The individual and the crowd - Carl Gustav Jung

In this book filled with challenge and provocation, Carl Jung - one of the greatest minds in history - argues that the future of civilization depends on our ability as individuals to resist the overwhelming power of the crowd with its numerical dominance and suggestive strength that suppresses the critical individual and hypnotizes him. The individual must understand the unconscious and true inner nature to ignite the light of his individuality in the darkness of the crowd, and to resist the complete dissolution and extinguishing of the individual spirit that the ideology of the crowd always seeks. Jung explains the essence of his teachings to readers after the shock of the two world wars and their effects. Carl Jung wrote this book in a time of terrifying visions, the Iron Curtain, and the great divide between East and West. What prevents the world from disintegration and chaos is a stable minority of individuals who first extract their buried individuality from within themselves, and thus free the individual from the narcotic hypnotic influence of the crowd. The crowd has drowned reason and individuality, which inevitably leads to tyranny. The book explains the crowd's trick that offers an easy compensation for the individual for his true duty, making him just a replaceable unit, and provides us with a psychological interpretation of the reasons for daily and global conflicts as the "projection of the dark, black shadow" onto the other, and thus dealing with him as something to be eradicated rather than seeing our internal problem. The projection of the human shadow colors, distorts, and corrupts the "other" completely. This book highlights the importance of individual and moral responsibility and the importance of individual freedom in front of the crowd, whatever its type and size. Therefore, Jung developed his influential program in "Knowing the Self." "The Individual and the Crowd" is a book that will awaken many individuals to the new life of the self that Jung envisioned, so that this new birth of humanity can begin.