Excellent Observation, Jung. But We Can Throw Away the Explanation Now.
This entire rabbit hole started with Finnegans Wake.
Which is already suspicious.
Nothing good ever starts with someone casually saying, “So I was looking into Finnegans Wake…”
For the record, I wasn’t reading Finnegans Wake. Let’s not get carried away. I was reading about it.
I have children. Work. Hobbies. Presumably a finite number of heartbeats.
Joyce can wait.
But I got interested in the basic idea: this lunatic spent sixteen years writing a book where languages, myths, history, religion, jokes, Dublin, sex, songs, dreams and probably whatever somebody muttered near him in a pub all dissolve into each other.
Words made of other words.
French hiding inside English.
Latin hiding inside Irish.
Biblical references inside dick jokes.
The whole thing loops back into itself.
Clever.
Mad.
Interesting.
Then I learned that one of the big ideas underneath it came from Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century philosopher who proposed that civilizations move through recurring historical stages.
Gods.
Heroes.
Humans.
Decay.
Collapse.
Return.
And for about thirty seconds I thought:
Huh. That’s interesting. Cyclical history.
And then my brain did the annoying thing it does.
Wait.
Why does history need to be cyclical?
Why isn’t this just…
the same fucking game being played repeatedly?
History doesn’t need a wheel. Humans are enough.
Take roughly the same animal.
Give it roughly the same needs.
Food.
Safety.
Sex.
Status.
Belonging.
Power.
Children.
Resources.
Recognition.
Now put a lot of those animals together.
Some will cooperate.
Some will cheat.
Some will accumulate resources.
Some will accumulate power.
Some will convince everybody that their accumulation of power is ordained by God, tradition, bloodline, the market, the revolution, national destiny, or whichever PowerPoint template is fashionable that century.
Coalitions form.
Elites form.
Institutions form.
Institutions calcify.
Other people get pissed off.
Revolts happen.
New institutions form.
Those calcify too.
Repeat.
يا جماعة…
Why do I need a mystical cycle of civilization for this?
If you keep playing the same game under similar constraints, the outcomes are going to rhyme.
Change the pieces.
Change the board.
Make the arena global.
Give everybody smartphones.
Add derivatives.
Add nuclear weapons.
Put a fucking blockchain in there if you really must.
The players are still recognizably human.
So Vico’s beautiful historical wheel suddenly looked to me less like a hidden law of civilization and more like an early glimpse of something much more boring.
And much more powerful:
Similar constraints repeatedly produce similar strategic outcomes.
Game theory.
Evolution.
Institutional incentives.
Resource constraints.
Same monkeys.
Better tailoring.
And that was the first little huh.
Because Vico’s observation can still be excellent even if the explanation doesn’t survive.
In fact, that might be the more interesting story.
Then Jung walked into the room.
A younger friend told me he had been reading Carl Jung.
And I realized I didn’t actually know enough Jung to understand what was pulling him in.
Obviously I knew the cultural residue.
The Shadow.
The Persona.
Archetypes.
Collective unconscious.
Individuation.
Synchronicity.
The usual suspects.
Words you encounter in literature, psychology, Reddit, YouTube videos and occasionally from a very intense man with a beard who has discovered cold showers.
So I started looking.
And here’s the annoying part:
Jung noticed some genuinely interesting shit.
Humans construct social masks.
Yes.
Humans suppress bits of themselves they don’t like.
Yep.
We sometimes become obsessively irritated by traits in other people that we have trouble confronting in ourselves.
Absolutely.
Cultures repeatedly produce heroes, tricksters, wise elders, monsters, mothers, death-and-rebirth stories.
True.
People experience periods of psychological upheaval where an old identity seems to die and another one forms.
Also true.
So far, so good.
Then came the second huh.
Because Jung does something that humans absolutely love doing.
He notices a pattern.
He gives the pattern a name.
The name becomes useful.
Then…
somewhere along the way…
we forget that we invented the fucking name.
Congratulations. We have turned a description into a creature.
Suppose people reject parts of themselves.
Their aggression.
Jealousy.
Vanity.
Sexuality.
Need for status.
Whatever.
Jung groups those disowned characteristics into an abstraction and calls it:
The Shadow.
Fine.
That’s actually useful.
Compression is useful.
We do this constantly.
But then listen carefully to what happens next.
A few decades later:
Why did he suddenly behave like that?
Ah. His Shadow came out.
…bhai.
The Shadow is what we called the behaviour we’re now using The Shadow to explain.
क्या चक्कर है?
We’ve gone in a fucking circle.
Observation:
Humans sometimes disown traits and react strongly when those traits surface.
Compression:
Let’s call this cluster “the Shadow.”
Fine.
Explanation:
Why does this happen?
Because of the Shadow.
No.
NO.
You have taken the label off the box and stuffed it back inside the box as the machinery.
That’s not a mechanism.
That’s a noun.
And I think we do this constantly in intellectual history.
Give something a sufficiently impressive name and everyone relaxes.
There is a wonderful little intellectual magic trick:
- Observe phenomenon.
- Invent elegant term.
- Capitalize term.
- Write 400 pages.
- Term now apparently exists in nature.
Collective Unconscious.
Archetype.
Historical Spirit.
Death Drive.
Civilizational Cycle.
Anima.
Animus.
And now the vocabulary itself carries authority.
You begin thinking you’ve explained something because you can speak about it fluently.
This is perhaps one of the most dangerous things abstraction does.
Abstraction is essential.
Without abstraction we’d be idiots pointing at individual trees forever.
But abstraction is supposed to compress reality.
It doesn’t automatically explain reality.
That requires mechanism.
So now I have a question I want to ask every time somebody introduces a majestic abstract noun:
Okay. What boring mechanism could generate this pattern if your beautiful noun didn’t exist?
And good lord does that question clear the room.
Archetypes become much less mysterious once you remember we’re the same species.
Why do cultures keep inventing heroes?
Jung’s answer gets you toward inherited archetypal structures in a collective unconscious.
Interesting.
But before introducing another invisible layer of reality…
what do all human beings already have in common?
Birth.
Dependence.
Parents.
Separation from parents.
Puberty.
Sex.
Jealousy.
Competition.
Danger.
Status.
Coalitions.
Betrayal.
Disease.
Aging.
Death.
Grief.
Children.
Strangers.
Predators.
Hierarchy.
Love.
Fear.
And approximately the same model of brain running the whole circus.
Now repeat that across thousands of societies and millions of storytellers.
Are we genuinely surprised that familiar patterns emerge?
The hero leaves safety and confronts danger.
The wise elder knows things the young don’t.
The trickster exploits social rules.
The monster inhabits dangerous unknown territory.
Children struggle with parents.
People die and are symbolically reborn.
Yaar…
of course.
You don’t necessarily need a Hero Archetype stored in some psychic basement.
You have:
**shared biology
- shared cognitive machinery
- shared developmental problems
- recurring social games
- cultural transmission
- probability.**
That is already an absolutely monstrous generative engine.
Why invoke another one before exhausting it?
And then I realized: oh shit, this is the same thing as Vico.
There it was again.
Vico sees civilizations repeating patterns.
Hidden cycle.
Jung sees stories repeating patterns.
Hidden archetypes.
But perhaps we’re repeatedly committing the same intellectual error:
pattern → abstraction → reification.
Instead of:
pattern → hypothesis → mechanism → test.
Vico couldn’t run modern econometrics.
Jung didn’t have cognitive neuroscience.
Freud didn’t have modern developmental psychology.
None of these people had access to the scientific apparatus we have now.
And that’s not their fault.
In fact, the impressive thing is that they noticed anything at all.
Their pattern recognition may have been phenomenal.
But we came later.
We have no such excuse.
And this is where my criticism moves almost completely away from Jung.
Excellent observation, Jung.
Seriously.
Nice catch.
But if we’ve since discovered that the thing you called projection can be decomposed into motivated reasoning, self-concept maintenance, defensive cognition, attentional bias, shame avoidance and a bunch of other mechanisms…
then…
خلص.
Thank you.
We keep the observation.
We update the explanation.
We move on.
Why the hell are we still building little houses inside the old explanatory scaffolding?
This is the bit that bemuses me.
Science is normally quite ruthless about this.
Newton is one of the giants of human history.
We don’t therefore teach physics primarily by asking:
But what did Newton really mean?
You learn modern physics.
Newton is there because his work matters historically and because Newtonian mechanics remains extremely useful within the correct domain.
Then relativity arrives.
Quantum mechanics arrives.
Better measurement arrives.
Better models arrive.
And nobody sits there saying:
Well, Einstein is interesting, but Newton’s personal philosophy of space had tremendous cultural influence, so perhaps we should preserve both explanations as equally alive.
अरे यार.
No.
One is a historical stage in the development of the model.
The other describes reality better under conditions where the first fails.
Done.
Yet in psychology, philosophy and chunks of the humanities, we preserve thinkers in a fundamentally different way.
What did Freud think?
What did Jung mean?
How did Hegel understand history?
What did Marx mean by alienation?
Those are perfectly legitimate questions…
if you’re studying intellectual history.
But if the question is:
Why do humans behave this way?
then I do not particularly care whose elegant vocabulary got there first.
I want the best explanation we’ve got now.
That’s the distinction that seems to get blurred.
Historical importance is not current explanatory authority.
That’s the sentence.
That’s probably the whole essay, actually.
Historical importance is not current explanatory authority.
We confuse those things constantly.
Someone can be incredibly important because they noticed a phenomenon early.
Because they changed the conversation.
Because they invented vocabulary.
Because they inspired future research.
Because they influenced literature and art and culture.
None of those facts automatically make their explanatory system the best model available today.
Darwin didn’t know genetics.
That doesn’t make Darwin stupid.
It means the story continued.
Early doctors could correctly identify a disease while explaining it using humours.
Keep diagnosis.
Throw humours in bin.
شكراً يا حبيبي.
Next.
That’s progress.
Why are we so sentimental about doing the same thing in psychology?
And then I understood why my friend likes Jung.
This bit actually made me soften toward Jung rather than harden against him.
Because fucking hell…
Jung must be catnip when you’re young.
Think about it.
You’re 19.
You’re confused.
Horny.
Ambitious.
Insecure.
You’re constructing an identity in real time.
Half of you wants approval.
Half of you wants to burn every expectation anybody ever placed on you.
You discover that you have parts of yourself that don’t fit the person you thought you were.
Then Jung walks in.
That’s not merely your insecurity.
That’s The Shadow.
The personality you show other people?
The Persona.
Your attempt to become psychologically whole?
Individuation.
Your dreams?
Maybe they’re speaking through structures deeper than your individual mind.
Bhai sahab.
Yesterday you were a university student upset because someone didn’t text you back.
Today you’re engaged in an archetypal confrontation with the ancient psychic inheritance of humanity.
Of COURSE it lands.
😂
It takes normal human experiences and gives them mythological scale.
Which is enormously seductive.
Especially when you’re young and trying to understand yourself.
And the really powerful part is that the descriptions often do resonate.
You read Jung describing some psychological pattern and think:
Holy shit. I’ve seen that.
And maybe you have.
But here comes another punchline:
A description feeling true does not make the proposed cause true.
Those are separate things.
Very, very separate.
Resonance is not evidence.
This may be one of the reasons these systems survive.
If someone describes your internal experience beautifully, you naturally start trusting their explanation of it.
But those are two different achievements.
Imagine someone says:
You sometimes react disproportionately to traits in others that threaten your own self-image.
You think:
Yep.
Seen it.
Done it.
Then they say:
This occurs because your autonomous Shadow is seeking integration within the totality of the Self.
Wait.
Stop.
The first sentence bought you credibility.
The second sentence just spent it without showing receipts.
We do this constantly.
A good phenomenological observation smuggles a much more ambitious ontology through customs.
And because the whole thing feels insightful, nobody opens the suitcase.
वाह भाई वाह.
Very elegant.
Where’s the evidence?
Meanwhile, I was also discovering that Europe apparently invented everything again.
This whole conversation started with Joyce.
Particularly his multilingual writing.
English mixed with French.
Latin.
Irish.
German.
Whatever else Joyce could fit inside one abused word.
And yes…
it’s extraordinary.
The degree to which he does it is absolutely insane.
But I had another moment.
Wait.
Multilingual literature?
Seriously?
Come on.
Persia, Arabia and the Indian subcontinent had been marinating languages together for centuries.
Persian.
Arabic.
Sanskrit.
Prakrit.
Hindavi.
Braj.
Urdu.
Hindi.
Turkic languages.
And not merely borrowing vocabulary.
Poets were deliberately code-switching.
Playing between languages.
Using Persian literary forms with Indic imagery.
Arabic theological vocabulary inside Persian poetry.
Persian inside Hindavi.
Sanskritic registers beside Perso-Arabic ones.
Amir Khusrau was playing games between Persian and Hindavi centuries before Joyce was a glint in Ireland’s eye.
And Urdu itself?
Come on.
Urdu is basically what happens when history says:
Put all these people in the same civilization for long enough and let’s see what happens to their tongues.
So yes, Joyce did something astonishing.
But whenever somebody says:
Joyce revolutionized literature by mixing languages—
a small desi part of me now wants to whisper:
अच्छा? पहली बार हुआ था क्या?
Really?
First time, huh?
😂
And this opened up another issue.
“Revolutionary” compared to which bookshelf?
This is where colonialism and canon formation do matter.
Not in the lazy:
European man bad, therefore idea bad.
That’s boring.
The much more interesting thing is amplification.
European universities.
Publishers.
Colonial administrations.
Academic societies.
Museums.
Later American universities.
These systems didn’t merely produce knowledge.
They determined what counted as the canon of knowledge.
A European intellectual writes something.
Other European intellectuals respond.
Translations appear.
Universities teach it.
Students write dissertations.
Departments form.
Schools of thought appear.
People spend another hundred years explaining what the original guy really meant.
Eventually the thinker isn’t merely somebody who had an idea.
He becomes part of the intellectual architecture.
Meanwhile somebody somewhere else may have explored a similar question two centuries earlier…
but they’re filed under:
poetry.
religion.
folklore.
mysticism.
“Eastern thought.”
Or nobody in the dominant institution ever translated them at all.
And then a Western reader encounters an idea in the Western canon and says:
My God! What an unprecedented insight!
Maybe.
Or maybe your library card only worked in one wing of the building.
But even Eurocentrism isn’t the biggest problem.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized the really interesting problem is broader.
It’s canonization itself.
Once a theoretical framework becomes historically important, it acquires inertia.
People teach it because other people teach it.
Books reference it because previous books referenced it.
Writers borrow the vocabulary.
Therapists adopt parts of it.
Popular culture adopts it.
The terms enter everyday language.
And eventually a theory gets something arguably more powerful than empirical support:
familiarity.
Now “Shadow” sounds like something that exists.
“Archetype” sounds like a discovered psychological object.
“Collective unconscious” sounds like a place.
We stop hearing these as hypotheses.
They become furniture.
And once intellectual furniture has been in the room for eighty years, nobody remembers who carried the sofa in.
So yes. Put Jung in a museum.
A fantastic museum.
I don’t mean:
OLD WHITE DUDE. WRONG. CANCEL. NEXT.
What a waste that would be.
I mean:
Carl Jung, 1875–1961
Extremely interesting observer of human psychological and cultural patterns.
Developed influential abstractions including the Shadow, Persona, archetypes, individuation and collective unconscious.
Some observations remain insightful.
Many proposed mechanisms were speculative, difficult to test or superseded by more specific psychological explanations.
Also said some very weird shit.
Gift shop downstairs.
I’d happily spend three hours in that museum.
Then I leave.
I don’t move in.
That’s the distinction.
If my young friend wants to read Jung, fantastic.
Read Jung!
But read him like we read an old scientific explorer.
Look at what he noticed.
Look at the maps he drew.
Look at where he nailed the coastline.
Look at where he wrote:
HERE BE DRAGONS
because he had no fucking clue what was beyond the next hill.
That is incredibly interesting.
What I don’t want is:
Jung said X, therefore X remains a currently valid model of human cognition.
No.
Jung saw X.
Jung proposed Y.
We have had a century.
What happened to Y?
That’s the question.
Maybe this is how we should teach every old thinker.
Not:
Here is Jung’s theory of the psyche.
But:
Here is the phenomenon Jung noticed.
Here is how he explained it.
Here is what evidence later appeared.
Here is what survived.
Here is what got replaced.
Here is what remains genuinely unresolved.
That structure is so much better.
Because now you’re watching knowledge evolve.
You’re not being inducted into a church.
And, oddly, it makes the original thinker more impressive.
You can actually see what they managed to infer without the tools we now possess.
Sometimes that’s astonishing.
I’ve acquired a new bullshit detector.
I think this whole detour has given me a question I’m going to keep.
Whenever I encounter some big intellectual abstraction…
I want to ask:
What mundane generative mechanism could create this pattern?
Civilizational cycle?
Maybe incentives + institutions + resource pressures + repeated games.
Archetype?
Maybe shared cognition + evolution + recurring developmental challenges + cultural transmission.
Projection?
Maybe defensive cognition + self-concept protection + motivated reasoning.
Synchronicity?
Maybe probability + selective recall + apophenia + the fact that approximately ten billion things happen to you during a lifetime.
And look…
sometimes the answer will be:
Nope. Those don’t explain it. Something interesting remains.
Excellent!
Now we’ve got a real problem.
Investigate it.
But often the answer may simply be:
Oh.
That’s all it was?
And I love that.
Because boring mechanisms are beautiful.
You don’t need history to possess a spirit.
You don’t need civilization to ride a cosmic carousel.
You don’t need heroes stored in ancestral psychic RAM.
You don’t need coincidence to contain an invisible causal thread.
Sometimes humans repeatedly behave like humans…
because…
they are humans.
والله العظيم, sometimes the universe is allowed to be that simple.
And maybe that’s the real lesson.
The old thinkers gave us abstractions because abstractions were sometimes the best tools they had.
Fair enough.
But an abstraction is scaffolding.
Its job is to help us climb.
If later generations discover the beams underneath the building…
we don’t preserve the scaffolding because the first architect was brilliant.
We take it down.
We photograph it.
We put a little plaque next to it.
We say:
This helped us get here.
And then we keep building.
Excellent observation, Jung.
Excellent observation, Vico.
Seriously.
Nicely spotted.
But the explanation turned out to be considerably more mundane.
And that’s okay.
Actually…
that’s better.
Because now we know a little more about why the thing happens.
Keep the observation.
Keep the history.
Keep the beautiful language if it’s useful.
But when the mechanism arrives…
update the fucking model.
बाकी सब archive में डालो.
الباقي في المتحف.
باقی سب میوزیم میں رکھو۔
And move on.