‘If Conditions Become Better, the People Become Worse’: A reply to Andrew Samuels's question

In Volume 37, Number 2 of the journal, published in April 1992, Andrew Samuels noted puzzlement regarding Jung's statement ‘if conditions become better, the people become worse’. Jung seems to be saying that when government responds to ‘necessity’ on the behalf of the governed it reduces their self-sufficiency and pushes them into dependency, i.e. it tampers with nature. This means to Jung a vital catalyst for individuation is excised from the lives of the people. That this is clearly a possibility cannot be denied, as we now see in eastern European nations struggling to emerge from the effects of totalitarianism. Even so, it seems to me that Jung's position was less than moderate on this point and that it failed to consider the elusive notion of social justice. This belief strongly resembles current day protestations of a profoundly politically conservative (in the American sense) ideological sense that ignores the vicious shadow created by wholesale de-regulation and free market economies (a form of ‘nature’); namely, the fact that human ambition and greed inevitably emerge in attempts to ‘influence nature’ by price fixing, insider trading, and exploitation of labour to name a few examples. How could Jung have ignored all this? Jung's statement was in a letter written in 1939 kindly provided by John Allan of Vancouver, BC, published in that same volume of the Journal. I'd like to offer a possible understanding or interpretation of that statement that rests upon having read through Jung's works chronologically several times and thereby developing a sense of the evolution of some central issues in Jung's personality and in his politics. His writings, both autobiographical and theoretical, provide a fascinating view into his personal and political development and help to clarify how he could be drawn into the