The End of Pretending
Jung believed that when the myths we rely on collapse, the unconscious floods in, shaping what must emerge next.
This is not a personal failure or a psychological defect. It’s a collective threshold.
The stories that once organized meaning—progress, stability, innocence, inevitability—no longer align with lived experience. When those stories fail, people don’t lose imagination. They lose the ability to pretend.
What follows is not chaos. It’s emergence.
Sociology calls this anomie: the breakdown of shared norms.
Political theory calls it a legitimation crisis: when institutions lose moral authority.
Anthropology calls it liminality: a threshold state between orders.
Systems theory describes a phase transition: instability that precedes reorganization.
Different disciplines, same moment.
When existing frameworks can’t metabolize reality, unconscious forces push through. New symbols surface. New values begin to form. Not because they are chosen, but because they are necessary.
This is why imagination intensifies now. Not escapist imagination, but symbolic imagination—the capacity to generate meaning when old structures no longer hold.
Mutual aid emerges when authority fails.
Generative systems arise when extractive ones exhaust themselves.
Coherence becomes more compelling than control.
Clarity matters more than certainty.
Courage replaces compliance.
Social psychology refers to this process as sensemaking: the human drive to restore meaning when shared narratives fracture. But sensemaking doesn’t begin with answers. It begins with honesty about what no longer works—and with noticing the unconscious shaping what comes next.
The end of pretending is not nihilism.
It is the end of inherited explanations that no longer fit.
What comes next will not arrive fully formed. It will emerge through experimentation, conflict, feedback, and repair. That is how systems adapt. That is how cultures change.
The collapse of myth is not the end of meaning.
It is the condition for something new to take shape.