A Collective Psychological Illness

Written by Mathew Naismith

I have touched on this topic about the collective being mentally ill before in past posts but my recent post titled, Saviours and Prophets, our Psycho Therapists, has brought this up again.  I can’t insert these replies to my last post into this post as they are way too big for a single post.  I also don’t like cutting other people’s replies down to fit within one of my posts so instead I have only used portions of my replies with additional material.

Our great psychotherapist teachers of the past, like Jesus and Buddha for example, saw an obvious illness that needed attention within the human race, what if we listened to Jesus or Buddha for example, all our problems we have now wouldn’t have occurred I believe.   It might be a strange way of looking at it but to me they are indeed our psychotherapist teachers, it is obvious they tried to influence the way we were thinking to save ourselves from ourselves!!

Because we didn’t listen to such teachers, we have become even more mentally ill at the collective level, today human depravation shows this quite clearly.  I feel a lot of empathy for the collective because it doesn’t realise how ill it is, mental illness can be like living in hell but at the same time not knowing how ill we really are while living in this hell. Yes it’s a strange way in looking at the collective at the human level but to me it’s obvious that the collective is psychologically ill and if left, like any psychologically ill individual, all hell will break loose obviously and obviously that is what has happened.

I see the collective as an individual and by doing so can see it’s illnesses like it’s fixation to the ego for example, any such fixation will of course cause problems in any individual.  How am I actually looking at these fixations? Addiction, obsession, complex, paranoia, neurosis, psychosis and so on can all have a detrimental effect on our psyche individually and collectively. All these symptoms are of a fixation of one kind or another, so how do we fix such illnesses?    

Firstly what I find so strange is we don’t collectively see the collective as an individual that needs psychotherapy to help it cease such degenerative behaviour.  We are so much into separateness, which is driven by the ego; we are blinded by such ego. The ego just doesn’t allow us to see how individual the collective is at the psychological level.  Once we start to look at the collective as one individual we then can see it as one mind and once we do this we are then able to use psychotherapy to fix our illnesses at the collective level.

We already have the tools to fix such illnesses at the collective level, religion, meditating, praying, chanting, singing and so on are tools that we can use effectively to heal our mental illnesses at the collective level.  There is problem in using these tools however, a problem we have produced ourselves as of any of our problems are, we allow the ego to influence the way we use these tools.

Another tool we can use is political ideological principles like communism for example, communism, as a whole, is supposed to dissipate ego human tendencies but again this hasn’t worked because once again ideological principles like this were influenced by the ego in some way.  Actually we can use any ideological principle that will dissipate our illnesses.  The point is, could we give the learning skills of an actual psychotherapist to a mentally ill patient and expect the patient to heal themselves?  No of course not but basically this is what is happening at the collective level, we have these tools but because we are ill we can’t of course heal ourselves.

So does this mean we can’t help ourselves individually and collectively? Not exactly, if we are aware of our own mental illnesses, at the individual and collective level, this will help us to resolve our illnesses.  If we are aware of our illnesses, these tools will assist us but if were not aware of our illnesses, we haven’t got a chance in helping ourselves obviously.

We might not have an actual Jesus or Buddha for an example to help us with our therapy but we do have people in the world who are aware of our illnesses at the collective level who aren’t as ill as the rest of us are but of course as always we need to be aware of this!!