Mass Psychosis - Our Greatest Threat  

“All one’s neighbors are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.”
-- Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
-- Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life

“. . .the totalitarian systems of the 20th century represent a kind of collective psychosis. Whether gradually or suddenly, reason and common human decency are no longer possible in such a system: there is only a pervasive atmosphere of terror, and a projection of “the enemy,” imagined to be “in our midst.” Thus society turns on itself, urged on by the ruling authorities.” 
-- Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind

“Crimes the individual alone could never stand are freely committed by the group [smitten by madness].”  

-- Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life

“The phenomenon we have witnessed in Germany was nothing less than [an] outbreak of epidemic insanity. . . No one knew what was happening to him, least of all of the Germans, who allowed themselves to be driven to the slaughterhouse by their leading psychopaths like hypnotized sheep.”  

-- Carl Jung, After the Catastrophe

“If a man imagined that I was his arch-enemy and killed me, I should be dead on account of mere imagination. Imaginary conditions do exist and they may be just as real and just as harmful or dangerous as physical conditions. I even believe that psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics [of physical disease] or earthquakes.”  

-- Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

“Once upon a time men were possessed by devils, now they are not less obsessed by ideas. . .”  

Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

“We can never be sure that a new idea will not seize either upon ourselves or upon our neighbors. We know from modern as well as from ancient history that such ideas are often so strange, indeed so bizarre, that they fly in the face of reason. The fascination which is almost invariably connected with ideas of this sort produces a fanatical obsession, with the result that all dissenters no matter how well-meaning or reasonable they are, get burnt alive...or are disposed of in masses.”

– Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East

“Just as the technological advances of the modern world have refined and perfected the weapons of physical warfare, so the advance in man’s understanding of the manipulation of public opinion have enabled him to refine and perfect the weapons of psychological warfare...(and) totalitarian psychological warfare...is an effort to propagandize and hypnotize the world into submission.”

– Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind

“Ideology – that is what gives the evil doing its long-sought justification and gives the evidoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“The comparison between totalitarianism and psychosis is not incidental. Delusional thinking inevitably creeps into every form of tyranny and despotism...evil powers from the archaic past return. An automatic compulsion to go on to self-destruction develops, to justify one mistake with a new one; to enlarge and expand the vicious pathological circle becomes the dominating end of life...this (delusion) starts with the leaders and is later taken over by the masses they oppress.”

– Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

– Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind