tradition of the “peaceful transfer of power” that every schoolchild learns is the cornerstone of American identity and democracy. Unwilling and unable to accept defeat, this homegrown demagogue employed his power, lies, savagery, and shamelessness to threaten everyone. Members of his own party crouched in fear under their desks and huddled in corners. His own vice president, in danger of being hung, barely escaped the chants and frenzy; a noose and gallows had been constructed and readied for him on the Capitol lawn.
This day, four years ago, was a day of reckoning that could have turned the national consciousness towards healing and repair, away from endemic racism and misogyny and a predilection to hucksters and lies. The party that propped up that demagogue could have held him to account, convicted him for his treason, and reflected on how they’d been so easily taken over.
Instead, today, history repeated itself in the strangest way—or perhaps it is better said that history reflected itself as if in a mirror image. This year, that same man’s re-election to the presidency was certified by many of the same people who, in the same physical space just four years ago, feared for their lives. Today, it was a mundane and boring proceeding. At the helm was the woman who might have been our next president. Unsurprisingly, in a desire to protect democracy and to model sanity, she played her role to the letter. No one from her party was hunting her in the halls for doing so.
Today was a peaceful day, but that peacefulness is not an indication of healing. It is merely the calm before an inevitable storm. And it is a day of mourning. What lies ahead has yet to be written, but it will require the best of us. Two weeks from now is the inauguration of that former president’s second term. We will continue to learn if we can face our fears of being outcast and punished for upholding truth-as-reality versus whatever lies we are told to believe. We will learn together how our institutions may hold or fall under his leadership and just how vulnerable our nation is to mass psychosis.
On January 17th, 2021, following the insurrection, I held an impromptu gathering online to explore the psychology of mob violence and its antidotes.
During that event, I told the classic story of the rainmaker and what it is for a society to be “in” or “out of” the Tao, and I read many quotes from Jung’s essays on “Civilization in Transition,” in which he reflects on how mass hysteria was able to spread throughout Germany and Europe before WWII and what might have been done to prevent it.
Here, in his post-mortem of WWII called “After the Catastrophe,” Jung speaks about a certain leader from back then with eerie familiarity:
All these pathological features—complete lack of insight into one’s own character, auto-erotic self-admiration and self-extenuation, denigration and terrorization of one’s fellow men, … projection of the shadow, lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-crossing—all these were united in the man who was diagnosed clinically as an hysteric, and whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of Germany for twelve years.
It is not hyperbole to speak of this moment in history as related to that moment in history.
The sheer scale of the January 6th attack and the degree to which its participants had been whipped up into mass psychosis is reflective of the ever-present danger of mob psychology, especially when their leader is the most powerful person in the country—or world.
The phenomenon we have witnessed in Germany was nothing less than the first outbreak of epidemic insanity, an irruption of the unconscious into what seemed to be a tolerably well-ordered world. … No one knew what was happening to him, least of all the Germans, who allowed themselves to be driven to the slaughterhouse by their leading psychopaths like hypnotized sheep.
I’ve posted that full presentation here, exploring the causes and the antidotes to mob violence and mass psychosis. It’s not the most eloquent presentation I’ve ever delivered. I was nervous and still overwhelmed by what was happening politically, so there are lots of “umms” and pauses to endure in the recording. But I hope the content will still serve to support reflection on what we all experienced four years ago, and what may—unfortunately—still lie ahead.
Mob Psychology
Coming up:
I’ve just posted dates and registration links for our upcoming Sunday workshops. First up: February 2nd. Less than two weeks after the presidential inauguration in the States, we’ll need to talk. Let’s process the self within society in real time. Register here.
I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.
It IS a day of mourning. I find it oddly comforting to read Jung’s words and know that he also struggled to comprehend and emotionally cope with the outbreak of collective violence and terrorization in his own time.