Jung vs Borg: Finding the Deeply Human in a Posthuman Age

In Jung vs. Borg Glen Slater argues the industrial disruption of the outer world is being followed by a post-industrial disruption of the inner world, resulting in a different order of existential crisis, making the collapse of global ecosystems look like a warm-up act. The main event, beginning with the psycho-social fragmentation of the digital age, appears to be the collapse of our ecology of mind. As he explores critical precursors of this phenomenon and shows how this crisis will accelerate through the attempt to merge human and machine, Slater demonstrates how the psychology of the unconscious, born in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, can be deployed as a counter-measure. Facing this technologically-induced fragmentation of the human psyche presents a profound challenge. The way of the world is now mostly fused with the way of technology. A global technocracy supporting a mass migration into cyberspace transcends the power of any individual government or corporation. The technoscience at the core of this technocracy eyes a posthuman future, with the figure of the cyborg already visible on the horizon. A conspicuous image of our becoming, the cyborg essentializes the extrapolation of technocratic trends, making it a primary target for depth psychological analysis. Although the bedrock of being is about to be deeply shaken, there is terrain to traverse before we hardwire our minds to computers and become fully biomechanical. Much depends on our capacity to remain conscious of the effect each stage of innovation has on the psyche and on the social and cultural changes that will follow. It is right here we may juxtapose the exploitation of the inner world and the preservation of its integrity, which is set out in the psychology of C. G. Jung. It is in Jung's psychology we find the crux of a countercultural turn to the holistic character of the deeply human.