I intend for this post to be the first in a protracted series discussing archetypes of the collective unconscious.

The new HBO ‘Adult Animation’ (what is with that, anyway?) series Santa Inc. has created quite the stir in dissident-right and antisemitic circles for its, shall we say, aggressive Judaism. And this isn’t simply a description of its creators – although it is extremely relevant for reasons that will become clear to state that 11 of the show’s 13 Executive Producers are Jewish, while 4 of the 7 main characters also share this affiliation – but rather a crucial analysis of the fundamental aspects of its storytelling.

Admittedly HBO have only released a trailer thus far, but assuming it’s broadly representative of the story’s core narrative we can summarise it as an attempt to bring the politics of social justice and anti-white activism in an overt fashion to Christmas entertainment. The emphasised text in the previous sentence is important, for we will demonstrate in future instalments of this blog that politics of this type is by no means alien from Christmas entertainment generally – indeed, it is now the primary metanarrative of this and entertainment more broadly in the Western hemisphere today. Santa Inc. is an extremely brazen form of this, which quite literally bemoans the characterisation of Santa Klaus as an ‘old white man’, while emphasising the inequality this stereotype perpetuates and presenting the antithesis in the form of a short, ugly, goblin-like Jewish girl who aspires to succeed the current Santa.

For the sake of clarity for the malevolent observers out there, this sentence is describing multiple characteristics postulated by the show’s creators, without there necessarily existing a link between them. All goblin-like protagonists in Santa Inc. are Jewish girls, but not all Jewish girls are goblin-like.

The conspicuousness of this narrative and its origin is conducive to an analysis of the psychological basis for narrative-driven stories and the ultimate wellspring thereof. In this instance, we can make the observation that a Jewish cast directed by Jewish producers will inevitably lead to Santa Inc., but this relies upon the assumption that what is being written by producers and playwrights is even conscious. It also fails to address the reason for the blatant moral and narrational discrepancies between entertainment of Hollywood’s pre- and post-Jewish eras, which, again, one can’t help but assume isn’t entirely conscious. Men of an antisemitic bent might posit that this merely represents another facet of the Jews’ plot to destabilise the West through the bastardisation of its traditions. This is an effect, however, not the cause, and it seems entirely pointless to describe only what is happening without ultimately understanding why it is happening. Politics alone cannot do this, but psychology perhaps has a better chance.

Anybody who’s studied Jungian psychology to any reasonable degree will have come across archetypes. Archetypes, or more properly, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, are psychological phenomena present within the third layer of the psyche as described by Dr Carl Jung, the collective unconscious – with the first and second being the conscious and personal unconscious respectively. It isn’t obvious how we should define archetypes, even when we have a sound working knowledge of what they are because these phenomena are naturally elusive to the conscious mind, but for the purposes of this discussion, an archetype can best be described as a shared representation of Being as myth. That is to say, it is generally through myth that we come to know archetypes, and through archetypes that we understand the commonalities of the fundamentals of Being manifested in the world at the individual and group level. But we do not require even a vague, conscious knowledge of myth in order to manifest archetypes, which is why they are so accurately described as being shared by a collective at the unconscious level.

Dr Jordan Peterson, who almost everybody (all ten of you!) reading this will be familiar with, has often described the power and ubiquity of archetypes in those of his lectures that are publicly available. As a firm disciple of Jungian psychoanalysis, this is unsurprising and his lectures on the archetypes present within stories such as Pinocchio are truly fascinating. What is most striking in these lectures is the level of consciousness from which Pinocchio, littered with archetypes, is derived; it is quite obvious that some of the narrative’s absurdities couldn’t possibly have been deliberately placed within it as archetypes, and it is even more striking that the audience can relate to these absurdities. This is indicative of the archetypal-mythological process, which essentially involves a conscious narrative being enveloped within a product of the author’s unconscious and transmitted to an audience whose own collective unconscious deciphers it. In other words, our collective unconscious can be described as an Encryption Key of Being.

One shortcoming of Dr Peterson’s lectures on this subject, although in his defence it isn’t necessarily relevant to what he’s teaching, is the Jungian view that the collective unconscious is particularistic. It isn’t like the ability to vocalise language, or the proclivity to nurture children, which are universal traits common to all Homo sapiens, but rather it represents the nature of a people, not all people. This isn’t to say that there aren’t archetypes common to all humans, but simply that a large proportion of the collective unconscious is crystallised within a tribal, particularistic structure. For the purposes of this discussion, we might identify a collective unconscious of the West as that which is common to the Occident’s native inhabitants. Dr Jung, of course, identified this, and he described on multiple occasions in writing the ‘Aryan unconscious’ and ‘Jewish unconscious’ as separately identifiable phenomena.

And so, it appears quite clearly to us that; if Pinocchio is a product of the Western collective unconscious, Santa Inc. is a product of the Jewish collective unconscious.

As a non-psychoanalyst, I don’t consider myself eminently qualified to pronounce on the nature or contents of the Jewish collective unconscious, but there are some glaring inferences we might wish to play around with, in any event. For instance, we see clearly in HBO’s new series, and with variable degrees of clarity in other modern productions, the endemic narrative of the tyrant and his challengers. The tyrant is tyrannical insofar as he (it’s almost always a he) is portrayed as the gatekeeper of normalcy, of cohesion and cultural homogeneity, as Santa Klaus is presented here. The challenger(s), conversely, represent the tolerance of difference and the self-recognition of difference relative to the antagonist’s values and physical type, and in many cases also the assumption that the tyrant’s values are necessarily immoral, unethical and undesirable (but to whom?). The vast majority of successful (read: overhyped) entertainment media in today’s world displays this juxtaposition, and so, we might hypothesise that this represents a powerful archetype of the Jewish collective unconscious. This is supported by variations of a theme appearing frequently throughout Jewish historical myth.

I hope you’ve found this blog interesting and thought-provoking. I do intend on making this post a series exploring Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, but my busy schedule may defecate on even the best of intentions.