At the centre of our era sits one unspoken rule: white supremacy survives by perfecting the imaginary. It sells coherence when the symbolic disintegrates. It starts to pump harmony when politics crash. And Carl Jung, more than any other mascot fetish for covert white supremacy, gives this metaphysics its grammar.
During a dinner with several psychoanalysts, who make a living off others’ secrets, I mentioned that I had written an essay on Attachment Theory. Predictably, it drew them in. Therapists who depend on fragile ideas tend to react as if you told everyone their secret honey pot stash.
One clinician smirked and said, Well, you brought that on yourself. Then he leaned in, but if you really want trouble, write about The Body Keeps the Score.
“I still value my peace,” I said. “I don’t need any more trauma in my diet.”
He laughed. Of course, he laughed. People laugh when they want you to join the cult of suffering where they’ve already engraved their names.
The predictability of it all. The pieties, the nervous jokes, the way everyone depends on a theory to keep their own chaos in check. How different is it on Substack? Entire business models are built on telling you how to write, by not writing. Gurus teaching the art of the “authentic” sentence while never daring one. And just above them, above the smoke of the incense, floats the new self-appointed priesthood: neo-Jungian mystics selling soft-focus salvation. This is the imaginary wing of white supremacy, the belief that the universe is fundamentally benevolent, that meaning is personal revelation, that suffering contains a secret message meant just for you. It is the foreclosure of history as violence, which allows the repackaging of classic brainwashing as spiritual depth. A spiritual pyramid scheme for people who still believe the universe leaves them little notes.
How cute.
Trigger Warning: If you feel personally attacked, please consult your imaginary. It may be working harder than you think.
I knew a Jungian once; his password was the Christian variant, WWJD, he told me proudly. What would Jung do?
This is the for-him edition of the neo-Evangelical industrial complex. The Matcha-Astrology pipeline pretending it’s psychology.
2026 is just around the corner. Pantone has already released the new colour of the year. Cloud Dancer. Basically white. Which, by the way, is not a colour. It is the masquerading as neutrality, a preferred technique of the symbolic order that launders whiteness into clarity. A white so empty it borders on abstraction. It’s supposed to represent clarity, renewal, optimism. Words chosen by a committee who have no contact with reality. A colour selected for members in a gated community who prefer anaesthesia to description. What is the colour of genocide? What is the colour of resistance? What is the colour of solidarity? What is the colour of empathy?
Our era is one defined by precarity, but also the refusal to acknowledge it. When people lose the ability to name, they lose the ability to describe their own life. Psychosis rises exactly where language thins out. When words fail, hallucinations move in to occupy the vacancy.
White supremacy thrives in this collapse. It steps neatly into the hole in the symbolic and fills it with myth, with purity, with archetype. The imaginary is installed as a replacement for meaning.
This is how things unfold now, not only through crude violence, but through the slow corrosion of meaning, not through repression, but through the absence of any coherent vocabulary.
In such a climate, Jung appears comforting. A mythology of benevolent forces, a universe with a plan. A Self waiting to be discovered. The perfect theology for people after Nietzsche. For those who still want to believe that their suffering expresses something profound rather than something political.
And Jung is one of those historic nodes where you can watch the imaginary infrastructure of white supremacy crystallise. The same signals that precede every revival of racial metaphysics: the hunger for complete symbols, cosmic confirmation, spiritual purity. Bio-predetermination.
These are the signals that always appear before political horror. The Jungian Index shows the rising chatter of archetypes, cosmic messages, and personal crises all recoded as destiny. Soft fascism has its own volatility curve, mapped in real time by its dogwhistles: the replacement of longing with pure symbols, and the fantasy of a lost coherence. Make Psychoanalysis Jungian Again, they cry.
Freud, meanwhile, gets reduced to a caricature. Mention his name, and people will think of sex, misogyny, and penis envy. Hysteria, however, wasn’t his invention. Hystera,1 the wandering womb, an entire century of male physicians who couldn’t tolerate women’s speech unless it was framed as pathology. It was Charcot who staged the hysterics at the Salpêtrière, turning women into diagnostic spectacles. Freud entered that world trying, however imperfectly, to listen.
But what survives from him in the public imagination is simply the image of an old man obsessed with sex. The cultural father who wouldn’t stop talking about desire. Something in that triggers ressentiment. People hate the figure who tells them they are not masters of themselves. Psychoanalysis is in the business where its customers are always wrong.
Beyond Charcot, there were others, like Breuer, who, in working with Anna O., launched the talking cure, and even Fleiss.2 But what remains today are the original discoveries and, more importantly, their fragments, their failures that resisted commodification.
These neo-Jungians, by contrast, smoothed his Orientalist metaphysics into something infinitely marketable.3
The Jungians, the for-him counterpart to the yoga girls, have perfected a particular performance. They slap Freud and his “Jewish science” for being “sex-obsessed” as though every accusation wasn’t simply a refusal to deal with their own drives. These are the same men who will reveal how Freud makes them uncomfortable, but Jung will make them feel tall. In their rhetoric, you will find all the classic fascist binaries, between spirit vs decadence. Nature vs corruption. Organic unity vs mechanistic fragmentation.
Freud becomes the decadent city Jew, the figure upon whom every resentment can be projected. Freud becomes the racialised thinker that is framed as fragmented, conflicted, and lacking. The Swiss, white metaphysician, on the other hand, sees coherence, unity, and essence. It’s impressive the way this displacement still operates today. The people who accuse any critique of Zionism of being antisemitic are the same people who erase the critiques from prominent Jewish thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, or contemporary Jewish scholars like Ilan Pappé or Norman Finkelstein. Direct antisemitism, of course, is out of fashion. But indirect antisemitism slides through the side door, cosplaying as spiritual preference.
The contemporary Jungian will tell you to trust the universe. Lost your job? Hyperinflation due to capitalist contradictions? Trust the Self! Trust that the cosmic message is one that only those who pay a subscription can decipher. You’ll hear the same grammar in wellness culture, in manifest destiny narratives, in tech-bro mysticism, where “individuation” is actually their portfolio strategy.4
That’s why they make the big bucks. It’s the same grammar you’ll hear from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) sales pitches. Zionist narratives of destiny, Attachment Theory influencers, The Body Keeps the Score acolytes, the eugenicists selling you that gene data collection to make the Aryan perfect baby. The content differs, but the structure is identical.
What they all share is a universe without lack. A worldview that promises smoothness over conflict. An obsessional neurotic dream of completion.
In this universe, Jung becomes the lighthouse, the fantasy of coherence in a world structured by conflict. The Orientalist fantasy that totalizes all religion as one, while understanding none. By the way, remember those “Human Design” people? Here, I prefer the furries. At least their references are much more creative.5
Conflict? How vulgar! History? Too heavy! Politics? Low vibration!
Fascist metaphysics attempts seduction through the same promise that if you obey the deeper essence of race, spirit, soil, and destiny, you will become whole. Jung’s version isn’t much different, that if you obey the unconscious, you can become whole.
But the real question is, who built the unconscious you are being asked to obey?
Who manages it? Who gets access to it? Who decides what counts as its message? Who benefits when the unconscious becomes a spiritualised authority, rather than a site of conflict?
Once you understand that the unconscious is a site of conflict, not a sanctuary, then we can start making better predictions.
Welcome to the new battlefield for your unconscious.
It barely matters that Elon Musk struggles to hide his real reasons for why X is so important, or that Netflix has just acquired Warner Bros. Observe the structure. Whoever controls the circulation of signifiers controls the field in which desire is formed. Even Hillary Clinton and former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz admit that they are losing the front on shaping the psychological programming of younger generations. The answer? The familiar paternalistic restriction of the youth to information. Why burn books when you can turn off the flow of information to the young, as if censorship could reverse a structural shift in the production of subjectivity?
None of this is new. Germany understood the power of media long before Silicon Valley patented the insight. The Nazis captured the radio not because it produced the messages, but because it produced a unified reception, the fantasy of a single people hearing the same voice.
Just as Public Relations is the Department of Ideology, Information Management is Psychic Warfare.
This is where we circle back to Jung. The late Jung is the perfect mascot for this battalion. He offers the fantasy of imaginary identification, the small consolations of synchronicity, cosmic coherence, a benevolent universe where the Self becomes destiny. You see the same enjoyment everywhere. The Hollywood films funded by the same war machine that has profited from death for decades. The spiritual optimism packaged for export. The belief that the universe is humming a private message into your ear while bodies pile up offscreen.
White supremacy survives through a fantasy of “natural meaning”. Blood. Soil. Destiny. Saussure ruined this fantasy by proving that meaning is arbitrary. It was not only a linguistic insight.6 It was an insult delivered directly to the heart of racial metaphysics. Jakobson deepened the injury with the simple fact that psychic life drifts and slides. Nothing is born whole. Nothing remains whole. Metaphor appears when the psyche wants unity. Metonymy appears when desire tears it apart.7
Fascism is a metaphor on steroids. Everything becomes an essence, about purity, a symbol of destiny. Freud, on the other hand, observes metonymy. The refusal of unity, the acceptance of drift. The insistence that meaning never closes.
This is why Jung’s mysticism is so politically convenient. It produces the fantasy that, beneath the chaos of life and history, there is a secret order waiting to be discovered. Fascism loves this because it replaces politics with mythology, conflict with destiny, and history with archetype. Hence, the unconscious obsession with the non-human, the land that was promised to us, the need to mow the lawn, and the completion of perfection.
This is why Freud is scandalous, not about sex. For Freud, libido was only the surface of a deeper problem. The actual shock of Freud was the claim that the ego is not master in its own house.
Unlike Jung, Freud insisted that the unconscious is not benevolent, not harmonious, not a reservoir of cosmic messages.
It is clear now that the opposition to the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians, or of the Congolese, of the Sudanese, or of East Timor, or the Muslims in Bosnia, has revealed something many preferred not to see: a profound distrust in democracy, and beneath it, the older hatred of the Other who insists on history.
Hollywood has been storyboarding the same fantasy from its conception. Remember Brad Pitt’s World War Z, where apparently the safest place on earth is Israel, where the occupier is recast as the last refuge, the occupied erased into a faceless zombie swarm.
Remember! Never ask “why?”!
Here, the psychic structure is similar to that of a joke, on which society has foreclosed its own violence. And the remainder? A bodily reaction from the suppression of psychic material.
Something similar animated Jung’s fear of ideology, collective movements, and the so-called “mass man”. Jung insisted salvation lay in the individual essence, untouched by politics. But whose essence counts? Indeed, not the essence of the racialised. Of the Other. Of women. Of the Blacks. Of the Orientals. Those in the zone of non-being. Those whose history is either sentimentalised or erased. Only the essence of the already-powerful is allowed its metaphysics.8
The neo-Jungians repeat the same warnings with updated branding: technology will estrange us, and we should trust only the Self. Every imaginary regime of whiteness must mask its material base. Meditation becomes a laundering of extraction. Astrology becomes a euphemism for structural privilege. Individuation becomes the spiritual cover story for domination. This spiritual libertarianism, the Californian ideal as psychological insight, is infantilising. The idea that the path back to meaning is always a retreat inward. That’s your trauma, your destiny, your private revelation. It’s giving Eat Pray Love economy draped over a völkisch skeleton.9
Meanwhile, these same people will preach endlessly about inner harmony, especially as the world increasingly fractures. Don’t mind the noise, tune back into your 丹田 (dantian), and vibrate higher. Just don’t forget to pay your monthly subscription. It demands obedience through spirituality without history, subjectivity without conflict.
These cults can never tolerate the question “why” because it exposes the inner structure. Why, reveals beneficiaries. Why does history speak?
Instead, they will demand you focus on “how”. How to regain dominance. How to optimise the Self. How to look younger, eat more, and feel whole. How to turn spirituality into productivity, trauma into branding, suffering into subscriptions.
This isn’t 1930s Germany. This isn’t your grandpa’s Fascism. How cringe! No, instead, this fascism meditates.
It meditates because whiteness must never appear violent. It must appear fated. Serene. Inevitable. The imaginary must do the killing, silently.
It journals about its destiny. It microdoses in the desert. It posts notes about synchronicity, and that weekend course to turn your passion into a marketing course. But for whom?
The fear, of course, is not about the aetiology of trauma, but the collapse of the imaginary order that protects their fantasy. Naming Jung and its fascist historical implications threatens the architecture.
Back at the dinner table, they warned me, “If you really want trouble, write about The Body Keeps the Score.”
But the trouble starts already when one declares that Jung is not the cure for our crisis of meaning. Jung is one of the ways we’re being prepared to accept a soft, orientalist spiritual fascism.
And if that sentence feels dangerous to you, ask yourself, who taught you that comfort is the ideal of the psyche? After all, it was Antigone that revealed the other side of the cancerous destruction of positivity. Theodor Adorno already understood what Jungian wellness refuses to acknowledge: that once spirituality becomes a market commodity, its purpose is no longer liberation but obedience training. We can observe, just as Fanon did, that the same refusal of history is what underwrites every colonial massacre.
If you ever are told to “trust the universe” while a genocide is live-streamed into oblivion, then you’ve already encountered the soft body of fascism, with its own gendered division of labour. The “women” sell yoga retreats, vaginal scented candles and matcha vibrational healing, while the men meditate on individuation, and their portfolio consists of memecoins, weaponry, mining and data extraction. Spirituality becomes the Brave New World anesthetic, depth psychology is the new brand identity.
What psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is no harmonious unconscious. No benevolent universe. No myth that will save us. There is only conflict, history, and the cuts through which a subject is constituted.
Zizek was right. Flowers should be forbidden to children. Innocence is the most dangerous fantasy of all. The imaginary is how white supremacy survives. It is time to refuse its flowers.
Hystera (ὑστέρα) - uterus. Classical physicians, notably in the Hippocratic corpus, theorized women’s symptoms as caused by a “wandering womb” that travelled through the body producing suffocation, paralysis, and emotional disturbance. This uterocentric model persisted for nearly two millennia—appearing in Galenic medicine, medieval scholastic texts, and 17th-century treatises—before being institutionalised in the 19th century at the Salpêtrière under Jean-Martin Charcot. Freud’s early work with Breuer breaks from this somatic determinism by relocating hysteria from the uterus to the unconscious, marking a foundational shift in the genealogy of psychopathology.
Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1955). Studies on hysteria (J. Strachey, Trans.). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1895)
Wilhelm Fliess (1858–1928) was a Berlin ENT specialist and Freud’s closest early collaborator. Fliess proposed an elaborate, now-discredited system in which human behaviour could be explained by periodic biological cycles (23 and 28 days), sexual “bisexuality,” and a “nasal reflex neurosis” linking the nose and genitals. Their intense correspondence between 1887 and 1904 deeply influenced Freud’s early work on hysteria, repression, and trauma; some scholars argue that Freud borrowed more from Fliess than he later acknowledged. Their break, after the Emma Eckstein surgical disaster and Freud’s waning patience with Fliess’s numerology, marks Freud’s decisive turn away from biological mysticism toward a structural, psychic theory of the unconscious.
Jung consistently mobilised Orientalist frameworks, casting “the East” as mystical, symbolic, pre-rational, and spiritually whole. His engagements with texts such as The Secret of the Golden Flower and Indian myth did not aim for historical or philosophical fidelity. Instead, they appropriated them as projections of the Western unconscious. As J. J. Clarke and Richard Noll argue, Jung’s use of “Eastern wisdom” operated within the colonial imaginary of his time: the East as spiritual essence, the West as technological decadence. Contemporary Jungian movements often reproduce this structure, translating these essentialisms into polished wellness commodities tailored for Western consumers seeking “ancient” metaphysics without political history.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
Scholars have long noted that Jung’s concept of individuation, presented as a universal psychological process, emerged not from cross-cultural empirical study but from early 20th-century bourgeois individualism and Romantic metaphysics. As Sonu Shamdasani argues, Jung borrowed heavily from German Romantic philosophy (Schiller, Goethe, von Hartmann) and recast their spiritual teleology as an intra-psychic developmental path. Far from a neutral psychological description, the “Self” functions as a secularised salvation myth, promising wholeness, destiny, and a return to lost unity.
Richard Noll demonstrates that Jung’s individuation model was structurally indebted to German völkisch and Lebensphilosophie movements, which emphasised organic unity, spiritual essence, and national destiny, precisely the ideological frameworks that later supported fascist thought. In these traditions, the individual does not “become” themselves but discovers a pre-existing inner essence aligned with cosmic order. Jung internalised this metaphysics into the psyche, producing an “inner destiny” that mirrors the external racial or national destiny articulated in völkisch ideology.
Contemporary wellness industries and Silicon Valley psychospiritual culture reproduce this fantasy by reframing individuation as a privatised eschatology, where market discipline, entrepreneurial optimisation, and mystical self-branding stand in for spiritual development. In this context, “trust the Self” functions as both ideological anaesthetic and capitalist self-management protocol: a spiritual injunction whose origins lie not in ancient wisdom but in 20th-century European metaphysics, nationalist romanticism, and the managerial culture of neoliberal capitalism.
Shamdasani, S. (2003). Jung and the making of modern psychology: The dream of a science. Cambridge University Press.
Noll, R. (1994). The Jung cult: Origins of a charismatic movement. Princeton University Press.
Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the modern soul: Therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. University of California Press.
Human Design is a New Age system invented in 1987 by Alan Robert Krakower (using the pseudonym Ra Uru Hu), drawing selectively from astrology, the I Ching, Kabbalah, the Hindu chakra system, and speculative genetics. Scholars of contemporary occultism note that it exemplifies what Joseph Uscinski calls “modular metaphysics”: a syncretic mixture of esoteric symbols presented as objective science. Its authority rests on fixed typologies that promise to reveal an individual’s “true essence,” “energetic blueprint,” and correct “role” in the social order. Critic Sasha Sagan (2020) argues that this structure mirrors earlier fascist taxonomies: rigid character types, quasi-biological destiny, and hierarchical differentiation disguised as spiritual truth. In Human Design, individuals are assigned roles (Generators, Manifestors, Projectors, Reflectors) that allegedly determine decision-making capacities and life trajectories. This pseudo-genetic mysticism reads as a contemporary update of authoritarian personality sorting, a metaphysics of predestination marketed as self-discovery. Its appeal within wellness capitalism lies precisely in this mixture of cosmic determinism and neoliberal optimisation: a fantasy of pure identity that disavows history, politics, and material conditions.
Sutcliffe, S., & Gilhus, I. S. (Eds.). (2013). The new age: A critical appraisal. Routledge. (Original work published 1999)
Sagan, S. (2020). For small creatures such as we: Rituals for finding meaning in our unlikely world. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics dismantled the assumption that signs possess any natural, organic, or intrinsic relationship to what they signify. By demonstrating that the sign is composed of an arbitrary relation between signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept), Saussure broke from centuries of Western metaphysics that grounded meaning in essence, presence, or nature. This arbitrariness undermined not just linguistic realism but the broader ideological systems that depend on supposedly “natural” correspondences, including racial, national, and spiritual essentialisms.
As Stuart Hall notes, Saussure’s model makes racial metaphysics structurally impossible: if meaning is differential and relational rather than inherent, then no race, nation, or identity can claim immutable essence or destiny. Modern semiotics thus constitutes a direct challenge to white supremacist fantasies of natural hierarchy by revealing that such claims rest not on nature but on discourse.
Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in general linguistics (P. Meisel & H. Saussy, Eds.; W. Baskin, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1916)
Hall, S. (1997). The work of representation. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 1–74). Sage.
Culler, J. (1976). Saussure. Fontana.
Roman Jakobson noticed something disarmingly simple about how we speak and think. Every time we use language, we move in two directions. Metaphor pulls things together and creates unity. Metonymy lets things drift and slide as desire moves from one object to the next. Nothing in us begins whole. Nothing stays whole. When we long for coherence, we reach for metaphor. When our desire wanders, we fall into metonymy. Jakobson’s insight punctures every fantasy of purity or fixed essence. Meaning never settles. Desire never stops moving. Unity is only ever provisional, a momentary shelter we build when fragmentation becomes too bright to face. Instead of closing the world, Jakobson opens it. He shows that the psyche lives in motion, not in destiny.
Jakobson, R. (1956). Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances. In R. Jakobson & M. Halle (Eds.), Fundamentals of language. Mouton.
Metaphysics is basically the story a culture tells about what is ultimately real. It decides what counts as a “true self,” what is “essential” about people, and what is just noise. When Jung talks about an individual’s inner essence, he is using a metaphysics that sounds universal but isn’t. It quietly reserves full depth and inner truth for certain people while treating others as lacking it. Metaphysics is never just philosophy. It sets the rules for who gets to be seen as fully human.
The völkisch tradition in late-19th and early-20th-century Germany fused Romantic nationalism with racial mysticism. It imagined the “Volk” as a spiritually unified people rooted in sacred blood and soil. This metaphysics of purity and destiny became a core ideological feeder line into National Socialism. The Nazi regime drew heavily on völkisch fantasies to naturalise racial hierarchy, justify expansion, and frame domination as the recovery of an organic order. Contemporary wellness culture often echoes these structures by offering spiritualised purity, inward retreat, and fantasies of authentic essence stripped of politics.
Noll, R. (1997). The Aryan Christ: The secret life of Carl Jung. Random House.
