Many of us are are at different stages of finding your way out of the web of the toxic patriarchal world that has pitted itself against nature for centuries. The fact is, patriarchy has created the world we live in, which is programmed into our psyches at a very young age. It comprises our reality, which, if I personified it, I would characterize as someone who is about to win the pot in poker by bluffing. Bluffing?
The ones who benefit most from this program (civilized Western culture) see themselves as masters of it and in a very limited way they are, in that they can make it work for themselves up to a certain point, to gain power and wealth but in fact they are only the larger gears of system that has it's own agenda.
By definition, anyone who is in a program cannot control it. Embedded in the "program" that drives Patriarchal Western culture are certain principles that go way back to its beginnings (predating Rome) that preempt the desires and needs of the individual. Western culture is about collective survival and expansion and it is anthropocentric. It serves the survival of the Western world (Western "man"), not any single entity, whether that entity is an individual or a corporate entity, like Google.
If a tyrant tries to identify with the spirit of Western culture, and put his stamp, his brand, on its agenda, or bend it to his agenda, he will be steam-rolled, not by a higher moral entity, but by the program, which has its own built-in failsafes.
What Jung kept harping on was how Western consciousness has generated a monstrous shadow. This shadow constitutes a vast blindspot in the Western patriarchal worldview that allows "us" to move ahead with the program without reflection, in an amoral fashion that allows us to do terrible things to nature, other cultures and each other to promote the survival of our Western patriarchal values -- our culture, our agenda.
If you ask any American (America being the self-annointed apex of Western civilization) to define what it means to be an American or what America stands for, you will hear any kind of nonsense that sounds scripted or lifted from some campaign speech. That is because Americans are full of propaganda. But now America itself is in the way of the preservation and survival of Western culture, just as Hilter was in the 1930s and 40s.
So, what we see happening now is, American culture is being steamrolled by Western culture. This does not mean that Western culture is developing a conscience or that the Patriarchy is softening or abdicating power, or assimilating its collective shadow, it just means that Western consciousness is undergoing a sea change to guarantee its own survival.
The way out of this is to wake up from the program (like Neo in The Matix (1999)) or initiate out of the program or, to individuate out of it, following Jung's example.
Shamanism is a good path for many of us: opening the soft eye, reinvigorating the power to dream both large and small, rebuilding eco-centric alliances, teaching us to see with our hearts.
(Article changed on Sep 12, 2026 at 7:11 PM EDT)
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
