Pick a God, Any God

Carl Jung is famously quoted as saying: “The State has taken the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship.” This is from his 1957 book, The Undiscovered Self. Before that, he wrote:

The increasing dependence on the State is anything but a healthy symptom, it means that the whole nation is in a fair way to becoming a herd of sheep, constantly relying on a shepherd to drive them into good pastures. The shepherd’s staff soon becomes a rod of iron, and the shepherds turn into wolves . . .

Did he say “sheep”? Wow, so let’s accuse Jung of being hateful, heartless and cruel, calling his fellow humans “sheep.” Shame on him. And he was a psychotherapist as well! This quote (about the poor sheep) comes from his 1946 essay “The Fight with the Shadow,” included in Civilization in Transition (Collected Works Volume 10).

These quotes probably came out of an even more famous quote I have cited in my writing before:

The idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the ‘belly’ at least, in St. Paul’s words. I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropriate and stupid such as only an ‘enlightened’ intellect could hatch forth.

Ah, a good one, as we can always expect from Herr Doktor Jung. As the dutiful academician I am, this quote comes from Jung’s 1928 essay “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious,” published in Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology (paragraph 110). Whew. I feel like I am back in grad school.