Puer Aeternus-The Eternal Child

The other day I wrote about what Jung called the Puer aeternus. The “age of the eternal child”, or Peter Pan syndrome.

He predicted that this is the age we are in now.

Whenever I roll an idea around for a piece it sticks with me.

Today a theory along this vein emerged.

What if part of the design right now is stoke the infant in us? And then co-opt our infantile emotional responses to gain power?

Here me out.

We had a mass event, during which we became infinitely more pliant & dependent than ever before.

In the space of a few weeks I watched as we easily gave up our rights, & our critical thinking faculties. People just wanted safety, & protection. We were willing to believe just about anything, unquestionably. On both sides.

I watched as society fractured and polarized.

All of the mainstream intellectual people stopped their normal critical inquiry. And went along with the official narrative.

That was strange. It felt so off in my body for people to be attacking things like the “lab l@€k theory” as racist. To me, that was an important question. The method in which they discredited it felt ridiculous. They didn’t discredit it with facts, they used a talking point.

Worse, as time went on, every single act of mature inquiry was shamed, then censored.

We weren’t able to have adult dialogue. It all devolved into petty fighting.

They also went on to create a completely dependent system, with bailouts across the social stratosphere. Millions of people partook. Yes, needfully so. But they created the need.

We still haven’t fully untangled ourselves from financials of this one.

If I wanted to see how quickly I could create a dependent system, this would have given me lots of information. Primarily how much appetite the collective has to be saved.

Alongside that we’ve had this other running cultural revolution.

While kindness and love are extraordinarily important to human flourishing, we’ve watched as kindness has turned into almost coddling. We are pandering to trauma.

While yes, addressing trauma is important, it’s definitely not the most important thing about people. The most important thing about us is our love, our care, and what we create.

We are making it cool to identify through trauma, pairing off into trauma groups, which is arresting healing. If we heal our trauma, then our identity shifts. If that’s how we’ve identified, then there’s no real incentive to heal.

Instead of focusing on healing the trauma within us through addressing it in the body, on a personal level, the focus seems to be on how others are triggering our traumas in our environment, then demonizing them, expecting the world to change for to change for us.

We have people who are looking for belonging who have formed a brigade of keyboard warriors tasked with enforcing this new “non-triggering trauma paradigm”. Pushing it to center stage. Which isn’t exactly where it belongs.

Yes trauma is important.

But more important and what can abate trauma symptoms, is love, community, service, maturation, friendship, relationship, boundaries, inner authority, inner power, standards of excellence, etc.

The way I see it now, is this focus on trauma identity…

“my trauma is worse than your trauma”

“this groups pain is worse than that groups pain”

is resulting in a fragile population, which in turn seeks to police speech and behavior. Instead of focusing on the very things that could alleviate the pain.

Now we’ve even got the winning Trauma group’s perceived issues dictating our political agenda.

I say perceived because I don’t always see the identified group being the people advocating for change. I don’t see politicians deferring to them to create policy.

It’s more like their pain has been co-opted.

By who exactly? It feels like it’s the savior/activists, elite, and media, acting on behalf of these communities.

People in positions of power, co-opt the most divisive issues, distort them, (because they have an agenda) then push them to the foreground, offering no real solutions, only more division.

If we just keep squabbling, we don’t mature. Because the goal is to fight, not to solve. Solving problems takes wisdom.

By taking this ineffectual approach, they are infantilizing the groups they seek to help (aka) rescue.

“There there, yes you are traumatized, we’ll fight for you. You can just receive the meager windfall of our efforts.”

The whole collective feels a bit distorted now. Out of shape. It’s gotten to the point where all of these movements have become a characture of what they were intended to be. Because they’ve been taken out of the hands of their benefactors, and become a useful punting tool.

Put into the hands of the mouth pieces.

And the mouth pieces are telling people over and over, 24/7, that not only is this normal, but it’s good.

This is has got be creating a generation of reliant, immature, non-resilient, people. We have put our faith into people who are using us to gain power. And now, we have no real idea how to resource or save ourselves because we’ve become so accustomed to this model.

Not ever using our own power to effect change in our lives is young. Maturation means that we have an effective way to advocate for ourselves.

Empowering ourselves, building coalitions, moving in communities is mature.

Just to give two examples what I’m pointing too if I’ve lost you in all this…

Yesterday on Lindsey Locket’s IG account, someone requested that she stop using capital letters, because they feel like they are being screamed at. This particular person said they even had to unfollow her because of it. But they’d like to continue to follow her if only she didn’t write in all CAPS.

While clearly the women is seeing or feeling a threat that isn’t there, and I have so much compassion for how that comes on line.

This is an example of being triggered and needing someone on the outside to make a special accommodation for us. Rather than us doing the hard inner work to stay regulated in the face of it.

She was essentially being asked to put a stranger’s feelings above her mission. This feels “young.”

This kind of expectation exists everywhere nowadays. Change the outside so we feel safe in the inside.

This is what we do for infants.

Like I said, things are getting weird.

I’m not saying there aren’t places we should do this. When it makes sense. When it is true.

Second example…

There was an article I read recently about Harvard Drs identifying LBTBQ at babies at birth as a service? That just felt wrong in my body. It felt “too much”.

They’d developed this science despite the fact that no elder in the LGTBQ community asked for it. It isn’t the result of advocacy by the community.

No

It’s all been co-opted by the saviors. Academia & the Elite. It’s actually a reinforcement of white supremacy. If you can see it. “We’ll be allies, set the agenda and do the work. We’ll solve problems no one asked us to solve and take credit as a way to elevate our status”

And as long as we play the role of the infants

in this dynamic, if we play the role of the people gratefully accepting their rescue agenda; cheering them on. How do we mature? The whole thing is off.

With all of this, I don’t think I’m being alarmist when I say lack of healthy maturation may be one of the biggest threats we face as a humanity in the west.

You have to wonder if it’s by design.

We’ve got a pliant society, that now firmly supports whatever their chosen party says without question. We have movements being co-opted by media mouth pieces. We’ve got major savior energy. Pandering to a traumatized population on both sides. A desperate need to belong because of the breakdown of community, service, relationships, and friendships.

How does someone individuate and mature here? In this scenario? In this dynamic? It absolutely breaks the spirit of the human to not be given the opportunity to feel their power and develop into adulthood.

2020 itself created this expectation that the government was the answer to everything. That’s not what we want.

If I wanted to take over the world with very little resistance, this is how I’d seed the psychological ground. Create an ineffectual, immature, codependent, traumatized, confused, population.