I woke up and looked at my watch. 9:00 AM. I lay in bed with my eyes closed for a few minutes remembering what I had just dreamed. I dreamt I was in college and got stoned—boy did I get stoned! So stoned, I was worried I would act improperly in front of my friends—especially Linda, who I had a crush on. I wanted to get close to her and simply tell her how good she looked in her new dress. Finally she came near me and then we were kissing. Before this PG-13 movie even had a chance to become any more erotic, I woke up. It was now exactly 9:11.
Co-incidence or synchronicity? Who knows? All I know is that I was planning to write this diary today, and that yesterday I was reading the September issue of The Atlantic magazine, which featured the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attack.
We are cohorts, defined as a broad group of people in a culture who have shared the same significant and unforgettable historical events. Such an event was not simply smoking pot in college. It was being of age when we got the news on September 11, 2001 that the World Trade Center was destroyed by terrorists who hijacked planes.
My two youngest daughters were in pre-school at that time. Although they sensed something bad was going on, they couldn’t fully comprehend the impact. So even though they were alive during 9-11, their generation is a different cohort.
A few weeks after 9-11, I was driving to Raleigh to visit a girlfriend. America was now at war. For a brief period of time after 9-11, Americans were united against a common enemy. As I drove though the bucolic countryside along the interstate, I noticed a disconnect. How could America be at war when I was surrounded by such serene peaceful pastoral scenery? This certainly didn’t look like war.
In a previous diary I made the case that people have two different conscious minds; an intuitive improbable mind, and a logical probable mind. Here I wish to propose that we also have not one, not two, but three different unconscious minds.
Freud didn’t come up with the concept of the unconscious mind, but he certainly promoted the idea. The problem with Freud was that he was wrong about so much stuff (Oedipus complex anyone?), that there has a tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water. Although I always thought of myself as a forward-thinking Psychologist, I am convinced Freud was right that much of our behavior stems from our unconscious mind.
I saw evidence of this first-hand when I spent a few weeks in Taiwan many years ago with a cohort of college students wanting to learn more about Chinese culture. With my sleep cycles thrown off from the long flight, I had been awake for days. As a consequence of sleep deprivation, I discovered I could simultaneously hear another person’s conscious words and their unconscious meaning.
About a dozen of us were in a Chinese landscape painting class. I looked at one of the girls’ paintings. There were two huge mountains next to each other—twin peaks. The next thing I knew, this soft-spoken, shy college woman; who had unusually large and heavy breasts, exclaimed out loud in exasperation, “I just can’t do a thing with my mountains!”
No one else there seemed to even notice the double meaning. Fortunately the filter in my brain that keeps me from saying the first thing that pops into my head was functioning. Otherwise I might have embarrassed her (and myself) profusely by rudely saying, “Have you ever thought about breast reduction surgery?”
But Jung went even further than Freud suggesting we not only each have our own individual unconscious mind, but that we all share a Collective Unconscious mind. Although the spiritual and mystical nature of the Collective Unconscious is appealing, I‘m not sure there is enough empirical evidence to prove it. Nevertheless, the Collective Unconscious seems to explain why two different philosophers, Plotinus in ancient Greece, and Lao Tzu in ancient China, both came up with the same idea, at about the same time, when there was no cultural contact between these two vastly separate cultures. Likewise it explains why one person who has ingested psychedelic drugs will seeming tap into some cosmic truth—such as we are all connected and one with the universe—and other people, who had no idea of the others’ psychedelic experiences, will have the same revelation.
As a psychologist, I am certainly not of the caliber of either Freud or Jung. Yet it occurs to me there is a third unconscious mind—the Cultural Unconscious.
The Cultural Unconscious is neither as individual as Freud’s concept of the individual conscious mind, nor as universal as Jung’s Collective Unconscious, which presumably is shared by all humans. The Cultural Unconscious consists of ideas and beliefs shared by virtually everyone in the same culture, that we are not consciously aware of. In other words, all Americans share a Collective Unconscious mind.
All this never occurred to me until that drive after 9-11 to Raleigh. With the radio off, I had time to think, and what I couldn’t stop thinking about was why 9-11 was such a shocking wake-up call. The last time another country directly attacked the United States was during the War of 1812. When the horrific attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, Hawaii was a territory, not a state. Even so, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and so many other wars, like the war in the Philippines and more recently Kuwait—were always fought somewhere else. Of course, the Civil War was fought on our soil, but in that war we weren’t attacked by a foreign power.
Yet here we were at war in Afghanistan, and before long would be at war with Iraq against Saddam Hussein. Then it suddenly hit me: Unconsciously, Americans believe that as long as we keep fighting wars overseas, war will never come to our shores.
I doubt America was the only civilization to believe this. In the movie Gladiator, the question is raised, why are we Romans fighting in Germany? The politically correct answer was, “For the glory of Rome.” I suspect Romans supported foreign wars for the same reason that Americans do: better to send our soldiers somewhere else to fight wars, than have wars where one lives.
Of course, Americans never admit that we ever went to war for “the Glory of America.” No, instead it was to preserve freedom, or make the world safe for democracy, or some other lofty ideal. If the lessons of 9-11 taught me anything, it is that Americans unconsciously fear that if we don’t have a war somewhere else, we will end up having one here.
This is one scary thought. Biden has finally ended the previously never-ending war in Afghanistan. War, like so many things, follows the Rule of Pi—It is 3.14159 times harder to get out of a mess, than to get into one.
Of course, after 9-11, conscious decisions were made by Americans, both those in power as well as ordinary citizens, that it was time to go to war. Rational reasons were put forward—to fight terrorism, to avenge the murderers, to kill the mastermind Osama Bin Laden, to get rid of weapons of mass destruction, to bring Democracy to the Middle East, etc. etc.
Yet I suspect, below conscious awareness, our shared Cultural Unconscious mind, warned us: either we fight a war in foreign lands, or war will come home to where we live. It’s something to think about—before we end up going off again somewhere to fight another war.