Thank you, Jon! A reminder and empowerment against the doubts that a lone ranger sometimes struggles with surrounded by and swimming in a sea of unconscious gullible co-beings who try to drag one into the “group” or otherwise consider one insane.

Besides, exaltation of the individual can be just as co-opted as exaltation of the collective. Power works with what it has.

If Ayn Rand were alive today, I wonder what she’d made of the whole Corona business. I have no reason to think that she was such an individualist, such a creative, rational, individual thinker, that she would reject the Germ Theory of Disease. Very, very few of us “get it” – that the “germ” is not our enemy, but merely a marker of something deeper happening within each of us. I say she’d be the first in line for The Shot.

Now, about collectivism VS individualism. In tribal (paleo or early neolithic) societies, people do indeed think alike and want the same things.

“One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is ‘polarization.’ Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of ‘argument from intimidation’: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what? . . .”

—Ayn Rand

For sake of clarity, Jung refers to the tapeworm (in his critique of Ulysses) as something that can reproduce other tapeworms ‘in inexhaustible qualities’, and does not discuss their being cut up etc (my mistake, I was referring from memory).

Also, my own mention of the ‘reptilian variety’ is only utilized to draw attention to the cold-blooded aspect of such creatures: it goes without saying that they do not actually belong to the class of reptiles.