Greatly influenced by Nietzsche’s grappling with the irrational forces believed to reside just below the surface of civilized society, Carl Jung theorized that each of our individual psyches contains an unconscious reservoir of motives, desires, fears, beliefs, and other characteristics that we have suppressed from our conscious mind. This suppression may be a deliberate psychological defense mechanism and/or it may be the filtered result of societal taboos. Jung furthermore believed that insofar as certain shadow elements of one person’s unconsciousness are shared by others — that is, as part of a collective psyche — we then have a second operative dynamic of the collective unconsciousness, which Jung attempted to demarcate through his schema of archetypes. In the same way that an individual has a shadow, an entire culture or subculture (with shared experiences and, according to Jung, ancestry) can likewise have a collective shadow. Jung writes:

Since conscious thinking strives for clarity and demands unequivocal decisions, it has constantly to free itself from counter-arguments and contrary tendencies, with the result that especially incompatible contents either remain totally unconscious or are habitually and assiduously overlooked. The more this is so, the more the unconscious will build up its counterposition. [Jung, Carl. Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.14), Princeton University Press (1977), p. xvii]

In the multicultural society of contemporary America (i.e, a society that no longer has a relative racial homogeneity), white collective anxiety is a manifestation of the collective unconscious of whites as a racial subgroup. Ipso facto, individual collective consciousness of one white person, when concatenated with other white people from his society, associatively emerges as the collective unconscious of the white racial subgroup.

The collective unconscious of an increasingly dispossessed white America (the ‘demand’ in our quasi-economic equation) manifests itself in Culture and the Arts. Whether it is through movies, music, or literature, Jung’s unconscious shadow archetype expresses itself as the antithesis of whichever of the 16 personality types is the dominant, actualized, conscious zeitgeist of the day.

Over the course of the past several decades, Political Correctness has done a helluva job in stifling healthy individuation among whites. As a result, among whites in Western countries at the moment, two variants of a singular theme have dominated the outward, conscious expression of ‘race issues’ when it comes to matters of white racial consciousness and white identity. The first is the self-hating-white-liberal who feels guilty about his ‘privilege’ and his historical complicity in the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, eugenics, and the like, has a BLM sticker on his Volvo, and who celebrates the fact that whites are projected to by a minority in short order. The second is the meek, white cuckservative who now dominates mainstream ‘conservative’ outlets like The National Review and The Weekly Standard. They are increasingly hard to differentiate from the former, with the silent enforcement mechanisms (self-censorship) of Political Correctness restricting their public expressions.

In reaction to this weak and nihilistic display of suppressed racial identity (and non-existent pride in the accomplishments of one’s European ancestors), the Shadow surfaces vis-à-vis subconscious, metaphorical surrogates: We can see it in the Lord of the Rings movies, and in TV shows like Breaking Bad. We can see a more pointed, subconscious fear of mass-immigration-leading-to-total-racial-displacement manifesting itself in the demand for (and success of) shows such as The Walking Dead and the countless modern zombie movies of recent years. Such is the macro-level, societal form of individuation.

And so when I saw the trailer for the upcoming War For The Planet Of The Apes movie, I was immediately struck by the much more overt metaphors for racial conflict and migration, the apes being an obvious surrogate for lesser races (e.g., indigenous Africans, projected to overwhelm Europe in coming decades due to a population explosion in Africa, and Arab Muslims migrating en masse under the proxy of ‘war refugee’ status.)

Caesar is the leader of the apes, and Woody Harrelson plays a Colonel (somewhat akin to a Colonel Kurtz) with a strong species-centric bias towards humans. And he sees what appears to be the displacement of humans by apes a threat to the human species. As a result of his RaHoWa-like perspective, the Colonel is willing to adjust any previous moral reservations accordingly. “There are times when it is necessary to abandon our humanity,” he says in the trailer, “to save humanity.”

The Colonel, apparently operating from the Right, rationalizes his species-centric preferences:

‘I offered you peace… I showed you mercy,’ the ape tells him…

‘You talk about mercy? No matter what you say, eventually you’d replace us. That’s the law of nature,’ the Colonel fires back. ‘So what would you have done?’…

Similarly, when talking to some fellow apes, we see Caesar taking a species-centric view, albeit from the Left:

‘What did the humans promise you? No matter what you do, you will never be one of them,’ Caesar spits. ‘You are ape.’…

As violet clashes between the races unfold in the climax, the apes can be heard chanting: ‘We are the beginning! Apes together, strong!’

Now, when it comes to how the movie, in contemporary political terms, eventually situates this thematic element of human-vs-ape conflict, will War For The Planet Of The Apes default to standard, Hollywood, Liberal platitudes? We shall see when the movie comes out.

But, so far, the marketing effort for this movie (at least through this trailer) is not making liberal posturing apparent (though I strongly suspect Harrelson’s character will amount to a caricatured ‘angry white guy’.) In other words, the film’s trailer is not directly appealing to liberals. It seems to be leaving the door open to conservatives. Maybe that’s just to get as many people into the theater as possible, politics be damned. In any event, methinx the marketers know exactly what they’re doing here. When it comes to the cutting edge of psychological and sociological science on human behavior, that cutting edge is found on Madison Avenue… and in Hollywood. Furthermore, Trump’s surprise election has tuned-in the scribes and bankers of Hollywood to a groundswell of previously-untapped sentiments stirring within a long-ignored, white, middle class America.