The Temptation and Deception of the Cult of Personality

The cult of personality is a phenomenon in which a person who claims knowledge establishes himself as the authority for what is known and calls others to follow him.

There is a direct relationship between the underdevelopment of independent individuality among the people of a society and the prevalence of this phenomenon. Both historically and today, our society has repeatedly been threatened by this destructive phenomenon, which undermines freedom and the independence of individual thought. The cult of personality is one of the greatest enemies of “being one person.”

Jung believed that life calls us towards the independence of personality and the development of our unique individuation, yet many of us flee from this call of life because, whether through fear or laziness, we are terrified by this summons to freedom and independence. A well-known saying attributed to Jung expresses it in these terms: “Do not compare, and do not measure. No one’s path resembles your unique path. To follow the paths of others is only temptation and deception. You must realise and walk in the outer world a path that begins within you.” Elsewhere he is said to have stated: “Whoever looks outward will dream, and whoever looks inward will awaken.”

Jung believed that there was no greater injury to the development of individual personality—individuation—than following others and the “cult of personality.” Jung’s students knew how much he disliked their calling themselves Jungians, psychologists who followed Jung’s thought. Once, when asked about people who described themselves as “Jungian” in following him, he smiled and gave only this brief response: “Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian.”

James Hillman, one of Jung’s most distinguished intellectual descendants and one of the founders of archetypal psychotherapy, referred beautifully to one of Jung’s most fundamental ideas in a lecture given around eight years ago, entitled “The Red Book: Jung and Profoundly Personal,” delivered in honour of Carl Jung on the anniversary of the publication of the book. Hillman points to Jung’s conviction that human beings should never give themselves excessive credit for what they know. In memorable words, he says, in effect:
We are “lived” by powers that we pretend to understand—a reference to Jung’s view that we do not understand and possess the ancient forces that shape ideas and then create our beliefs; rather, when we enter their archetypal field, they possess us and live through us. Everything Jung tried throughout his life to write and clarify was only an effort to pretend that he understood, an effort to comprehend these forces. We are always struggling against the many limitations of mind and language in attempting to understand the powers that live us. The “I” or “self” is only a fiction I have never encountered anywhere; only ideas exist. To understand this transforms our conception of what is taking place in life. We are lived by powers that we pretend to understand.

Hillman is right, because upon reaching this understanding we realise that “we do not have beliefs; they have us,” and “we do not possess ideas; we are possessed by them.” If each of us steps onto the path of the love of wisdom—philo-sophia—we enter, on our journey, the perennial land of ideas that we did not create, ideas far older than ourselves. We enter their timeless domain and become their voice, but we will leave while they remain. Understanding this truth is liberating for any philosopher because it prevents us from giving ourselves too much credit for our beliefs and what we know. We understand that we are only travellers through the territories of ideas, not rulers of those lands. It is a humility that leads us, instead of calling people to ourselves, to call them towards these ideas and towards thinking independently about them.

This path neither began with us nor ends with us. Calling human beings to “be one person” means precisely this: be yourself, and do not remain forever in someone else’s house. Listen and think, but do not stop forever at any person or any idea. Beware of a philosophy or a body of thought that asks you to become its follower; and if you encounter someone who claims knowledge and asks you to follow him—or even remains approvingly silent about your becoming his follower—run in the opposite direction. Do not sell your individuality to any cult of personality, for it is a wholly ruinous transaction and its price is the loss of your own Self.

Aydin Areta