The question of whether Britain is becoming a Police State reared its head again this week.  This claim was made by one of the men released after being arrested under the terrorism act, Abu Bakr.  Carl Jung, from whose theories the Myers Briggs Type Indicator® was derived, was often asked about various political situations when he was alive.  He was asked about Hitler, for example, and offered both explanations for the Nazi phenomenon and suggestions on how the West should deal with him.  After the stories this week claiming and refuting Britain's status as a police state, I wondered how he might have responded to the claims.

I'm not a trained Jungian analyst, I never met Jung, nor have I read the entirety of Carl Jung's Completed Works.  But from what I have read, he often seemed to draw a line between objective facts and individual beliefs, and said that his interest lay primarily in the latter.  With regard to UFOs, for example, he expressed no view on whether they existed as physical objects, but he regarded them as highly significant from a psychological point of view (whether they were real or not).  He pointed out, in this and other contexts, that when someone holds a belief, whether that belief is true 'objectively' or not, it is still a psychic fact.  That is, it is a fact that someone holds that belief, and therefore of high psychological significance.

I suspect, therefore, that Carl Jung would not have been interested in debating whether Britain was a police state.  He would have left that question for others to resolve.  But he would have regarded as highly significant the fact that such claims are made, reported in the media, strongly defended and generally cause so much public discussion.  These are psychic facts and the public prominence that they have probably indicates something of psychological importance, whether or not Britain is a police state from an objective point of view.

These 'psychic facts' have an origin somewhere, and part of the explanation for them probably lies in the collective British or Western unconscious psyche.  The problem is that we are faced with an evil - ie: terrorism - but in dealing with it we are focusing intensely on police- and intelligence-led counter-terrorism measures.  From a 'conscious' standpoint this seems to make sense, because our society needs protecting.  But if we look at this from the point of view of Jung's theory of the unconscious then there are some potential dangers.

In Jung's theory, any intense conscious activity may produce some compensating (counter-productive) activity in the unconscious.  That is, whilst our collective conscious psyche is trying to defeat terrorism, our collective unconscious psyche may well be doing things that undermine those efforts, thereby actually encouraging terrorism.

For example, many have argued that invading Iraq has encouraged more terrorism, not less.  A more mundane example of unconscious impact might be the inadvertent but frequent use of the phrase "Islamic terrorism" - unconsciously associating Muslims with terrorism - rather than just "terrorism" (remember that the biggest terrorist threat in Britain in the last four decades has been from the white communities in Northern Ireland, but it wasn't called "Catholic terrorism" or "Protestant terrorism").  Other examples might be found in the balance of media reporting, the operation of foreign policy or simply old-fashioned racism - such as having a more suspicious attitude towards a stranger of Asian decent than a white stranger.  Even Google searches on "crime figures black white" or "crime figures white black" yield many pages talking about "black on white race violence" but very few talking about "white on black race violence".  This is a very intereting imbalance, perhaps suggesting that there is institutionalised racism, or an unconscious compensation for it, embedded within even the internet?

The problem of evil isn't just with "them", it is with us as well - all communities have their good sides and their extremists, all have problems of evil to deal with.  But individuals and societies tend to be conscious of the evil in others and unconscious of the evil in themselves.  And, as Jung wrote, such "naivete.. leads to a projection of the unrecognised evil into the 'other'... [and] our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil"¹.

Cherie Blair once said that as long as young people feel they have no hope but to blow themselves up, we're never going to make progress. She was pilloried for it because of the timing, it was on a day when the lives of children had been taken by a suicide bomber, and she had to make a very public apology.  But the point she was making was valid in my view: in the West we need to understand what in our collective unconscious psyche is contributing to the terrorist problem and preventing us from dealing with the evil of terrorism in a more effective way.

Reference
1 Civilisation in Transition, p297, Carl Jung