Usurpations

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One of my favorite places to go during those seven years that I was an independent owner-operator was onto the great plains and prairies of northwestern North America. They stretch from the Mexico border far up into Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

North Dakota

I just loved the prairies, the great sweep of the land and the unspeakable skies. But I was also very much aware while I was out there that these lands and skies were taken by exterminating the people who previously lived there.

Jung was particularly aware that the past is much more in our minds than we realize. I have often heard here in the US several variations on the phrase that goes “Let's put all that behind us and move forward.” Perhaps that attitude has its temporary place, its virtues, and is understandable in a nation of immigrants. But I think it is ultimately impossible. Here is Jung writing again about “America,” meaning, as I wrote in a previous post, the USA:

...the American...shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the newborn. There is a great psychological truth in this. The foreign land assimilates its conqueror...Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of the indigenous inhabitants.

I not long ago saw a film documentary in which some Finns visited their ancestral lands and homes in Karelia that were usurped by the Soviet Union during World War Two. I actually felt sorry for those Russians who had moved into the expropriated Finnish homes – you could just see their agony as they were being interviewed. I'm sure the usurpation of others' lands and homes has occurred all over the earth.

My guess that the reason the highest-income 1% are feeling like victims, even like “battered wives,” is that their usurpation of our homes and wealth are giving them agony in the unconscious parts of their minds.