https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GaivDJp8fjI
So one of Jung’s critiques of Protestantism was that the critique of Catholicism is that it might fall prey to the authoritarianism that’s in some sense implicit in the Roman-like structure of the church and the hierarchy that’s there. But his critique of Protestantism, the danger there, was that everyone would become their own church and then their identity would become self-proclaimed in some fundamental sense because with no mediating structures between the divine and the person, it’s easy for the person in some sense to usurp the position of God. And one of the things that’s puzzled me about the recent insistence that people can self-define their own existence is that they’re attributing to themselves in some real sense the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence of God because their stance is something like, I am that I am. That’s why it’s pride. Right, right, right. And I really see those things as tightly linked. It’s one of the things that’s tilted me, I would say, ethically in a more conservative direction because even in the psychotherapeutic literature, you see this Rousseau-like underpinning, which more or less assumes that sanity is part and parcel of the autonomous individual. And so there’s a Rousseauian element there, there’s a Protestant element, and a classic liberal element. And I’ve fall preyed that to some degree by thinking of the sovereign individual as the fundamental unit of value. And this is partly under the influence of Piaget and the theorists of play and the people who made the case that identity comes out of negotiation, that in order to be sane, which is something other than, let’s say, self-actualized in the narrow sense, you have to be positioned in these hierarchical structures. So you can’t be sane without a partner, without a long-term partner, let’s say. Or if you don’t have a long-term partner, you better have some children or some parents, and if you don’t have them, you better have some friends. And if you don’t have them, you better at least have some colleagues and a town and a city and a state and a country, all the way up the hierarchy. And that what the sanity then becomes is the symphony-like ordering of that entire structure, rather than the autonomous health of the autonomous psyche, self-defined, also conjuring up the notion that all of that embeddedness is nothing but an imposition in the manifestation of your autonomous self, which is also something that Rousseau would tilt towards, right? But Jordan, that doesn’t come from Protestantism. That goes right back to the early temptation. You shall be as God. Now, Protestantism certainly reinforces one extreme. You’re right about that. You think, say, of Heine’s famous description of Marx, you are a godless self-god. Right, right, right, because that’s the alternative. Well, that’s a scary, that’s a very frightening thing if it’s real. And the lack of embedding is what is ripe for manipulation, right? Because you can move, you can move, this is what we’re seeing with sort of, you know, mob-like mentality throughout the culture, across the spectrum, because you can move people like a school of fish, because they’re not embedded in something. And that’s the tech, in the text, that’s what we saw at the beginning. Pharaoh, that’s what Pharaoh wants to do. Pharaoh wants to reduce the Israelites to potential so that he can then rule over them and manipulate them. He doesn’t want families. He doesn’t want all these embedded structures which create this normal pyramid. Those are alternative sources of power and structure as well that would… They don’t have to be, they don’t compete. The idea that a family is a power structure or a structure of communion doesn’t compete with our relationship with God, it actually becomes a place where it can happen. And that’s why the laws, right, when God gives the laws, they’re all modes of communion. They’re not just a bunch of rules or moral rules, they’re methods of being together and of ultimately loving each other. The methods of negotiation. So Pharaoh makes them slaves, obviously, and Hayek would say that’s what modern collectivism does, makes us serfs.