According to the Washington Post, the upcoming US elections are totally stressing people out.
The American Psychological Association has even issued guidelines for dealing with election-related stress. These include avoiding news about politics, avoiding political conversations, getting informed about political candidates, and then voting "with pride" so as to feel included in the political process.
Easy, right?
Of course, WaPo and the APA both fail to mention that the everyday lives of most Americans are entirely unsustainable. And that, in many respects, our society is totally falling apart for reasons that most people have little or no control over at this time.
From my perspective, stressing out over the presidential race makes very little sense.
Clinton is a mobster and enthusiastic proponent of friendly fascism. Trump is a creepy egomaniac who is being used as a magician's prop to distract our electorate from the fact that Clinton is a mobster. The rigged contest between the two is no cause for alarm. It is just business as usual. But the hyperinflation of this contest's salience in our societal mind opens up a typically-closed space in average people's thinking - the space to consider big things, like where we are, how we got here, and what future might now come into being as a result of this path that we are on.
"And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly"
-Clinton campaign strategist email to John Podesta as published by wikileaks-
How will people use this new space opening up in our societal mind?
In general, new equals change equals people getting mad and looking for scapegoats. The masters of media theater, having anticipated (and largely crafted) this current state of affairs, are in the process of attempting to channel the negative sentiments boiling to the surface of our shared thinking into somewhat run-of-the-mill war mongering.
This year, however, there are new influences which have started to act upon our societal mind. Weird influences. So, while a big conflict between nation-states will probably follow the beating of war drums in media and government, far less banal events may begin transpiring as well.
There are signs that the cracks in our shared story of the world have widened into major gaps.
As this story delineates the boundary that separates the collective unconscious from our shared awareness of what is and is not real, the appearance of such gaps is significant. It means that unconscious material can more easily spill out, uncontrolled, into everyday experiences. And because people in our society typically lack the epistemological ground on which it is necessary to stand in order to make sense of this unconscious material, they will interpret these non-ordinary experiences according to whatever mythologies about the world and our place in it are embedded in their psyches.
As unconscious material spills into the everyday lives of tech billionaires, for example, they may interpret this as glitches in reality's programming, and go so far as to launch well-funded secret projects designed to 'save' humanity by breaking us out of the 'matrix'. Meanwhile, average Americans may see demons in this unconscious material, or use hospital quarantines to control anomalous phenomena presenting itself as contagious hallucinations.
Salient events like a national election are used to channel our natural stress-responses into activities that are useful to the control regime.
Emotionally threatening information is shunted away from most people's conscious awareness to be processed unconsciously by automated psychological procedures. Systemic problems are emotionally threatening to those who have internalized inaccurate stories about the world and their place in it. As systemic problems (related to health, money, security, human relationships, environmental stability, etc.) converge, and increasingly overwhelm our societal capacity to deal with them, an increasing volume of emotionally threatening information is poured into our psyches for unconscious processing.
Which totally stresses people out, because it uses up the psychological resources necessary for processing stuff like changing interpersonal relationships and everyday traumas. And because it is currently taboo to talk about systemic problems directly, most people remain consciously unaware of the cause of this stress. Consequently, systemic problems remain impossible to address in our everyday lives, but our unconscious resources are also unavailable to process the personal stresses that naturally come along with existing, and so can no longer be relied upon to adequately process the unconscious dimensions of our individualized problems.
This is useful to our psychosocial control regime insofar as there is profit to be taken from illness and confusion. But it will become problematic when the growing volume of inadequately processed unconscious material crosses an arguably nascent threshold, and makes too many people's everyday lives into unintelligible messes. So in order to keep our societal mind at this threshold but not beyond it, there will probably be an escalation of the activities used by our control regime to manipulate public perception and our thinking in general.
Fortunately, while the big stuff is out of our hands, each of us is perfectly capable of treating the parade of increasingly weird problems beginning to unfold throughout our society as a chance to make the stories we hold true about the world and our place in it explicit, as well as to get better at honestly talking these stories over with each other. Beyond this, as the ghosts that haunt our collective unconscious are increasingly pushed out into the open, we also have the rare opportunity to acquaint ourselves with dimensions of experience that are typically hidden from view, and perhaps make some peace with them.