The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [367]
Through most of human history, this archetype was nowhere more obviously represented than in the symbolism and myths associated with the world's religions. Their central purpose was to bring human beings into contact with a deeper component in their psyche, which gave them the sense of belonging to something far transcending their own individual ego-existence. Where this level could be reached, it gave a sense of meaning and purpose to life; a sense of connection, not just to other people and all the world but to a dimension beyond time and existence altogether.
We see how this archetype was called into play by the story of job and how, in the appearance of the all-powerful, all-knowing spirit behind the universe, job is overwhelmed into a sense of his own utter insignificance. Up to this point, however aware he may have tried to be of some `higher power' in his life, and of the need to conform his own life with what he imagines to be a pattern dictated by that power, he has still only been able to perceive the world from within his own little bubble of ego-consciousness. But now this bubble has been shattered, showing him how little he has really understood. Compared with the majesty of this super-mind which has created every last, minute detail of the universe, he knows nothing. Yet the very fact that he is part of this creation, that he is part of its complex purposes and that it is somehow concerned with his existence, gives Job a sense that, although in himself he is nothing, he is also identified with something infinitely greater than himself. He is part of the totality, `the One'. We thus see the immense power which this archetype can generate. But if its original purpose is light, so also it can be taken over by the `dark inversion'and turned to very different ends. Such is what we see in the other two stories.
The most obvious expression of the Self archetype in the twentieth century was that it shared the same fate as other archetypes. It was taken over by the ego and projected outwards. That once-religious hunger for a sense of totality, to be part of a single all-embracing unity, took on political expression: most notably through those totalitarian political systems which in the twentieth century came to be imposed over large parts of mankind. The whole point of a totalitarian system is that it seeks to control everything in the lives of the individuals who live under it. And it does so precisely because those who create it have become possessed by that unconscious archetype of totality which is now projected onto every detail of the way society is organised. But this is not done in the name of a genuine sense of totality, but only as the expression of a collectivised form of egotism, representing the attempt by one group of human beings to impose their power and control over the rest. The Nazi ideology claimed transcendent justification for imposing on the world the collective will of German nationalism and Aryan racial supremacy. Still more powerfully, Communism claimed universality for its wish to create a new world order in the name of the proletariat, the downtrodden masses. These totalitarian ideologies were unconsciously driven by that archetype of wholeness, but only in the name of part of the whole: as was unconsciously revealed in how they spoke of `the Party' as the supreme embodiment of their collective will, the `part' laying claim to the whole. It was the nature of this phenomenon which Orwell portrayed so acutely in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The appeal of Communism lay precisely in the extent to which it was inspired by an image