Civilization #57: How Modernism Ruined Everything

To understand Sigmund Freud, we must first place him in the context of the Western religious, intellectual, and literary tradition.

In the beginning, the main religion for humans during the Ice Age was animism. The idea of animism is that we humans are no different from every other living, conscious being in the world. We are like the trees; we are like the animals. We're all interconnected, and life is just a cycle of life and death, birth and rebirth. This religion is still around today in many societies, for example, in the Amazon.

We then transitioned to the mother goddess. As we became more agricultural, fertility became more important. We needed to have more children and grow more crops, so we began to worship the mother goddess, and women held a very high status at this stage in history. But as populations grew and towns came into being, they came into competition with each other and started to war.

This created polytheism. Polytheism is the idea that each place has its own patron god. When these places come into conflict, the way they settle disputes is that the losing party's god becomes a servant to the winning god. This creates the idea of the pantheon that we see in Greek, Roman, and Norse mythologies.

The radical break from this tradition was the birth of monotheism. While there is scholarly debate about which was the first monotheistic religion—some say certain Egyptian cults, some say the Jews, some say the Zoroastrians—it was the Christians who were the first true monotheistic religion. The reason why is that the Christians introduced the idea of the Holy Trinity: God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. These are different entities, but they are co-equal to each other. They are separate but unified; they are different but equal.

This idea is very hard for us to logically reconcile. The only way for us to understand this is if God is both nothing and everything. Therefore, God excludes everything else; there can be no other God with our God. The power of monotheism is that, for the first time in human history, it creates the idea of the individual. When God is everything, you have a direct connection with God, and it removes you from the community.

This would create a lot of problems in the future, but at this point, monotheism was being promoted by the Roman Empire as a way to consolidate its rule. The problem was mediated by the Catholic Church, which mediated God for everyone, creating its own community. However, the church became corrupt, and many religious reformers came to believe that you don't really need the church to access God. In fact, you have an imperative to access God directly through the Bible. You have to read the Bible by yourself and interpret it properly. The most seminal reformer, of course, is Martin Luther.

This is important because by limiting the church, you create direct access to God, and this creates the idea of a crisis in faith.

The Crisis in Faith

The idea of a crisis in faith is: how do you truly know, as a person, whether or not you love God, and how do you know God loves you? Think about your mother. You know your mother loves you, and you know you love your mother, but there are many days when you really hate your mother and you fight with her. It's hard for us not to doubt ourselves.

This creates the crisis in faith because, in Protestantism, you are required to show absolute faith and devotion to God. If you doubt, if you hesitate, you will be condemned to hell. Historically, there have been many solutions to this problem proposed by different prophets. Let's look at three.

1. Wealth Accumulation: The Calvinists argued that to show your true faith in God and to prove to yourself that God truly loves you, you make a lot of money. That is a testament to the power of your faith. This is a very popular solution that gives us capitalism today.
2. Jihad: You will die for your faith. You'll sacrifice yourself to promote the truth of God. That's also a solution.
3. Transgression: This idea is harder for us to truly understand. The idea is this: you must demonstrate complete and absolute faith in God to be one of the elect to go to heaven. To do so, you must demonstrate courage and fanaticism. The best way to do that is to prove yourself to God by rejecting the laws of men, by rejecting human morality, by rejecting and breaking social taboos to demonstrate your faith in God.

I know this sounds like a strange idea, but let me give you an example. Let's just say that in school, I decide to start a new class called "Individual Empowerment," and my very first assignment is for you to go shoplift a piece of candy from a small store. Of course, you are disgusted and appalled. What if you get caught? You might get expelled, jailed, or punished by your parents. You may be an outcast from society. And then I tell you, "Have faith. Trust me. When you do this and you break the social taboo that's preventing you from realizing your full potential, you will feel an extreme sense of exhilaration, liberation, and excitement. This will motivate you to do greater things in life. By breaking taboos, by transgressing against society and showing your true faith in God, you will master your destiny."

So you go and steal something from the store, you get away with it, and guess what? You feel excited, exhilarated, and energized. That's the idea of transgression, and it has been around for hundreds of years.

Philosophical Responses to the Crisis of Faith

Another way to resolve the crisis of faith is through philosophy, specifically epistemology, which is the theory of knowledge. How do ideas come together? Where does knowledge come from? How do we know what we know? Epistemology is philosophy's attempt to resolve this crisis.

Previously, we discussed Immanuel Kant, who proposed the idea of active subjectivity. This is the idea that we are not just passive consumers of information; we actively participate in reality. We imagine reality in a way that allows us to understand it. Kant tells us we imagine space and time onto reality, which creates a world of appearance for us to understand. The problem with Kant is that he doesn't know what reality is. In fact, he tells us it is impossible to truly understand reality. This creates a problem because if that's the case, how do we know if reality exists or not? It's entirely possible that we are in a computer simulation.

Hegel comes along and resolves this issue by introducing the idea of the Geist—the spirit, the mind. He argues that this is the manifestation of God that is the underlying basis of all reality, and from this reality comes the material world. Hegel believes that the Geist is in a process of reconciling itself with the world, bringing us along with it so that one day everyone will achieve full enlightenment.

Then, Marx will come along and argue that the Geist is really history. Marx inverts Hegel and puts the material world before the world of ideas. He argues that history is a movement of class struggle, and the end of history is when all class struggle ceases and we all become equal in a workers' paradise. Why? Because as capitalism becomes worse and worse, as the proletariat increase in number but are oppressed by the capitalists, eventually the proletariat—you and me—will develop class consciousness and unite. We will overthrow the capitalist class through collective action.

Freud's Radical Break: The Unconscious

Today we study Freud because he will come along and present a completely different conception of the movement of history and of the individual. He argues that the individual is really just unconscious forces embedded within the brain. These three forces are the superego, the ego, and the id.

• The ego is who we think we are.
• The superego are the social forces that act upon us.
• The id are these hidden sexual urges.

Freud will argue that these hidden sexual urges are the true foundations of who we are as well as of civilization. He names two of them: the Oedipal complex and the Electra complex. Oedipus is a character from Greek mythology, a king who killed his father and married his mother. Electra is also a character from Greek mythology, from Aeschylus's play the Oresteia, a woman who wanted to kill her mother and marry her father. Freud was remarkably well-read in Greek mythology and world literature. He argues these are the two fundamental bases of who we are. If you are a man, you have the Oedipal complex; if you are a woman, you have the Electra complex.

This is all strange because Kant makes sense, Hegel makes sense, and Marx makes sense, and they all seem to flow from each other. And then you have Freud. The question then is, where did he get this idea?

The Jungian Revision

Everyone sort of knew that Freud's theory of the unconscious was problematic. He had a very famous student, his heir apparent, named Carl Jung. Jung really saw Freud as a father, worshipped him, and wanted to improve on his theory of the unconscious. Over time, Jung would systematize this idea.

For Carl Jung, we have the ego, which is made up of two forces: the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious is also divided into the personal and the collective. The personal unconscious is just our memories and experiences. The collective unconscious is the collection of all society's memories and experiences. They are captured and expressed whenever we engage in society—when we eat food, talk to people, watch movies, or read books. The collective unconscious is embedded throughout society; you breathe it like you would breathe air.

Jung also says that we have the animus and the anima; in other words, we are made up of two opposing forces, the male and the female. There's a duality to us.

When we meet people, the ego projects a persona. The persona is basically our best self in a certain social context. In school, you're a student, and you try to be the best student. At home, you're a daughter. At McDonald's, you're a friend. You are different personas in different social contexts.

We try to protect our best self, but we are made up of a lot of bad memories and bad thoughts. So the ego suppresses the worst aspects of us in a shadow form. The shadow is really the alter ego of the ego. Jung argues that all of this is what is called the self. He tells us that life is a constant process of self-discovery. If you truly want to master yourself, you must discover who you are, and that will take a lifetime of self-exploration guided by a psychotherapist. This sounds much more logical, and it's become the standard model for modern-day psychology.

You would think that Freud would be happy that Jung came up with this new idea, but Freud was infuriated that Jung would question his theory. In fact, Freud was notorious for being a control freak. He excluded Jung and refused to have anything to do with him. Everyone in the community around Freud would now distance themselves from Jung, and there would be no reconciliation between the two ever.

This leads us to a few questions:

1. Where did Freud get his idea for the Oedipal complex?
2. Why was Freud so afraid of criticism and so secretive?
3. Why did this idea become so popular?

The ideas of Freud and Carl Jung will become the basis of a major cultural movement called modernism, which is the cultural movement that we still live in today. While there are many definitions of modernism, for us, the easiest definition is the cult of the self. We live in a world, a society, and a culture that's obsessed with ourselves, with self-improvement and self-empowerment.

I will show you that Freud became so influential and famous not because his psychoanalytic system was designed to help his patients. Ultimately, his system was designed to protect the interests of powerful men.

Uncovering the Truth: Why Did Freud Change His Theory?

Let's put Freud in his historical context. Freud lived and worked at the end of the 19th century, primarily in Vienna. At this time, Europe was going through fundamental social, cultural, economic, and political change. We were transitioning from the pre-modern era to the modern era. Before, we lived primarily in towns and villages where we dealt with each other emotionally and had a purpose in our community. But when we moved to the cities, it was money and the clock that regulated our lives.

Because of these social changes, two new fields, sociology and psychology, were developed to understand what these changes meant for us as humans. In sociology, there were three major pioneers: Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel. Simmel wrote a wonderful essay called "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in which he describes the impact of moving to the city.

Instead of reacting emotionally, the metropolitan type reacts primarily in a rational manner, thus creating a mental predominance through the intensification of consciousness... Thus the reaction of the metropolitan person to those events is moved to a sphere of mental activity which is least sensitive and which is furthest removed from the depths of the personality.

Let's use a metaphor. In the village, you grow your own food, make it, and eat it. You know exactly where it comes from. But in the city, you get exposed to all different types of cuisine and flavors, which excites your imagination. You're much more curious. The problem, of course, is this is all an abstraction. You have no idea where the food comes from, how it's made, or if it's healthy for you. City life is a higher abstraction, and today we have the internet, which is an even higher abstraction.

This transition causes psychological issues:

• Anomie: In the village, you know exactly what to do. In the city, there are different rules, and it's confusing. For example, in the village, if someone punches you, you punch back, and afterward, you become friends. In a city, if someone punches you and you punch back, you both go to jail.
• Alienation: You have no real freedom in the city. You work from 9 to 5. Every day is the same regulated life, and you lack freedom.
• Disenchantment: You feel as though you are just a machine and have lost human agency.

These issues created a need for psychology. Sigmund Freud was an ambitious medical student who became a psychologist. He started to see patients, often young women who were hysterical. This isn't a word we use anymore, but back then, it meant they couldn't control their emotions. They were prone to outbursts, crying when they saw a man or were touched by one. They couldn't form healthy relationships.

Freud was tasked with figuring out why this was happening. He did something novel at the time: he won their trust and asked them directly, "Why are you like this?" After many sessions, the women started to confide in him. They told him the truth: "I'm hysterical and afraid of men touching me because when I was young, my father abused me."

Freud was shocked at first, but over time, he heard this story from so many different patients with the same symptoms that he concluded they must be telling the truth. He wrote a very famous paper in 1896 called "The Aetiology of Hysteria." (Aetiology means origins). In it, he says:

My previously communicated assumption that trauma, specifically sexual trauma, cannot be stressed enough as a pathogenic agent, was confirmed anew. Even children of respected, high-minded, parental families fall victim to real rape much more frequently than one had dared to suspect. Either the parents themselves seek substitution for their lack of satisfaction in this pathological manner or else trusted persons such as relatives... abuse the ignorance and innocence of children.

He was arguing that abuse is much more common than we are led to believe. He was becoming an advocate for these women, telling the world they weren't crazy; they were traumatized.

The symptoms of hysteria are determined by certain experiences of the patients which have operated in a traumatic fashion and which are being reproduced in his psychical life in the form of mnemetic symbols.

He's saying this is not made up in the mind. This happened physically and then gets represented in the mind.

The Assault on Truth

A man named Jeffrey Masson wrote a book called The Assault on Truth. He went to Harvard, became interested in psychoanalysis, and became friends with Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter. She trusted him with Sigmund Freud's letters, which were not open to the public. Masson spent years going over the letters and discovered something shocking: the early Freud and the later Freud are two different people with two different theories about trauma and abuse.

Here is the early Freud:

I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood... There are a whole number of other things that vouch for the reality of infantile sexual scenes. In the first place, there's the uniformity which they exhibit in certain details.

He's saying, "I know people don't believe me, but the evidence is clear. I've talked to different people who don't know each other, and they're telling the same story with the same details. Either there's a giant conspiracy, or they're telling the truth."

It is less easy to refute the idea that the doctor forces reminiscences of this sort on the patient, that he influences him by suggesting to him to imagine and reproduce them. Nevertheless, it appears to me equally untenable. I have never yet succeeded in forcing on a patient a scene I was expecting to find in such a way that he seemed to be living through it with all the appropriate feelings. Perhaps others may be more successful in this.

When you read this Freud, you see a very clear, nuanced, and balanced thinker. He accepts that he himself might be suggesting false memories, but he says he has failed to achieve this.

Now, let's look at the new Freud.

Since child masturbation is such a general occurrence and is at the same time so poorly remembered, it must have an equivalent in psychic life, and in fact it is found in the fantasy encountered in most female patients, namely that the father seduced her in childhood. This is a later reworking which is designed to cover up the recollection of infantile sexual activity and represents an exculpation thereof. The grain of truth contained in this fantasy lies in the fact that the father, by way of his innocent caresses in earlier childhood, has actually awakened the little girl's sexuality. It is these same affectionate fathers that are the ones who then endeavor to break the child of the habit of masturbation.

What Freud is now saying is that young girls are sexual animals from a very early age. They have these urges and a longing for the father, compounded by the fact that the father, in his innocence, hugs and caresses his little girl. It's made worse when the father notices the girl masturbating and tries to stop her. This creates a sense of resentment, hatred, and more longing. Now, Freud is saying it's not the father; the father did nothing. The girl, because of her sexual urges, has all these sexual fantasies and is no longer able to differentiate between fantasy and reality.

From his essay "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria":

The love-hungry little girl, unhappy at having to share her parents' affection with her brothers and sisters, realizes that all that tenderness comes flowing back when her parents are made anxious by her illness. The little girl now knows a way of calling forth her parents' love.

He is explaining why hysteria is so common in society, and the answer is very simple: women are desperate for attention. They're fine; they have no issues. They just want attention, and that's why they are hysterical—because they know that illness attracts attention from caregiving males.

In his book, Civilization and Its Discontents, he expresses his contempt for women in society:

Furthermore, women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence—those very women who, in the beginning, laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable.

Freud is saying that we must thank women because without them, there would be no civilization. They give birth and raise families. But men are smarter than women, and so men are tasked with the responsibility of building civilization—of creating science, literature, philosophy, politics, and administration. But what all women want is to be doted on, and that's why women hate civilization. First, because they're not smart enough to contribute to it, but also because it takes men away from them.

So, what explains this transition? The Freud we encountered earlier was a scientist—very clear, nuanced, and subtle in his thinking. This Freud is like a mythmaker, almost a priest.

There's a very simple explanation. He may be treating his patients, who are young women, but who's paying the bills? The father. If Freud went to the father and said, "I talked to your daughter. It's your fault that she's like this," they wouldn't be very happy. We can understand why, at the end of the day, Freud decided that he needed to change his story if he wanted to maintain his clientele.

The Historical Context of Abuse in Vienna

The question then is, is there evidence to suggest that sexual trauma and abuse were common in Vienna in the late 19th century? The answer is yes. There is some evidence to suggest this was actually a phenomenon in Vienna at the time.

Vienna was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and there were lots of secret societies and religious cults. One of them was called Frankism. The Frankists rejected Jewish norms and believed they were obligated to transgress moral boundaries. Remember the crisis of faith? How do you demonstrate your faith in God? You break taboos. And they were breaking a lot of taboos. The Frankists engaged in sexually promiscuous rites, such as the infamous 1756 incident where they were allegedly caught dancing around a half-naked woman. At its height, Frankism claimed perhaps 50,000 followers, many of whom were powerful people, primarily Jews living in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as well as Central and Eastern Europe.

These were followers of a man named Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish rabbi who lived in the 17th-century Ottoman Empire. For many, he was extremely charismatic and was basically their messiah. He preached a religion of transgression because transgression meant courage, empowerment, and true faith. He had so many followers that the sultan gave him a choice: either continue what you're doing and I'll kill you, or convert to Islam. He converted to Islam, but when he did so, he told his followers, "I did so because God doesn't care about what you do. God cares about what's in your heart. As long as you're true to God, what you do in life does not matter." The religion he started is still around today. As part of this movement, sexual abuse was common.

So we have evidence suggesting that yes, these women were probably telling the truth, and Freud knew it. But Freud ultimately had to change his story to protect his livelihood.

There's also another reason. This has to do with a man named Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelweis lived in 1840s Vienna and was a doctor at Vienna General Hospital. He was in charge of two maternity clinics. It was the same hospital and the same staff, but the mortality rate at the second clinic was much higher than the first. Women could die giving birth because of fever. Ten percent of women were dying in the second clinic, and only about 3% were dying in the first.

Semmelweis was appalled and launched an investigation, spending seven months trying to figure out what was happening. He looked at all different possibilities, including weather, treatment, and personnel. Then he had a radical breakthrough. The second clinic was a teaching hospital. In the morning, doctors would work with cadavers, showing students how to dissect them, and in the afternoon, they'd go and deliver babies. Semmelweis didn't know why—at this time, germs were not a thing—but he theorized there could be a connection.

He created a protocol where everyone had to wash their hands using a formula of water, chlorine, and lime—the same formula we still use today. He tried this protocol, and it was a miracle. After people started to wash their hands, almost no one died in childbirth anymore. Semmelweis, being a rigorous scientist, collected all this data and conducted experiments to prove that washing your hands could save lives. He then presented his findings to the doctors of Vienna General Hospital, believing they would praise him and promote this throughout Europe.

Instead, the doctors told him they had to keep this quiet. They respected him and his amazing work, but if word got out, people would know they were responsible for the deaths of these women before, and their reputations would be in tatters. Semmelweis responded, "I understand that, but if we don't publish our findings, more women are going to die." They fought for years, and eventually, Semmelweis was blacklisted. He was not allowed to work in a hospital ever again. Ultimately, he was confined to an insane asylum by his colleagues, where he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later, leaving a young family.

That's what happens when you defy powerful people in 19th-century Vienna, and Freud didn't want the same fate. He also had a young family.

The Interpretation of Dreams

Now there's another problem: how does Freud convince his patients to go along? Before, he told them, "I believe you," and they trusted him. Now he's changing his story. How can he convince them that they suffer from sexual fantasies and that their experiences of sexual abuse are all just made up in their heads?

The solution is the interpretation of dreams. Freud pioneered a new way of working with his patients. Together, they would analyze their dreams. If you talk about their memories, they're going to fight back and say, "I remember very clearly." But if you talk about their dreams, that allows you to subtly suggest new ideas and memories—to basically implant new memories and gaslight the person.

The Spread of an Idea: Modernism and the Cult of the Self

But this leaves a question: why did this spread throughout the world? A lot of the influence of Freud has to do with Carl Jung, who would take his ideas of the unconscious and systematize them for popular consumption. Jung popularized ideas of personality types, like introvert and extrovert, which we still use today.

The main influence is in modernism, a transformative art movement beginning around the early 20th century. Arguably, the first great modern artist is James Joyce, who in 1922 published Ulysses. Joyce was an Irish expatriate who studied Dante in university. He wrote Ulysses as a way to imitate and almost surpass Dante, and the title of course refers to Homer's Odyssey.

Let's read a passage from Ulysses to understand his writing:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.

What does this mean? I have no idea. I can explain Dante, Homer, and Shakespeare, but I struggle with James Joyce. There are two reasons why. First, he was a singer, so you have to read what he writes as if it's music. It's meant to be read aloud. He's focusing more on the style than the substance. Second, he was extremely well-read, and in every sentence, there are multiple allusions and references to other books. You must have read what he read to understand him.

There are those who argue that Ulysses is the greatest book in the world. Many will tell you, "Yes, James Joyce is hard, but if you spend the time to go over what he's writing and connect the references, you will have a transformative intellectual experience." It's almost like doing a jigsaw puzzle. And that's all true. But think about what they're really saying: James Joyce believes that he is God. He has the mind of God. And if you spend the time—it might take you years, decades—to understand what he writes, you will access the mind of God. That's very different from Dante, who was trying to use poetry to bring people into the mind of God, which is a truth of the world. Dante is a lot more accessible.

Modern literature, as represented by Ulysses, is elitist and self-referential. It's full of allusions, but you don't actually know what the bigger story is. It's usually written in a style called stream of consciousness, which tries to capture the mind as it thinks and works. This is different from Homer, who was very democratic, trying to bring beauty and truth to the people through epic poetry. Starting with modern literature, we have this abrupt change. Before, literature was about empowering people to seek the truth for themselves. Now, it's really just this very elite club of very arrogant, haughty people.

James Joyce was good friends with Virginia Woolf; in fact, she published his work. In 1927, Woolf published To the Lighthouse, probably her most famous work. In it, she's also trying to respond to Joyce. To the Lighthouse is very much based on Homer's Odyssey, and it's extremely well-written. Let's look at what she writes:

There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, "You shall go through with it." To eight people she had said relentlessly that, and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds.

She's reading a book and thinking about the issues it raises, but she's also thinking about life, like, "Oh, I have to go and do something." This captures stream-of-consciousness thinking really well. She's heavily influenced by Freud, trying to go into the unconscious to figure out how it works. To the Lighthouse is about memory, perception, and remembering. But again, it's extremely self-indulgent, inward-looking, and a radical departure from traditional literature.

This modernist idea is too optimistic, too positive. It's saying, "Hey, if you're poor, don't worry about it. As long as you think happy thoughts, you'll be good." This is the idea of positive psychology that we have today.

Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud also had a major influence on Pablo Picasso. You can see it in his painting Head of a Woman. It's a Cubist portrait of a woman, but if you look further, it's actually two people as well. This is visually representing the theory of the self as presented by Jung.

Why Did Modernism Spread?

So why is this art spreading throughout the world? Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but let's look at an article from JSTOR titled, "Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psyop?"

In the mid-20th century, modern art and design represented the liberalism, individualism, dynamic activity, and creative risk possible in a free society.

In other words, the capitalist West was at war with communism. In the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, communism was spreading all around the world. It was very popular and called for collective action. So, the powers that be in the capitalist West were spreading Freud, Joyce, Woolf, and Picasso—all this modernist art—in order to create a cult of the self. Because if you believe in the cult of the self, if you believe that you are the source of everything, then you are not capable of collective action. In many ways, this was a response to the problem posed by communism, and this would become most obvious during the Cold War.

Why would the cult of the self be bad? Mikhail Bakunin explains it very well.

To be free in absolute isolation is an absurdity invented by theologians and metaphysicians who have replaced the society of humans by that of God, their phantom... Freedom in isolation, then, is the freedom of nothingness, or indeed, the nothingness of freedom: slavery. God, the figment of God, has been historically the moral, or rather the immoral, source of all slaveries.

What he's saying is that the radical turning point in human history is the invention of Christianity because it gives us the idea of individualism. We think that's a good thing because we're taught that individualism means free choice and freedom. Bakunin is saying that's an absurdity. We only have freedom from our community. We only have freedom if others are free around us. If we are free but no one else is, then we are slaves as well. Because individualism prevents us from working with and loving others, it makes us slaves to ourselves and allows the powers that be to better control us. He's saying Christianity is a slave religion, designed to make us all into slaves. Bakunin lived in the 19th century, but if he read Freud, he would also argue that the cult of psychoanalysis is about entrapping yourself in your own emotions.

As for us, we want neither phantoms nor nothingness, but the living, human reality, and we recognize that man can feel and know himself to be free, and therefore can achieve freedom, only among men. In order to be free, I need to see myself as surrounded by free men and to be recognized as such by them. I am free only when my individuality, reflected as by a mirror in the equally free consciousness of all my fellows, comes back to me strengthened by the recognition of all.

What he's saying is this: if you want to be happy and free, care about others, be kind to others, and work with other people. Sacrifice your own self-interest for the greater good. That is what will make you really happy. And that's generally true. If you're by yourself, will you be happy? Probably not. But if you have a family and kids, you don't have any freedom, but you're a happier and more free person in many ways because you have better control of your emotions and more purpose in life.

The Cult of the Self Today

Let's bring this to the present day. Social media is the democratization of the cult of the self. Before, only the wealthy could enjoy it and take the time to self-indulge. But now, with social media, everyone can participate, and that has led to a global epidemic of depression.

You see this huge spike in depressive symptoms around 2015, the year we gained widespread access to smartphones. Now, young people feel they can't do anything right, that life is not useful, and they do not enjoy life. This has led to a huge spike in suicide, and this is happening throughout the world—not only in North America and Europe but also in Latin America and East Asia. The cult of the self, which originated in Europe, has now conquered the world through technology.

So, the answers to our three questions—Where did Freud get his idea? Why did he break with Jung? Why are his ideas so popular?—are that it's all to serve the interests of the powerful. That's the world we live in today. The only solution moving forward is if we rediscover our humanity. If we are able to find the courage to care about others and put the interests of others before our own, we ourselves must choose to kill the cult of the self.