“We Are The Great Danger”

Jung's fear about humanity was it's increase in technological power without a concomitant increase in psychological understanding. How can humanity control weapons of mass destruction if it cannot control it's own destructive emotions?

Jung's warning is perhaps even more relevant today. Our technological prowess has advanced beyond anything that would have been imaginable in Jung's time. Not only weaponry but also the everyday gadgets we have already come to take for granted can have a destructive potential. The current ubiquity of computers, tablets and smartphones, for instance, has a direct impact on our psychological health. (A nice discussion of this fact can be found in this talk from author Nicholas Carr who wrote a book called 'The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains'). On top of this there is the undeniable damage that our technological progress has had and continues to have on our planet.

Because of this, it is worth taking another look at Jung's warnings. Here is an extended excerpt from an essay in Jung's Collected Works, Vol. 11:

The power of science and technics in Europe is so enormous and indisputable that there is little point in reckoning up all that can be done and all that has been invented. One shudders at the stupendous possibilities. Quite another question begins to loom up: Who is applying this technical skill? in whose hands does this power lie? For the present, the state is a provisional means of protection, because, apparently, it safeguards the citizen from the enormous quantities of poison gas and other infernal engines of destruction which can be manufactured by the thousand tons at a moment's notice. Our technical skill has grown to be so dangerous that the most urgent question today is not what more can be done in this line, but how the man who is  entrusted with the control of this skill should be constituted, or how to alter the mind of Western man so that he would renounce his terrible skill. It is infinitely more important to strip him of the illusion of his power than to strengthen him still further in the mistaken idea that he can do everything he wills. The slogan one hears so often in Germany, "Where there's a will there's a way," has cost the lives of millions of human beings. 

Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. He does not know that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way.  (CW 11, pp. 534-535)