/lit/ - Literature

>>12625791
tfw your ill-conceived and juvenile fantasies are totally exposed

>In recollectivization the image of the original group and its wholeness is projected by the renegade ego upon the mass. The ego surrenders and, re-emotionalized, pouring itself out in an orgy of mass participations, experiences with pleasure a mass self akin to the uroboros, which sucks it in, embraces, and engulfs it. But a nihilistic, regressive perversion of the motto "Be embraced, ye millions!" is truly of the devil. The mass shadowman, the herd of atomized individuals, and the mass self combine to form a pseudo-unity which is sheer illusion. That it is purely a matter of mass unification and a travesty of unity is evident from the swift disillusionment which ensues, and from the fact that mass illusion is incapable of producing any genuine and durable participation, much less anything constructive. The illusion of unity at a mass meeting does not even lead to genuine participation mystique with the spirit of the mass, let alone to a relationship of the participants with one another. In the real group, the group phenomenon of participation brings a synthetic development, taking the form of mutual responsibility, increased readiness for self-sacrifice, etc., which appears not merely as a momentary intoxication but embodies itself in institutions and communal undertakings. For instance the orgiastic feasts among primitives and in the older cultures promote the growth of groups and communities, and establish religious forms and other phenomena whose importance for the development of consciousness we have already stressed

>But in mass phenomena the illusory elation is as transient as that induced by hypnosis; it does not impress itself upon the conscious mind by bringing it to a creative synthesis, but leaks away like any other momentary intoxication. Yet even this delusive frenzy of mass possession is zealously desired by an ego emptied of all meaning, and is one of the chief allurements with which the mass hypnotist successfully operates. Modern mass propaganda seeks-in part quite consciously to restore the old group unity and the mutual projections of the participants, together with all the symptoms of emotional possession that pertain thereto. This it does-as was particularly to be observed in National Socialism-by enlisting the aid of symbols and archetypes. We have already pointed out the basic error and also the dangers of these recollectivizing tendencies. The intended victims of this possession are-above all in the big cities-atomized individuals split off from the unconscious, and although they may be able to regress to this unconscious state for a little while by surrendering their egos, the subjective delirium which accompanies it harbors in itself the most dangerous and destructive consequences

hnng