The Collective Unconscious: Humanity's (Hackable) WiFi Network
The good, the bad, and the fascinating...
Read time: Approx 5-7 mins
*This, like many topics I choose to write about, is not from a lens of self-righteousness. Rather, I tend to enjoy writing about things that I have and continue to struggle with, personally. I've become more aware, sure, but I fall prey to human nature just like the rest :).
You wake up at 3:03 a.m. sweaty and confused. You just dreamt that you were climbing a never-ending staircase while a talking owl in a trench coat gave you life advice. The weird part? You mention it to your friend the next day, and they had a dream about a talking animal giving them advice, too. *Cue Twilight Zone theme music…
Now, either owls are moonlighting as freelance therapists, or there’s something deeper going on. The Collective Unconscious, the psychological equivalent of a shared Google Drive full of ancient symbols, metaphors, fears, desires, and plot twists that humans across time and culture keep tapping into, whether they know it or not.
Rooted in Psychological Principles
Carl Jung wasn’t your average psychiatrist. He dabbled in alchemy, mythology, astrology, and probably would’ve had a massive following on TikTok if he were alive today. While Freud was busy talking about cigars and suppressed sexual fantasies, Jung said, “Hold my pipe,” and proposed that, beneath our personal unconscious (that little shadowy vault of repressed stuff unique to each of us) lies a collective unconscious shared by all humans.
This shared unconscious isn't made of merely memes and cat videos, but of archetypes: universal symbols that appear across cultures and epochs.
Some of the proposed archetypes:
The Hero (from Hercules to Harry Potter)
The Mother (Mother Earth, Mary, your neighborhood PTA president)
The Trickster (Loki, Bugs Bunny, your little brother)
The Shadow (that side of you that wants to punch a cat after being cut-off on your commute to work)
The Science-y Side
Metaphors and symbols are fun…but what about data? Turns out, modern psychology, neuroscience, and even physics are beginning to peek under the hood.
Evolutionary Psychology
Research shows humans may be biologically primed for certain fears (like snakes and the dark) and behaviors (like storytelling). A 2001 study by Öhman and Mineka found that our brains are much faster at detecting images of snakes and spiders compared to other stimuli. A trait we’ve inherited from ancestors who didn’t particularly enjoy being bitten.
Translation? Your fear of spiders isn’t just yours. It’s your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother whispering: “Stay the f**k away from that thing.”
Infant Cognition Studies
Babies, regardless of culture, prefer looking at face-like patterns over abstract ones. This innate tendency suggests a pre-installed software for recognizing human faces and emotions, like archetypal patterns loading in Windows 1.0 of our brains.
Cross-Cultural Myths
Joseph Campbell, writer, educator, and scholar in the realm of mythology, showed that stories across the globe—from Maori myths to Star Wars—follow similar structures. This “monomyth” or Hero’s Journey is an archetypal blueprint that we’re seemingly hardwired to understand and repeat.
Throw In A Little Physics
Now, you might say, “But aren’t we just fleshy computers running complex electrical signals?” Not so fast, friend…
Physicists, like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, have suggested that quantum coherence could be involved in consciousness. Their “Orch OR” theory (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) claims that quantum processes in brain microtubules might underlie our experience of awareness.
Woah…
What’s wild is that quantum entanglement, where two particles can instantly affect each other regardless of distance, kind of smells like a physics version of Jung’s synchronicity. You know, that thing where your ex texts you right after you thought about them for the first time in months?
It’s still speculative science, but if entangled particles can communicate across the cosmos, who's to say we humans don’t occasionally “log into” the same collective unconscious cloud?
Need More Analogies?
Try these:
Collective Unconscious as the Internet: You don’t need to see the WiFi to know it’s working. Just like our psyches, it connects us all. Your thoughts and behaviors are like browser tabs opened from a much older operating system.
Archetypes as Emojis: Universally understood symbols that say a lot with little. The “Mother” archetype? Think 🫶, 🍼, and 🛏️ all at once.
Consciousness as a Radio: Your personal ego is like a station, but the radio waves (archetypes, symbols, myths) are broadcast everywhere. Tune in or not, they’re there.
Real-World Application
Ever wondered why memes spread like wildfire? It’s because they often hit archetypal nerves. The underdog, the fool, the sage…it’s all there in digital shorthand. When Kermit sips tea or the “distracted boyfriend” template gets reused, we’re watching modern archetypes in action.
Brands do it too. Apple taps the rebel/trickster. Nike channels the hero. Disney? Eternal mother/father storyteller. This isn’t just good marketing, it’s unconscious resonance.
The “Dark” Side of This Shared Network
#Manipulation of Our Collective Emotions
In today's world of monetization and power, you better believe this force is being hijacked against our best interests…
What happens when the deep, weird, mystical content of our individual unconscious—dreams, symbols, archetypes—starts getting filtered not through therapy, or art, or community ritual, but through Canva templates, YouTube ads, and the collective’s unconscious pull to “meet market demand?”
You get Healing™, LLC. You get Athletic Greens AG1. You get MindBloom. You get subscription-based mindfulness apps. You get home renovation shows and the sudden urge to knock down every wall in your already-perfect home. You get the majority of the cryptocurrency market. You get almost every wellness supplement in existence…
One day you’re earnestly unpacking your abandonment wound; the next, you're being served a sponsored post that starts to feel eerily targeted…and oddly reminiscent of the snake oil shenanigans of centuries past…”End your trauma today!…with a $47.99 masterclass, three PDFs, a bottle of my personally-crafted “science backed” nootropics, and and a Zoom call that may or may not involve a ring light and a faux-sage smudging.”
Our psychological existence was never supposed to be marketed and sold like an ab workout.
Jungian archetypes like the Healer, the Guru, the Hero—they already live in us. That’s why the ads and the influencer content feel so magnetic. They're not just selling you an eBook; they're activating the unconscious longing for wholeness, meaning, power, safety, or transcendence that makes us human. When something becomes viral or trendy, it's because those who have something to SELL are highly skilled in human psychology…and, sadly, equally skilled in how to manipulate it en masse.
That’s the slippery part…the part that has derailed (and likely will again) my own progress more times than I'm aware of…
When you’re vulnerable, when you’re mid-unraveling, it’s really easy to mistake the #language of self improvement for the experience of self improvement.
It’s really easy to confuse a polished testimonial with transformation.
It’s really easy to believe that if you just buy the course, do the steps, and “manifest” hard enough, you’ll finally outrun the parts of yourself you're uncomfortable with…
But WE don’t work like that. The psyche doesn’t accept coupons.
The deeper risk, and the part I'm very worried about from a Healthcare and mental health perspective? We stop discerning. We start believing that if we don’t have a brand around our health and wellness, we haven’t really healed. We start performing our “progress” online, projecting a persona that’s part spiritual, part lifestyle, part affiliate link. This, inevitably, feeds the cycle by becoming more popular and visible in our daily lives (#trending)…it's a self-perpetuating hijack of something positive, and it warps into an unconscious, monetizable version that loses its original value. From an aerial view, this appears to only be worsening our mental health, creating more fear and dissociation from our authentic selves…and when the market has our fear…oh, boy! It will always be happy to sell us “the answer.”
None of this makes us bad people. It just makes us…people…living inside a system that knows how to manipulate and monetize our deepest ache to feel whole again.
So, it's essential, always, to pause. Ask:
Am I doing this because it actually resonates with where I’m at?
Am I doing it because the algorithm made it look like the next step on my “healing journey™”?
Who is profiting from all of this and how are they subliminally showing up in the videos I watch or podcasts I listen to?
It needs to be yours, and it requires a level of conscious discernment to weed out the never-ending deluge of unconscious manipulation that has woven itself into our existence.
Hollow Social Movements
Today’s mass movements—whether it’s ‘No Kings,’ pro-Palestine, pro-Trump, anti-vax, anti-capitalist, or anti-immigration—often ride the same collective psychological rails as viral wellness content. And just like with healing influencers, this isn’t about saying the movements themselves are bad…They often point to very real pain, injustice, or truth. I share many of the concerns they raise (and some are bat-sh*t crazy…).
But something else is happening, too. Something archetypal and something that, if we're not careful, can create a form of collective hysteria.
We're seeing the mass possession of people by shared symbols and slogans, passed around like sacred scrolls on social media. The chants, the hashtags, the righteous memes—they feel true. They feel real. Because they come laced with the same archetypal charge: The Rebel. The Savior. The Martyr. The Enemy. The Shadow.
If you stop someone mid-hashtag, mid-pro-Palestine flag wave, mid-”lock her up” chant and ask, “Hey—can you explain what that actually means?” …you’ll often get silence. Crickets. Or just another meme in response.
Activism has become unconscious mimicry. This is the collective unconscious gone algorithmic.
We mistake resonance for understanding. We mistake intensity for clarity. We mistake the shared feeling of belonging for the work of discernment.
And again, none of this makes us dumb…It makes us human. Humans wired to resonate with symbols more than data. With myth more than policy.
But here’s what Jung might ask:
Are you integrating the archetype, or is it possessing you?
The Hero doesn’t always see clearly. The Rebel can’t always self-reflect. The Martyr rarely asks for nuance. And when those roles go unexamined—when they’re not consciously integrated—they can lead us straight into the very shadow we thought we were fighting (guilty…).
This is what terrifies me—not just as a clinician or a citizen, but as a fellow meat-suit-wearing soul trying to stay tethered to reality: that the collective unconscious is being streamed, sped up, flattened, and fed back to us through a feed designed for emotional reactivity, not thoughtful inquiry.
So again, we come back to discernment…
Are you repeating this because it’s true for you?
Or because it felt true in a scroll-induced dopamine haze?
Can you name what you believe beyond a soundbite, or are you just repeating another phrase from one of your favorite Fox News Muppets (or MSNBC, for that matter…)?
Because slogans aren’t substitutes for self-reflection.
And archetypes—no matter how powerful—aren’t excuses to stop thinking, or to stop questioning.
In Conclusion…
The collective unconscious, in its purest form, is neither good nor bad. It's part of our human design and the shared fabric of the universe. But…it is also one of the most powerful forces shaping our inner and outer worlds—more than algorithms, more than politics, maybe even more than money. It whispers through our dreams, our desires, our TikToks, and our trending causes. And if we’re not paying attention, it’ll have us mistaking borrowed thoughts for truth, and mass agreement for wisdom.
So now more than ever…in a globalized, digitized world of non-stop connectivity…don’t just feel the pull—question it.
Trace your thoughts. Ask where they came from. Who they serve. To which billionaire the money is flowing.
The world doesn’t need more autopilot archetypes.
It needs more consciousness.
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