22 Dec Mark Steyn – What’s It All About?
Some of Mark Steyn‘s musings can seem so deep and philosophical as to leave the reader with no practical hope. His latest, reproduced below, may be close to that category.
But Christmas is a reminder that hope has already been supplied; it just requires us to make it practical. That’s the extraordinary challenge that lies ahead in 2024.
In the meantime, consider the ideas of Carl Jung and ‘enantodromia’…
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You Make Me Feel So Jung
~What’s it all about? What’s the grand unifying theory for what Kate Smyth a couple of years ago called the “controlled demolition” of the western world? At The Daily Sceptic, Dr Hugh Willbourn pins it all on dear old Carl Gustav Jung:
2023 has seen the culmination of a worldwide process which Carl Jung called enantiodromia, a notion he took from Heraclitus. Truly there is nothing new under the Sun.
Jung defined enantiodromia as: “The transformation of the hitherto valued into the worthless, and of the formerly good into the bad” and “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time”.
There’s a lot of that about:
*”Celebrating diversity” means enforcing an ever more ruthless conformity;
*Western nations are sewers of hateful racist prejudice and white supremacy, yet they’re the only countries black and brown people want to move to;
*An increasing number of girls are boys, and the statement that “men are not women” will get your social-media account closed down;
*The state flag of Minnesota has to be vapourised because it’s insufficiently “inclusive” and, if you object to the national anthem of Canada being sung in Punjabi, you’re “divisive“;
*In the interests of “saving democracy”, the leading political candidate cannot be allowed on the ballot;
*In order to save the environment, we have to destroy rural life, close down all the farms, slaughter every cow and put wind turbines in the path of every incoming bird;
*A “vaccine” fails to innoculate you against an ailment of minimal risk to most people under eighty, but it will give you a heart attack, stroke or a Stage Four turbo-cancer and cause teenage footballers to drop dead on the pitch.
But get with the programme! In the western world’s new Oppositeland, diversity is our strength, no matter how many rapes and stabbings there are, and the season of good will to all men now requires “counter-terrorism police” to safeguard its carols and Nativity scenes:
Boy, His Majesty’s Home Secretary is a kidder. Get a load of this:
If you’re out and about and you see something that just doesn’t look right, makes you feel uncomfortable, is just out of place, let the police know.
Oh, really? There was this 6’4″ person with pronounced five o’clock shadow in my daughter’s changing room, and it “just didn’t look right”, so I let the police know and my case comes up at Wankershire Magistrate’s Court the day after Boxing Day. I was about to add that I’d tried to book Christmas lunch at my favourite five-star country hotel, but it was chock-a-block with Albanian men and that seemed “just out of place”, but fortunately the SWAT team tased me into submission before I could bring it up.
“The transformation of the hitherto valued into the worthless”: that’s pretty good. A year ago, the Miss Greater Derry organisation in my own state of New Hampshire became the first participant in the Miss America pageant to crown a transgender beauty queen. And, er, no, she’s not exactly one of those cute girly trannies with a petite figure and feminine bone structure…
Miss Greater Derry would appear to have a greater derrière. But, as Bert Parks used to sing, “Thar she blows, Miss America”:
The only reason that the young lady in question – Brian by name (oh, relax: it’s pronounced “Bree-ann”) – won Miss Greater Derry is that she’s got a penis.
If that makes no sense, well, in Jungian terms it’s “the transformation of the hitherto valued into the worthless, and of the formerly good into the bad” and “the emergence of the unconscious opposite”. The Netherlands is full of beautiful women, but this year they too preferred to crown a transgender as their national beauty queen. Same with the famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition’s cover model. Swimsuit models are getting a bit like Henry Ford’s Model T: You can get it in any colour as long as it’s packed.
True, this does not turn “the hitherto valued into the worthless” for everyone: a remarkable number of America’s “conservative” radio hosts are surprisingly partial to the bepenised woman. There seem to be fewer takers, so far, for the conversion of legions of confused middle-school girls into unconvincing plonkerless boys. Dennis Prager equates the mutilation of American schoolgirls with the enforced clitoridectomies of Muslim females – and he’s correct that it destroys whatever claim to moral superiority the west might once have had: it’s not merely the transformation of “the formerly good into the bad” but of the formerly good into the evil. It is not Putin or Chairman Xi or the mullahs who are slicing the breasts off thousands of middle-schoolers and rendering them infertile.
If you feel a wee bit queasy about mutilating little girls, well, unless you’re as rich as JK Rowling, better shut up, hater. Nevertheless, there are, as Marx would have said, internal contradictions in the new Utopia. As George Pereira wrote in response to this week’s Laura’s Links:
Laura,
In the fat movement you need to love your body the way it is. Drugs to lose weight are bad. Surgery to lose weight and change your body are bad. Losing weight is fat phobic. Even if it dooms you to a life of constant illnesses and early death, you’re always better off fat or else!
In the confused kid movement at the slightest hint of confusion there’s pills and shots aplenty and life altering surgery before anyone can reconsider. Even if it dooms you to a hopeless life of utter misery, you’re always better off being mutilated.
Can anyone fat-splain or trans-splain how the two approaches can exist at the same time?
What if I’m a really overweight confused kid? What do I do?
Enter the Miss New Hampshire contest. Worked for Brian.
I’m not really up to speed on “social-media influencers”, but I notice a lot of those in the “body positivity” field are suddenly dropping dead …at forty-two …thirty-seven …thirty-three …twenty-eight. Another died in the Chipotle parking lot, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Yet the message to their gazillions of followers remains: don’t change a thing; your body is healthy at any size.
On the other hand, if you’re a twelve-year-old girl, your body is a social construct.
George is correct about the basic inconsistency. But, as I’ve tried to explain to pundits who bang on about the left’s “hypocrisy”, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature: Prancing around in blackface and shoving a banana down my pants would be a career-ender for me, but, when Justin Trudeau does it, no problem. Why? Because Justin’s one of them, and I’m not. That’s the same reason Tamara Lich and the Canadian truckers are still being criminally prosecuted, but elsewhere in the Decayed Dominion certain more favoured demographics can shout “Death to the Jews!” in public, on camera, with impunity.
Unlike the constitution-wavers of the American right, the left does not live in abstractions. It makes hard-power calculations on what’s useful to them. Muslims are, and Jews aren’t. Tough, but, like the mobsters say, nothing personal, strictly business. Thus, according to Canada’s state-funded national broadcaster, “Israel started the Hamas war” – while that whole October 7th unpleasantness was just a bit of freelance rape and murder one has to accept (per Sadiq Khan) as the occasional price of living in a great global city kibbutz.
Which brings us back to Dr Willbourn on Jungian enantiodromia and “the emergence of the unconscious opposite“:
The emphasis of the word ‘unconscious’ is mine. This unconsciousness is critical. It arises and subsists or subsides within each of us. The greater the unconsciousness, the greater the conformity to the norm. It is by means of this unconsciousness that good science, common sense and progress have transmogrified into deceitful manipulation, folly and decay.
Enantiodromia is illustrated by the perfect misnomer of wokeness. Those who ‘awoke’ to injustice have become hypnotised into ideological slavery.
Maybe that’s true of the lowest-rung foot-soldiers. But, at the top, the people who are doing this to us are not doing it “unconsciously”. They understand very clearly that the new utopia can only be built on a mountain of corpses – from myocarditis, from body positivity, from diversity stabbings, from whatever it takes. I said some years ago that those tearing down statues of every king, queen and prime minister would soon move on to actual human beings: if you are determined to erase the entirety of the past, why would you balk at the abolition of human biology? In both cases, it is to ensure that there is no path back: no nation, no community, no family, no civilisational inheritance. You can only stagger onward, deeper into the void.
A few months ago, a correspondent wrote to me to suggest that I had spent two decades overthinking my demography shtick. The answer to the collapsed birth rates, he said, was staring us in the face – and in some cases the mirror: we are no longer as attractive as we used to be, and therefore fewer and fewer people want to make babies with each other. As evidence, he linked to an Australian anthropologist seeking to explain why the students in 1950s school yearbooks are both better-looking and more mature in appearance than today’s. The classic good looks of the lantern-jawed American male, for example, may depend on vigorous masticating that the modern diet no longer requires.
This could all be true, but it’s not an either/or question. Aside from insufficient mastication, modern man is also deficient in the traditional male virtues – or, if you prefer, “toxic masculinity”. It’s no surprise a certain number of blokes would rather win the girls’ swimming championship. They can see where we’re headed: This year’s freshman class at the University of Vermont is two-thirds female; is it so hard to imagine it as an all-ladies’ college? And sooner than you think?
Heraclitus said “cold things warm, warm things cool, wet things dry and parched things get wet”. But even he might have been surprised to see men become women, and ugly men become beauty queens, and people who remember when only women were women become social pariahs. There is no “hypocrisy” or “inconsistency”; au contraire, it is admirably consistent: What serves the left’s interest is the destruction of all norms and of all the most basic societal building-blocks – and of the widespread confusion and disorientation that follows. For in chaos all things are possible: Forty per cent of French pre-schoolers are of a “migrant background“. There’s another one for Heraclitus: French children become non-French. But don’t worry, because soon all children will become, genetically speaking, non-anything – just as soon as they’ve perfected that “male womb“.
To return to the clever Mr Cleverly warning his fellow Britons to be on red alert at the Christmas market for anything that seems “just out of place”: Has he left the house lately?
There are tampon-dispensers in the boys’ bathroom. In an utterly unmoored world, wouldn’t it be easier just to list the few remaining things that aren’t “out of place”?