June 2025 – Page 2 – An Alternative Perspective

The God of Growth: A False Idol with Real Power

We tend to imagine power as something held—gripped tightly in the hands of politicians, CEOs, billionaires. But what if even those figures aren’t truly free? What if the system they uphold is not just a structure, but a kind of self-sustaining entity… a living thoughtform, fed by belief and fear?

Welcome to the worship of the God of Growth.

The Scoreboard That Replaced the Game

At the centre of modern politics is a points system: GDP, stock prices, employment rates. These numbers are treated not just as tools for understanding wellbeing—they become wellbeing. They are shorthand for national success, political competence, and collective security.

Politicians are judged by how well they can make the economy “grow.” More points = good leadership. Fewer points = failure.

But here’s the catch: these “points” don’t reflect reality. A rising GDP doesn’t mean people are thriving. It might mean more people are being overworked. It might mean more forests are being destroyed. It might mean weapons are being sold, addictions exploited, or resources strip-mined.

Still, the scoreboard glows. The numbers go up. Applause.

The Recursive Trap

So politicians, in their quest to stay elected, are forced to worship growth. They don’t necessarily believe in it. Many likely feel the contradiction. But survival within the system demands obedience to its logic.

And the voters? Conditioned to equate economic growth with personal safety, they too uphold the cycle—rewarding leaders who promise expansion, punishing those who don’t.

No one designed this trap. It emerged.

It’s like a recursive algorithm:

Growth is good.
We fear the lack of growth.
We reward those who promise growth.
Those in power pursue growth at any cost.
Growth causes harm.
Return to step 1.

Over time, this loop generates its own momentum, evolving beyond the control of any individual.

The Egregore: A Spirit Born of Belief

In occult and psychological terms, this is what’s known as an egregore—a collective entity formed by the thoughts, emotions, and actions of a group.

The God of Growth isn’t a person. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not even a single decision.

It’s an emergent intelligence. A social phantom.

It lives in policies, in media headlines, in boardrooms, in national budgets. It rewards loyalty and punishes defiance. It doesn’t need to be real to hold power. It’s real enough.

When the Idol Demands Blood

The tragedy is this: the God of Growth doesn’t care about its worshippers. It doesn’t care about ecosystems, human joy, mental health, or long-term stability. It only knows one command:

More.

More production. More consumption. More markets. More extraction. Even if the cost is collapse. Even if the cost is us.

Seeing the God for What It Is

The first act of rebellion is not protest. It’s recognition.

Once we see the idol for what it is—false, hollow, powerful only because we believe in it—we can start to loosen its grip. We can question the metrics. We can ask better questions:

What if wellbeing isn’t measured in money?
What if slowing down is not a failure, but a healing?
What if true progress means learning to live within limits?

Growth is not inherently evil. But endless, mindless growth is cancer. And we are not here to serve a tumor.

Ending the Worship

Let this be the beginning of a new form of economic spirituality—not one rooted in numbers, but in nurture, justice, and balance.

The God of Growth will not give us a better world. But we might still find one—if we’re brave enough to stop praying and start listening.

The Shadow of the Mob: How Cancel Culture Reveals Humanity’s Repressed Self

Introduction

Cancel culture is a loaded term—invoked with fury by some, defended as justice by others, and dismissed as overblown by many. But what if we viewed it not as a purely political or cultural phenomenon, but as a psychological one? From a Jungian perspective, cancel culture may be less about individual accountability and more about the collective shadow—humanity’s unconscious darkness—emerging in a digital age that doesn’t yet know how to process it.

What if the mob isn’t merely punishing transgression, but projecting its own repressed qualities onto a convenient scapegoat?

The Collective Shadow and the Archetypal Scapegoat

Carl Jung proposed the concept of the shadow—the unconscious repository of traits we deem undesirable, immoral, or shameful. What we refuse to integrate within ourselves doesn’t vanish; it festers in the dark and seeks expression, often through projection. On a societal level, this becomes a collective shadow, surfacing as we displace our unacknowledged inner material onto others.

The target of a cancellation—a public figure, a peer, an online stranger—often becomes an archetypal scapegoat. In myth and ritual, the scapegoat bears the sins of the tribe and is sacrificed or exiled to restore social equilibrium. Today, the ritual takes place online. The digital firepit is the comment thread. The sin is moral impurity.

But the fervor? That’s religious. Archetypal. Shadow-fueled.

Why Now? The Rise of the Unprocessed Psyche

We live in an age of hyper-visibility and deep fragmentation. Everyone is their own brand, their own broadcaster, their own PR department. Meanwhile, the tools for authentic psychological integration—community, ritual, introspection—have eroded.

Cancel culture thrives in this vacuum. It provides a synthetic moral high. A hit of certainty in a morally ambiguous world. A way to feel good without having to face the disturbing truth: that we, too, contain capacity for cruelty, ignorance, prejudice, and contradiction.

Instead of saying “This reminds me of something in myself I haven’t dealt with,” the unconscious says, “That person is disgusting. Get rid of them.”

The Performance of Virtue and the Fear of Exile

Much of cancel culture is driven by fear—of being next. As a result, virtue is often performed, not lived. We denounce to demonstrate that we are clean, correct, on the right side of history. It’s the modern equivalent of burning a witch to prove you’re not one.

This makes it difficult to speak honestly, to question the herd, or to show nuance—qualities vital for a psychologically healthy society. If one mistake marks you as irredeemable, then redemption as a concept is dead. Growth is irrelevant. All that remains is punishment.

But the shadow requires growth. It demands confrontation, not exile.

Cancel Culture as a Mirror

If we zoom out, cancel culture may be seen as an evolutionary pressure—a flawed but inevitable attempt by the collective psyche to regulate moral boundaries in a new digital terrain. It points to real traumas, power abuses, and social injustices that need redress.

But when we cancel rather than converse, when we exile rather than integrate, we repeat the very cycles we claim to oppose. We become the tyrant we sought to dismantle.

In this light, cancel culture is not the problem—it is the symptom of a deeper, unresolved issue: the collective failure to do shadow work.

Toward a New Integration

If cancel culture is a symptom of shadow repression, then the cure isn’t more silencing. It’s more integration.

This means:

Encouraging inner reflection, especially when we feel reactive.
Distinguishing between justice and vengeance—they may feel similar, but arise from different places.
Valuing growth over purity, recognizing that fallibility is universal, and transformation is possible.
Creating space for difficult conversations, where people can be accountable and human.

If humanity is to evolve beyond this recursive purge cycle, we must learn to see our enemies not only as threats, but as mirrors. Not to excuse harm—but to understand where it originates, in them and in us.

Conclusion

We are all being asked to grow up psychologically. The digital age has exposed us to ourselves in ways no previous generation has had to face. The question isn’t whether cancel culture is justified—it’s whether we are ready to look into the mirror it holds up and ask: What am I seeing in them that I refuse to see in myself?

Until we can answer that, the shadow will keep casting new scapegoats for the mob to burn.

Systemic Gaslighting: Let’s Finally Say It Out Loud

You Know It, I Know It: Systemic Gaslighting Is Real

Let’s stop pretending this isn’t happening.

You know the feeling. You go to the GP or A&E with something serious, something that’s quite literally threatening your health or your life—and you get fobbed off. Not just dismissed, but unacknowledged. It’s as if your suffering never even entered the room. I once went through a period where due to my dysphagia (difficulty swallowing foods), I couldn’t swallow anything—not even liquids—and three different doctors didn’t just ignore the urgency. They didn’t even acknowledge that not eating or drinking might be life-threatening.

That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s gaslighting at a structural level.

We don’t always use that word in this context, but maybe it’s time we did. Because the plausible deniability this system thrives on? It’s wearing thin. It’s implausible now. And yet the more glaring the denial becomes, the more we’re made to feel crazy for seeing it.

When the system fails you repeatedly, when it actively erodes your trust in your own perception, it doesn’t feel like negligence. It feels like being crushed. Slowly, deliberately. With no admission of force.

And if you’re neurodivergent? It’s a whole extra layer of hell. I’m autistic. I have social phobia. I don’t perform distress the way they expect. I don’t cry on cue. I don’t shout. I process. And because I process, I’m read as cold, or fine, or “not that bad.”

So I mask. I over-explain. I try to predict what they want from me, how to appear distressed in a way they’ll believe. But it always feels off. Like I’m being baited into dishonesty just to prove my honesty. And that makes them feel justified in writing me off.

This is what systemic gaslighting looks like:

They act like they care.
They position themselves as your advocate.
But every policy, every interaction, every flicker of body language says: “We’re not spending money on you if we can help it.”

I’ve warned others before. Told them: don’t be fooled by the performance of care. If you have the strength, call it out in the moment. Name the evasion. Ask for honesty. Demand respect. But know that they have tactics too. And they’re good at them.

So what keeps me going? Partly survival instinct. Partly the sheer disgust at how far we’ve allowed this to go. But mostly: the knowledge that it doesn’t have to be this way. That somewhere under the mountains of bureaucracy and gluttony and cruelty, there’s a version of the world where institutions actually listen. Where they respond with compassion, not scripts. Where people aren’t punished for needing help.

And until that world is real, I’ll keep writing. Even if no one hears it right now, the truth is here, in black and white.

You know it. I know it. Let’s stop pretending.