Navigating the New Frontiers of Postmodernity: Reimagining Cultural Sustainability

Steiner explained that … “from the earliest times, a distinction was made between ‘sciences of what is’ and ‘sciences of what should be’. Natural Science deals with what is; Ethics, of what should be. We chose to start our reflection by mentioning these two concepts: Science and Ethics. This is because we found that all areas of science continue to advance in what W. Dilthey (1921) called Natürwissenschaften and Geistwissenschaften, the already classic notions of Sciences of Nature and Sciences of the Spirit; being so because the world continues in a condition that generates so much unequal. If the sciences continue to develop, then where is the problem? The evidence points to ethical issues [1-3].

For C. G. Jung’s psychology “the great problem of humanity is the problem of evil. We can no longer escape this question. With all the things that are coming up in the world and all that coming from the world wars, we can’t help but consider this topic. In Christian Theology, but not in its practice, there is a tendency to deny evil, that is, privatio boni, that is, a Christian optimism that lends the believer a great elan, which prevents him from considering the problem of evil more fully. for real. The question of evil is the problem of the shadow or to employ euphemisms and excuse it with idealisms. If you look at the history of Christianity, how many millions of people have died because of this idealism? Merlin (symbolism), for being the son of the devil, but having a very pious Christian woman as his mother, unites in himself”. (Von Franz, M.L.; 2018) [4].

Jung wrote that “our tendency is to evade an ethical decision”, but if we reach deep self-knowledge…we are faced with collisions of duties, which cannot be decided by any paragraph, neither the Decalogue nor other authorities. In fact, it is only from here that ethical decisions begin, as the simple fulfillment of a coded ‘you must’ is far from being an ethical decision; it is simply an act of obedience, and in certain cases, even a comfortable way out, which with ethics is only related in a negative way... for me, it became clear that, contrary to general understanding, unconsciousness does not represent an excuse, but it is very another crime, in the proper sense of the word. (1993, p. 331) … “only the act-creating force, which represents the whole person, can make the final decision (with respect to the conflict of duties) (1993, p. 9.422) [6-8].

In the introduction to his book The Method (2012, vol.6, p. 15), Edgar Morin wrote: “this work implies a chain that leads us to rethink and revisit the good, the possible and the necessary, that is, ethics itself... Ethics cannot escape the problems of complexity. This forces us to think about the relationship between knowledge and ethics, science and ethics, politics, and ethics. Our culture is not prepared to deal with or face these problems in the dimension, radicality and complexity that characterize them. Its crisis produces a gestation, and this gestation produces the ferments and the outlines of a regenerating thought. It is often sought to distinguish ethics and morals. Let us use ‘ethics to designate a supra- or meta-individual point of view and ‘moral’ to place ourselves at the level of individuals’ decision and action. But individual morals implicitly or explicitly depend on ethics.” In the same book cited above, Morin explained that “The crisis of the foundations of ethics is situated in a general crisis of the foundations of certainty; crisis of the foundations of philosophical knowledge, crisis of the foundations of scientific knowledge (2012, p.27) [9,10].

We chose to discuss certain philosophical, ethical, scientific, and anthropological foundations before entering the theme of sustainability and the theme of the cultural unconscious and cultural complexes, because although we know from Morin and others that we are dealing with the “problems of complexity” where we will use the concept of One Multiple, which means a paradox, that is, there is a human unity and a human diversity. There is unity in human diversity and diversity in human unity. (2012, vol.5, p.65) [11].

However, as a psychologist representing complex psychology, we learned from Jung that despite everything we discussed and will discuss, that “only the individual is a bearer of conscience”, even when we admit that sustainable development, with all that this concept encompasses, can favor the expansion of individual and collective consciences. The archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung, the psychoanalysis of Freud, as well as the post-Jungian theory of cultural complexes intend to work with the roots of modern society, however, only the individual with his conscience and will can make moral choices. Depth psychology carries a hermeneutic power, without which we would not be able to fully discuss the concept of cultural sustainability, and the possibility of revealing part of its unconscious structure [12].

Another aspect in interesting point about ethics raised by Morin (2007) was the following reflection: “to be a subject is to associate selfishness and altruism. Every look at ethics must recognize the vital aspect of egocentrism as well as the fundamental potentiality of the development of altruism. Every look at ethics must consider that its demand is lived subjectively. […] every look at ethics must realize that the moral act is an individual act of reconnection; reconnection with another, reconnection with a community, reconnection with a society and, at the limit, reconnection with the human species. Thus, there is an individual source of ethics, in the principle of inclusion, which inscribes the individual in the community (2007, vol.6 p.21-22) [13-16].

We want to call the reader’s attention to the fact that within this article we intend to place man as a protagonist in sustainability processes; the destinies of forms of culture, and types of society, community, etc., pass through their choices. Man is the only species that chooses what he wants to be. However, in the historical period we are living in, post-modernity, practically all traditional frontiers have been made more flexible, by the new crises, but also by the new achievements of science and technology; spatial, temporal, affective, sexual, economic, ecological, social, religious, etc. This is what possibly generated the crisis of the foundations of certainty [17].

Faced with this situation, Souza Santos (2000, p.58), dared, noting that most solutions are utopian or unrealistic, wrote: “We need, therefore, an alternative thinking of alternatives. I have been proposing an epistemology that, unlike modern epistemology – whose trajectory is from a point of ignorance, which I call chaos, to a point of knowledge, which I call order. (Knowledge-as-regulation) – points to another epistemology for which the point of ignorance is colonialism and the point of knowing is knowledge-as-emancipation solidarity…

From knowledge-as-regulation to knowledge-as-emancipation, the transit is not only epistemological, but also a transit betweenknowledge and action (1995, p.25) [18-20]. In this paragraph by Souza Santos, we can see the connection between science and ethics that we will put here as the main argument of our work. Science is a creation of man, a product of his culture; we do not want to witness in the future of science, the same results found in the character Frankenstein described in a brilliant way by Mary Shelley.

Cassirer wrote that: “[…] we see the conflicting forces in perpetual struggle. Scientific thought contradicts and suppresses mythical thought (1977 p.119) [21,22]. However, in Jung, with complex psychology, in Morin with the theory of complexity and its methodology and for Souza Santos with the “Epistemologies of the South”, there is an opening for an “Ecology of Knowledge”.

Returning to Cassirer as an eminent interpreter of culture: “[…] we need to make a sharp distinction between a material and a formal point of view. Human culture is undoubtedly divided into various activities that follow different lines and pursue different goals. If we are content to contemplate their results – creations of myth, religious rites, or creeds, works of art, scientific theories – it will seem impossible to reduce them to a common denominator. But a philosophical synthesis means something different. We are not looking for a unit of effects, but a unit of creative process. If the term ‘humanity’ has any meaning, it means that, despite all the differences and oppositions existing between its various forms, they all cooperate towards a common end (1977, p. 119).

As we have already discussed in another article of ours, Jung explained that “by fantasy he meant two different things: the phantom and imaginative activity. He explained that by fantasy as a ghost, he understood a complex of representations that is distinguished from other complexes of representations in that it does not correspond externally to a real situation. Although fantasy may have its origin in memories of experiences that occurred, its content does not correspond to any external reality, but is essentially the flow of the creative activity of the spirit, an activation or product of the combination of psychic elements, endowed with energy. Insofar as psychic energy can be subject to voluntary direction, so too can fantasy be produced consciously and voluntarily, either as a whole or at least in part” (1991, p. 107) [23-25]. […] Jung wrote that: “imagination is the reproductive or creative activity of the spirit in general, without being a special faculty, since it is reflected in all the basic forms of psychic life: thinking, feeling, sensualizing, and intuiting. Fantasy as a mere direct expression of psychic activity, of psychic energy that is only given to consciousness in the form of images or content [...]

These considerations were necessary for the reader interested in cultural sustainability, but who do not have a background in psychology. The notion of cultural sustainability depends on an interdisciplinary approach, dedicated to increasing the meaning of culture, as well as considering the importance of its tangible and intangible characteristics, in the local, regional, and global fields of sustainable development [26].

On this topic, Agnes Heller suggested as a hypothesis: “the constant – or, at least, constantly emerging – modern illness of meaning deficiency, which threatens to dissolve the sociopolitical order, can be better neutralized if rights and duties remain in balance or are combined. […] the more rights surpass duties, the less a moral power will be recognized; the more duties outweigh rights, the less the constitution will be recognized as a moral power. […] I think that Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right, suggested the best model, albeit idealized, of modern moral powers, as well as the dynamics between them. The three moral powers are: the family, civil society, and the State (nation); they sustain corporate and political communal moral powers. Perhaps I should have mentioned another moral power: the law itself. There are three types of rights (Recht): statutory (legal) law, moral rights (there are three of them: the right to the pursuit of happiness, the right to personality development, and the right to our own conception of the good) and, finally, the right to law as it is embodied by the state, that is, in the constitution. (1999, p. 23) [27,28].

Reflecting on the issue of globalization, the same author explained that currently, “cultural tradition makes a difference, and multiculturalism has drawn attention to this difference. Local, ethnic, and religious identities preserve and maintain their moral power due to the density of these cultural beliefs and practices with which men and women invest these powers daily. The broader the identity, the less dense such cultures become, at least in a multicultural formation. Hence, more universal cultures can help to cement more general moral powers. There are currently two remaining universal cultures: high culture and mass culture. The former confers meaning and provides common references and interpretations for people whose cultural background is entirely different; to that extent, it deepens mutual understanding. The second (the mass culture conveyed by the media) provides entertainment and nullifies the difference by offering the same menu everywhere. Between these two universal cultures, the life of difference is flourishing or dying, depending on the place and our perception of the future. […] In modern liberal democracies, both liberalism and democracy jointly determine the forming factors of moral powers, and so they are moral powers in themselves. […] if one of these moral powers becomes formal and the other substantive, all moral powers will be unbalanced, and modernity may be destroyed. […] at the beginning of our century in Europe, liberalism became substantive while democracy became formal. This was an important condition for the emergence of totalitarianism. […] apparently especially in the US, there is a tendency towards the formalization of liberalism and the materialization of democracy. The result is a growing tolerance for violence (1999, p.31) [29].

Marcos Callia (2006) explained that “studying prehistory is like a rebirth: the imaginary rebirth of origins. Let’s look for the origins as inspiration, the arche of the Greeks, the starting point of the rational process, a primordial element that transcends time and temporality, a reference to the principles of the original of everything, beginning between an indeterminate state and a beginning of organization (2006, p.8) [30].

This indeterminate state and a beginning of organization is what we are seeing again in Brazil and in the Globalized World. Jung for about fifty years studied the psychological symbolism of Alchemy. Perhaps this work should be considered his Magnum opus; the beginning of alchemy operations, explained Edinger (2006), had the first procedure, which was to find the Prima Materia. From there, the alchemical process could begin.

According to Edinger (2006): “The Prima Matter is undifferentiated, without borders, limits, or defined form. This corresponds to a certain experience of the unconscious that exposes the ego to the infinite, the apeiron. The place of matter is prior to the logos creator of the world, where we have to deal with what is to come, it precedes the ‘formations’ so it is still deformed and without beauty, therefore unpleasant, it is despised and rejected” (2006, p. 10) [31,32].

Does the reader perceive the similarity with our current world where new borders, limits and forms are so difficult to visualize? This coincides with the research carried out by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925 - 2017) on “The Malaise of Postmodernity” and “Liquid Modernity”, the title of some of his works. Liquidity can be seen in the symbolism of water or the ocean, where borders cannot be visualized. For Bauman (1925) postmodern human relationships also suffer from this “lack of limits”, from this “deterritorialization”; It’s “liquid love”. For Jung, everything new starts with “chaos” (prima- matter or confused mass). But it is possible for man to bring new forms of order, new forms of organization. Understanding the role of cultural sustainability – and other forms of sustainability – will help in this process.

For Jung (1948): “Archetypes are, by definition, eternal factors that order psychic elements forming certain images (to be designated as archetypal), but in a way that can only be recognized by the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously and are supposed to form the structural dominants of the psyche in general […]. As a priori conditions, the archetypes represent the psychic special case of the “pattern of behavior” familiar to the biologist and which lends to all living beings their specific type. Just as the manifestations of this biological plan can change during development, so can those of the archetype. Empirically, however, the archetype never emerged within the life span of organic life. He enters the scene with his life (1948, p. 374). We could not discuss the question of origins without first defining the concept of archetype, as we have just done above; Archaeologist Steve Mithen (2003), in his work The Prehistory of the Mind, explained the need, to understand the psyche, to unite two new scientific areas: “cognitive archeology” and “evolutionary psychology”, or that is, trying to reconstruct archaeologically how our ancestors thought, imagined, and felt. The first theories about the origin of American man are two: the first puts them through the Bering Strait, approximately 14,000 years ago from Europe, and the second proposed by the anthropologist Anna Roosevelt (1991), that about 40,000 years ago, would have come from Africa or Oceania.

In ethnography, there are examples of indigenous societies in which the shaman describes to the potters the drawings he saw in his trance (Ilius, 1988) […] another important characteristic of ceremonial ceramics is its humanization, with the application of faces on the bulge of vases or the transfiguration of the object’s body into a human body, as is the case of funerary urns (2006, p.40). Gomes wrote that: “The actuality of Santarém in the State of Pará is located at the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers. […] The vegetation comprises savannas, dense forests, igapó forests, grasslands, and anthropogenic secondary forests, a product of continuous management since pre-colonial times. These ecological conditions provide a wide range of resources that were possibly used in the livelihood strategies of various groups that developed in the Santarém region.” […] this area has been occupied since the Paleo-Indian […] However, Santarém is best known for its late pre-colonial culture (1000-1500).

According to Schoan (2006), from the 5th century onwards, a lifestyle emerged on the island of Marajó that would mark the landscape of the island and the imagination of its inhabitants. The “Marajoara culture, as it became known from the first research carried out in the 19th century, was characterized by a set of cultural practices that spread and dominated the social, political, and economic scene of the island until the dawn of the 14th century. […] the island’s ecology is marked by two opposing seasons: the high and the dry. […] during the flood it is possible to sail all over the island, as all the water courses are connected. The rivers are all tidal, rising and falling twice a day. The field area becomes a large plate with raised edges, retaining the water that has nowhere to run. […] In June the rains decrease in frequency and intensity and the waters begin to subside […] in July the first effects of the dry season begin to be felt […] the terrestrial animals once again spread across the land, which the sun torrid from the equator helps to dry out. (2006, p.36) […] “For 2000 years these populations explored the different ecosystems of the island, in a sedentary or semi-sedentary way. They made resistant ceramics, with abundant clay, but they did not dare much in decoration.[…] the long period of coexistence with the island’s ecology led to an understanding of the cycles of water and aquatic fauna, so that, around the year 400, the island populations consciously began to manipulate the ecology in their favor, building dams, digging lakes to retain water and fish at the end of the rainy season, so as to guarantee food and water for the dry months.

.[…] this enabled population growth and a growing complexity of social relations and cultural practices. […] These populations, around 700 or 800, produced extremely elaborate ceremonial and funerary ceramics. Its usefulness resided precisely in its symbolic content, in its ability to materialize cosmologies and mythologies, making the ideas and concepts shared by the group permanent and visible […] these forms […] […] had their origin in dream states or in hallucinogenic trance (2006, p. 38-3). […] Since the 19th century, the Santarém region has attracted the attention of researchers and naturalists interested in documenting not only the richness and diversity of environmental resources, but also the material remains of the ancient indigenous people who occupied this area. […] The botanist Barbosa Rodrigues (1875), the geologist Hortt (1885) […] a century later pointed to the same site as the oldest pottery site in the Americas, dating back to around 7000 years (Roosevelt apud Gomes, 2006)., p. 51).

Curt Nimuendaju located 65 archaeological sites on the right bank of the Tapajós, in Lago Grande de Vila França, and in Alter do Chão […] which makes Lima (1928), Metraux (1930), Nordenskiöld (1930), recognize Santarém as a true Amazonian civilization.[…] Santarém stands out for its very naturalistic, three-dimensional compositions of human beings, animals, anthropomorphized figures, as well as mythical beings, still present today in the Amerindian cosmologies of current groups. […] Influenced by the anthropology classic Primitive Art, by Franz Boas (1925).

Frederico Barata (1950;1951; 1953a; 1953b;1954) produced several articles on the stylistic characteristics of Santarém ceramics, based on studies of formal elements. In addition to identifying incised geometric patterns, which represent the stylization of the frog, snake, owl, tortoise, and jaguar motif, Barata carried out a comparative study of the zoomorphic elements present in the vase of caryatids, recognizing, based on the vulture, rei, a stylization process that transformed zoomorphic representations into anthropomorphic ones. […] the identification of these allowed the development of later iconographic studies, based on ethnographic analogies with current indigenous societies (2001; 2005b). On the ideological level, Roosevelt apud Gomes (1987). Historical references to mummies and idols in special structures were considered evidence of social hierarchy, with the existence of cults of deified ancestors, typical of complex societies.

According to Godinho (1996) and Martins (1998) apud Mesquita (2006) “Serra da Mesa is a region in the north of the State of Goiás, where an archaeological site was found in a gigantic outcrop of limestone rocks with ancestral inscriptions on the banks of the Tocantinzinho River, called Sítio Abrigo Pedra Talhada, GO-Ni 176, in the municipality of Niquelândia. Pedra Talhada is full of prehistoric cave paintings, and ninety other archaeological sites have been found in the Serra da Mesa region. Having been identified in 1995, all the paintings and archaeological sites were flooded in 1996 by Furnas Centrais Elétricas for the construction of the Serra da Mesa Hydroelectric Power Plant, located 250 kilometers from Brasília, 22 degrees and 7 min. As a project of only economic and developmental concern, it failed to comply with the Federal Constitution and an entire environmental and indigenist protection legislation conquered since the 1980s, as well as international agreements, such as agenda 21, which prioritize environmental quality and the quality of life. life of the local population” Taut (1996) apud Mesquita (2006, p. 82). Mesquita explained that “this grandiose engineering work, in the final stage of its construction, did not even have the license granted by the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama). According to the Iparj Institute (1995). […] the flooded area affected the reserve of the Avá- Canoeiro indigenous population and about 1200 families of farmers residing in the region. […] several other hydroelectric plants are being built and designed for the Tocantins River. The last one closed the floodgates for the flood was the Peixe Angical Hydroelectric Power Plant, on January 14, 2006, several archaeological sites, petroglyphs, and precious records of ancestral memory were and are being flooded. […] (2006 p. 82-83) And in a poetic, symbolic way, she explained that being with Mnemosyne “is to commune with the past to envision a future full of images and stories with archetypal qualities, which allow us to weave associations in communion with nature, with life, with the heart and with the soul. Mnemosyne is, above all, archaic generatrix” (2006, p.84).

Due to the need to make the main historical and cultural elements of Brazil intelligible, we will sketch the historical period since the foundation of Brazil in 1500, Darcy Ribeiro (2006), in his work “Brasilian People”, worked with the concept of transfiguration ethnic, which means the process through which peoples arise, transform, or die. Ribeiro wrote that he wanted his book to “want to be a participant, aspire to influence people, aspire to help Brazil find itself”. (2006, p. 17) […] “the confluence of so many and so varied formative matrices could have resulted in a multiethnic society, torn apart by the opposition of differentiated and immiscible components; just the opposite happened.” […] He explained that “this basic ethnic unity does not mean, however, any uniformity, even because three diversifying forces acted on it: ecological, economic and immigration”. (2006, p. 21) […] “Through these ways, several rustic ways of being of Brazilians were historically shaped, which allows us to distinguish them, today, as sertanejos of the Northeast, caboclos of the Amazon, creoles of the coast, caipiras of the Southeast and Center of the country, gauchos from the southern campaigns, as well as Italian Brazilians, German Brazilians, Japanese Brazilians, etc. All of them are much more marked by what they have in common as Brazilians, than by differences due to regional or functional adaptations or miscegenation and acculturation that lend their own physiognomy to one or another portion of the population” (2006, p.21). […] “More than a simple ethnicity, however, Brazil is a national ethnicity, a nation people settled in their own territory and framed within the same State to live their destiny there, unlike Spain, in Europe, or the Guatemala, in America, for example, which are multi-ethnic societies governed by States and, for this very reason, torn apart by interethnic conflicts, Brazilians are integrated into a single national ethnicity, thus constituting a single people incorporated in a unified nation, in a united ethnic State. . The only exception is the multiple micro-tribal ethnicities, so imponderable that their existence does not affect the national destiny.

However, Darcy continued, “underlying the Brazilian cultural uniformity, there is a deep social distance, generated by the type of stratification that the process of national formation produced. The class antagonism that corresponds to all social stratification is exacerbated here, to oppose a very narrow privileged stratum to the bulk of the population, making social distances more insurmountable than racial differences… The nation people do not arise in Brazil from the evolution of previous forms of sociability, in which human groups are structured in opposite classes, but are combined to meet their needs for survival and progress. Rather, it arises from the concentration of a slave labor force, recruited to serve the mercantile purposes alien to it, through such violent processes of ordination and repression that they constituted, in fact, a continuous genocide and a relentless ethnocide. …In these, the social distance between the dominant and subordinate classes is exacerbated, and between the latter and the oppressed, aggravating the oppositions to accumulate, under the ethnic- cultural uniformity and national unity, dissociative tensions of a traumatic nature. As a result, the ruling elites, first Lusitanians, then Luso-Brazilians and, after all, Brazilians, have always lived and still live in the panic terror of the rise of the oppressed classes. A good expression of this fear of panic is the repressive brutality against any insurgency and the authoritarian predisposition of the central power, which does not admit any alteration of the current order.

… On this level, class relations become so insurmountable that they obliterate all properly human communication between the mass of the people and the privileged minority, who see and ignore it, treat, and mistreat it, exploit, and deplore it, as if it were a natural behavior… it is not unthinkable that social reorganization should be carried out without social upheaval, through democratic reformism. But it is highly unlikely in this country where a few thousand large landowners can monopolize most of its territory, forcing millions of workers to urbanize to live the famished life of the favelas” (2006, p. 20-26).

By way of introduction, we need to briefly bring some basic definitions about the psychology of the unconscious. Personal unconscious: Freudian point of view - according to which the contents of the unconscious are reduced to infantile tendencies repressed due to the incompatibility of their character. Repression is a process that begins in early childhood under the moral influence of the environment, lasting throughout life. Through analysis, repressions are abolished, and repressed desires made conscious (1991, p.117). Collective unconscious - the notion of collective unconscious- was established on its historical view, not just the history of the individual, but in the history which circularly encompasses the evolution of the brain and the culture. This unconscious buried in the structure of the brain, and which reveals its living presence, only in creative fantasy is the suprapersonal unconscious. It lives in the creative individual, manifests in the artist’s vision, in the thinker’s inspiration, in the religious experience. The suprapersonal unconscious, as a generalized brain structure, is an ‘omnipresent, ‘omniscient’ spirit that pervades everything, knows the human being as he is at this very moment, knows it as a myth. The relationship with the suprapersonal unconscious or collective unconscious, and an expansion of the human being beyond himself, in a death of his personal being, is a rebirth to another dimension, according to the ancient mysteries. Therefore, without the sacrifice of man as he is today, man as he has always been (always will be) cannot be reached. It is certainly the artist who knows the most about this sacrifice of the personal human being (1993, p.19). Cultural Unconscious – Henderson (1984) defined “The cultural unconscious, in the sense I use it, is an area of historical memory that rests between the collective unconscious and the manifest pattern of culture. This may include both conscious and unconscious modalities, but it has some sort of identity arising from the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which helps in the formation of myth and ritual and further promotes the developmental process of individuals (1984, p. 103). The Affective Tone Complex - The essential basis of our personality is affectivity.

Thinking and acting are mere symptoms of affectivity. (1981, p.31). Today we can take it for granted that complexes are partial dissociated aspects of the psyche. The etiology of its origin is often a so-called trauma, an emotional shock, or the like, which tore a piece of the psyche out. One of the most frequent causes is, in fact, a moral conflict whose ultimate reason lies in the apparent impossibility of adhering to the totality of human nature. This impossibility presupposes an immediate dissociation, whether the ego-consciousness knows it or not. As a rule, there is a pronounced awareness of the complexes, and this naturally gives them even greater freedom. […] the most ‘primitive’ and most naive man did not ‘psychologize’ the disturbing complexes but considered them as entities per se of their own, that is, as demons (1991, p. 32-33).

Cultural Complexes - Singer & Kimbles (2004) explained that the theory of complexes was their first contribution to the young science of psychoanalysis. It is still a vital part of how Jungians understand and formulate individuals’ internal and external experience. Although Jung included the cultural level in his scheme of the psyche, his theory of complexes had not been systematically applied to the life of groups. […] Applying Jung’s theory of complexes to the cultural level of the psyche and to group life – and how group life exists within the psyche of the individual – is the new addition that we propose to build. […] what we have called “the cultural complex”.

The real name of this notion is a synthesis of two powerful words: “cultural” and “complex”. […] cultural complexes can be thought of as rising from the cultural unconscious, with them interacting with both the archetypal and the personal domains and the wider external arena of schools, communities, media and all other forms of cultural and group life. In this way, cultural complexes can be thought of as forming the essential components of an internal sociology. […] the notion of cultural complex is not the same thing as cultural identity or national character. […] cultural complex is often built on centuries of repetitive traumatic experience. […] intense collective emotion is the official stamp of an activation of a cultural complex whose root is an archetypal pattern.

We ask: where in Brazil are the centuries of traumatic experience? Our starting point was to reflect on the main topics to think about the expression of violence within the historical context.

Slavery

As the foundations of his reflections, Galtung (1995) conceptualized violence in a very broad way: “Violence happens whenever people are influenced in such a way that their current somatic and spiritual realization are smaller than their potential realization” (Galtung apud Han, 2017, p.160). Brazil had 350 years of slavery; we would dare to think that it was the greatest shame and the greatest violence to which the Brazilian people were subjected in its 500 years of construction.

According to Han (2017) “…Violence is the fissure that does not admit any intermediation, reconciliation. While power makes hierarchical relationships a continuum, violence causes cracks andruptures. The hiatus as a constant mark of the structure of violence is distinguished from the hierarchy, which is constitutive for power. Hierarchy is a distinction, an unevenness within a continuum, which in contrast to the gap creates relationship and connection. Power is always organized as an articulation of power. On the contrary, the articulation of violence is always a contradiction, as violence promotes disarticulation. What characterizes power are articulations and dispositions; rupture and crime, on the contrary, define violence. Both power and violence use a technique of subjugation, of “doubling the other”. Power makes use of this expedient until the other submits; violence does it in such a way that the other “breaks”” (2017, p. 138-139).

Luhman apud Han (2017), explained that “power is a relationship that establishes the union of ego and alter, me and the other. The performance of power is symbolic, that is, it creates reference and confluence (sym-ballein) But, according to Han, “it can also take on a ‘diabolical’ form. This diabolization makes it repressive and destructive, separating and excluding… Violence, on the contrary, is not a symbolic means; in its essence it is diabolic, that is, divisive (dia-ballein)” (2017, p.147).

The colonization process in Brazil was very violent, not only because of the process of slavery, but also because of the genocide of the indigenous people, imposition by force of the Christian religion, imposition of legal forms and others. Even in current times, the relations of violence between master and slave are updated in the extremely classist society that is Brazilian. Probably, due to these violences, some prominent Brazilian Jungian analysts, such as Walter Boechat (2014), Gustavo Barcelos (2012) and Denise Ramos (2004) and Roberto Gambini (2004) identified a cultural complex of inferiority in Brazilian men. Gambini described the Brazilian soul in a very interesting way: “The Brazilian ancestral soul is today a lost soul … and because it suffers from this national inferiority complex, its creative energy is repressed”. “The puer presents the weakness and helplessness of every beginning. It has a strong upward component … which often leads to a fall and failure. His world is not the time- space continuum of concrete reality, but the eternity of spiritual transcendence, which explains his speed and haste, although he can wander aimlessly and aimlessly... unrelated. It is fascinated by the new, but rejects the temporal process of its development, so the puer is often represented in myths as young people who die early and invariably turn into flowers” (2012).

This occurs both at the level of personal complexes and at the level of cultural complexes that are situated in the cultural unconscious. Denise Ramos, in the chapter she wrote for the book “The Cultural Complex- contemporary Jungian Jungian perspectives”, ed. By Singer, T. and Kimbles, S.L. (2004), emphasized a third cultural complex characteristic of the Brazilian reality: corruption.

She wrote that “The phenomenon of corruption as part of Brazilian history is an endemic shadow, which seems to be ingrained in its culture. Corruption can be defined here as ‘as misusing power for private benefit or advantage’ – a power that may, but need not, reside in the public domain. In addition to money, the benefits derived from corruption can take the form of protection, special treatment, recommendation, promotion, or the favors of women or men. (…) Brazilians are problematized, daily, by misdemeanors or small bribes. To avoid appearing ‘foolish’, some Brazilians assume the role of being ‘smart’ and corrupt themselves or accept corruption as an acceptable means of survival or to build a living (…) This destructive behavior appears to be so ingrained within Brazilian culture. that we have lost sight of its origin” (Leisinger apud Ramos, 2004, s. p.).

Walter Boechat (2014) added, because of his research and long experience, two other Brazilian cultural complexes that had not been formulated: The Indigenous Holocaust and Colonialism. According to Ribeiro (1997), “The fundamental procedures for the domination of the slave colonies in the Americas were: the eradication of the old local ruling class, the granting of land as landowners to the conquerors, the adoption of slave-holding forms of conscription of labor and the implantation of bureaucratic patriciates, representatives of royal power such as tax collectors” (1997, p.114).

(…) Thus, it loses the high levels of technological qualification to plunge into a spurious culture (…) This was the greatest movement of historical updating of peoples ever carried out, through the detribalization and deculturation of millions of Indians and blacks. (… ) super-oppressive conditions of acculturative compulsion were created (…) The deculturating and acculturating power of this process of historical updating was even greater than that of the equivalent processes of Romanization and Islamization, as evidenced by the linguistic and cultural uniformity of the American peoples” (1997, p. 115-116).

“It is estimated that when the Portuguese arrived here, around six million souls lived in Brazilian territory – the same number, approximately, as the population of Portugal at the time. Of this population, around a thousand ethnic groups divided the national territory, speaking a thousand different languages. There were a thousand mythologies, a thousand cultures. (…) Less than 200 years later after the arrival of the Spaniards and Portuguese, the indigenous population was reduced to between ten or twenty percent of the original” (2014, p. 75).

According to Aristotle (2009), “In a strict sense, politics is not the will to exercise dominion, but the decision to live together” (2009, 1262b 1333b). in obtaining profit they cannot form a community. The reason for this is that they lack the political dimension. The economic system whose binary code is ‘profit-loss’ has no eyes to see the common welfare. It is precisely here that the essence of the political is shown, explained Han” (2017, pp.124- 125 notes 103).

Although Slavery, Genocide, Colonization and Corruption may exist as independent “Brazilian cultural complexes”, we believe that the main historical factor that deserves to be highlighted as a factor causing trauma to the soul of the Brazilian people was slave colonialism. We agree with Gambini (1999) and Ramos (2004) about the “inferiority complex” generating a reaction of a compensatory nature that led to the cultural complex of corruption (2004, p. 119).

Oliveira (2020) explained that “There is, in parallel with this intensification of human genocidal colonization, a colonization that is even more contemporary in its lethal actions, a destruction of the material conditions of life, generating an ecological crisis already announced by great scholars as a calamitous and, at some levels, already irreversible. We have arrived at the level of the prospect of an ecological ‘suicide’. We’re taking our own air! There is a suffocation of existential human, social and ecological conditions in progress, to a dizzying extent… The maddened growth in our lands has continuously generated murders of those who defend the land and the entire strength of its springs, its forests, animals, and minerals. Growth has been perpetrating masked genocidal disasters: fires, land grabbing, cattle pastures, vicious plantations, and robbers of the earth’s soul. The rampant mining rush has just been responsible for some terrible holocausts; Brumadinho, (flooded city) for example” (2020, p.75).

We would like to put here the hypothesis of the Cultural Complex of Hunger/Food Insecurity, as a tragic result of the Colonization period and whose perverse effects lasted from the period of the Republic to the present day. Josué de Castro (1953) wrote a book that became a classic, “Geography of Hunger” and then “Geopolitics of Hunger”, which won the Roosevelt Prize, awarded in the United States to the best book published during the year on social issues and human well-being. He wrote that “under the aspect of universal calamity, if we make a comparative study of famine with other calamities in the world – war and plagues or epidemics – we will find that the least known in its causes and effects, is exactly famine [.. ]

However, the damage produced by this last calamity is greater than that of wars and epidemics combined. […] there is the universally proven fact that it constitutes the most constant and effective cause of wars and the preparatory phase, almost obligatory, for the outbreak of great epidemics (1953, p. 12). “At the time it was written (1953), within a rigorously scientific criterion, about two thirds of humanity lived in a permanent state of hunger, the attitude of the world begins to change (…) which gave rise to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 44 nations (…) have planned measures to serve the nuclei of undernourished populations” (1953, p.16).

For the post-war period, De Castro (1953) carried out an exhaustive study on the subject that goes beyond the scope of our article, however, he used an interpretive method in which he approached what today we call the dimensions of ecological, economic, and environmental sustainability. society and how they interact with each other. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report released by the UN on July 6, 2022, points out that the number of people affected by hunger worldwide has risen to 828 million in 2021, up from 46 million since 2020 and 150 million since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic. A decrease can be seen in relation to the post-war period, which was from 2/3 to about nine percent today. In Brazil, 31 million people are hungry and 61 million are in a state of food insecurity.

The study carried out by Embrapa’s Secretariat for Intelligence and Strategic Relations (SIRE) showed that Brazil’s share in the world food market jumped from US$ 20 billion to US$ 100 billion, with emphasis on meat, corn, cotton, and forest products. This generates the potential to feed around 800 million people, which represents 10% of the world. However, we have already witnessed in 2015, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, people running after the garbage truck to catch food scraps that fell from the ground, and recently, it was reported in the main national newspapers, people going to the garbage cans of the butchers to pick up the bones that had been discarded.

De Castro explained that “(…) we do not despise factors of a cultural nature, factors of the feudal agrarian latifundium category that both the development of Brazilian society (...) is through the food deficiency that monoculture imposes, it is through hunger that the latifundium generates and so on” […] He dreamed of “the end of the era of economic man and with the possibility of the dawn of a new social era, despite the tragic night of fascism still casts its shadows” (1953, p.21 and 23). It is evident that Brazil is a much more developed country today [it reached the seventh G.I.B. world], than in 1753, but the agribusiness sector is accused of destroying forests, degrading the standard of living of indigenous populations, and enjoying tax privileges. Although there is no strict monoculture, the last two neoliberal governments (Temer and Bolsonaro) resumed the old political forms of privileging elites and landowners to the detriment of small and medium farmers. There is no concern with sustainability, ecological, cultural, social, national policy, international and scientific policy. This was evidenced by the total absence of government including in the COVID-19 pandemic AND by the massive cut of funds in all areas except for agribusiness.

According to Ignacy Sachs (2001), between 1972 and 1992, the world advanced in conceptual issues, but in practice eco-development did not progress (…) having as its enemy what I called the technical world that generated unemployment and income concentration. This also happened in Brazil, where 70% of people earn one to two minimum wages (approximately 250 to 500 US dollars) per month, they can buy food, but without much diversity and quality, mainly animal protein, an area where Brazil stands out as a world leader. Therein lies the perversity of the paradox: it feeds 10% of the world’s population and is not competent to take care of its own nation.

Sachs observed that (…) “Brazil, due to its natural resources, the size and quality of its scientific research, has very favorable conditions. What is missing is a great Long-Term Project, but this requires a great societal debate. He also reflected that Brazil is stuck to a financial logic that is short-term economics. As a solution to the problem, he proposed a synchronous responsibility with the present generation and a diachronic responsibility with future generations. Because environmental sustainability turns into social sustainability and cultural sustainability” (Sachs 2022 in an interview with Fundação Anchieta/SP/You-Tube).

We believe that these ideas from Sachs, who is one of the inventors of the concept of sustainability, may contribute to reimagining the creative possibilities of man on Earth, in relation to the theme of sustainability and for the construction of peace between nations. De Castro’s (1953) dream of a new era, seventy years later, is still far from being realized, and the “tragic night of fascism still casts its shadows”. Let’s take some examples: In Brazil we had Bolsonaro, in the United States the controversial Trump, in France Marine Le Pen has been growing, in Italy Georgia Meloni recently won the elections, also from the far right.

We justify to the reader the emphasis we place on the Brazilian context, which is because we are Brazilians; we thought we would contribute in a more ‘didactic’ way focusing on Brazil and making analogies with the global cultural context. “Geertz, a North American anthropologist, discussed the dilemma of reconciling biological unity and the great cultural diversity of the human species […] He sought a definition of man based on the definition of culture […] he established a stratigraphic view of man divided into three levels: the biological, psychological, and cultural” (Clifford Geertz apud Laraia, 1978, p. 33). Laraia wrote that for Geertz, culture should be considered “not a complex of concrete behaviors, but a set of control mechanisms, plans, rules, instructions (which computers call a program) to govern behavior (…) Studying culture it is, therefore, to study a code of symbols shared by the members of that culture” (1986, p. 63-64).

Geertz reported: “I need to understand culture from the perception that individuals have of themselves and their actions. I stop looking at the macro as a society that is there, and I start looking at individuals (…) I start looking at how the individual does to give meaning to the world. What meaning do individuals bring to their interactions in the world? (…) I am interested in ways of being in the world. What Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life’. (…) I think we should understand the other as another and not as a reflection of ourselves. (…) Max Weber’s genius made my work possible (…) Man is tied to webs of meaning that he himself has spun; I assume culture to be these webs and its analysis, therefore, as an interpretive science, the search for meaning. (…) Ethnography is the dense description of these meanings. Culture is not what you do, but what you think” (Clifford Geertz interviewed by Alan McFarlane/You- Tube, 2007).

One of the fundamental aspects of Jungian psychology is how the individual constructs meaning for his life, through the process of individuation. This is the Jungian “Myth of Analysis” according to James Hillman. We perceive an epistemological affinity in this aspect, with the way Geertz’s anthropology sees culture. When we move from regional, local levels of sustainability to global sustainability, the level of complexity both at the level of scientific concepts and at the level of practical interactions, increases a lot and borders become more fluid.

The same author made a critique of a concept that is at the heart of the hegemonic model and that he reconceptualized as a “governance matrix”, explaining its excluding and, consequently, unsustainable character. It completely excluded large social groups such as cultural diversity and the environment, and included other groups, subordinating them to power-depriving forms of inclusion – as was the case with women. (2012, p.54). […] prepared the way for the crisis of governability: the law of the market. […] instead of social transformations, problem solving; instead of social conflict, social cohesion, and stability of flows” (2021, p. 502). […] The governance matrix replaces self-determined participation with participation based on a principle of selection according to which only certain authors, interests or voices are invited to participate. Participation can be autonomous, but the criterion for choosing the participants is not […] there is a benefit for those who are admitted, but always at the expense of those who are not. (…) it is possible to detect two non-existent actors: the State and the excluded. […] While Polanyi argued that the economy exists embedded in society, the governance matrix is premised on the need to embed society in the economy.

These last dimensions of sustainability explained by Santos (2021), national policy, international policy, social, economic, and cultural are intertwined and interdependent, constitutive of each other, as well as the ecological dimension and the psychological dimension. In the Chinese language, the word crisis is a compound word: risk and opportunity. The current global crisis is pervasive and involves all dimensions of sustainability. But it also generates the powerful impulse necessary to emerge from the collective unconscious, the re-imaginative forces to face the uncertainties and to think about the renewing proposals for all these dimensions. As we saw in ‘Santos’ considerations, the emergence of new ways of thinking about culture must be articulated by anti-hegemonic coalitions, which, perhaps, can create a basis for a new world order.

There is a need to build new paradigms based on epistemological questions that are not only more scientific, but also more inclusive in relation to social actors, which will enable\the understanding and expansion of cultural sustainability.

Mushakoje in “The Crisis of Paradigms in Social Sciences and the Challenges for the 21st Century” (1999), explained: “The epistemic foundation of synarchy paradigms is the existence of a knowledge shared by the community to which a group of individuals belongs. Free decisions must be taken within a collective process of mutual adjustments among the group members. Consensus is the ideal formula that guarantees the legitimacy of shared knowledge” (1999, p.206).

For Jung, however, the most important dimension of sustainability is the psychological: “Psychology is far from reaching a development like that of other sciences (…) However, any science is a function of the psyche, and any knowledge is rooted in it. It is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and the condition sine qua non of the world as an object. It is extremely strange that Western man, with very few exceptions, apparently does not attach much importance to this fact. Suffocated by the multitude of known external objects, the subject of all knowledge has been eclipsed, to the point of seeming non-existence” (1993, p. 80).

He explained that “only one who is fully aware as a human being is fully present. Whoever comes to this awareness is lonely. Modern man has always been lonely. […] Consequently, he has become ‘unhistorical’ in the deepest sense of the term, having withdrawn from the mass that lives only on traditional ideas. […] Prometheus’ sin was to run out of history. In this sense modern man is a sinner. A higher level of consciousness is therefore guilt” (1993, p. 80-81). […] When you hear about a cultural problem or a human problem, you must never forget to ask who is speaking. For the more general the problem, the more it will ‘secretly introduce’ its personal psychology into the description. This could lead to unforgivable distortions and false conclusions, with serious consequences. […] of course, I only know the psychic problem of modern man from my own experience with other people and with myself (1993, p. 83). […] But no culture before ours was constrained to take this psychic background seriously in itself. […] we build a science on this, one more proof that we are taking these realities seriously. (1993, p.84). […] Our epoch wants to experience the psyche […] the great innovations never come from above, always from below, like trees that do not grow from the sky, but germinate from the ground, even if their seeds have fallen from above. […] The background of the psyche is nature and nature are creative life. It is in the fascination that the spiritual problem exerts over modern man that is, in my opinion, the central point of today’s psychic problem. On the one hand, it is a phenomenon of decay - if we are pessimistic. But, on the other hand, it is a promising seed for a profound transformation of the spiritual attitude of the West – if we are optimistic. (1993, p. 85).

“The fascination of the psyche is nothing more than a new self-reflection that turns on our fundamental nature (1993, p. 87). Perhaps a last attempt, sane or desperate, to escape the power of obscure natural laws and win a greater and more heroic victory for the awakened mind over the sleep of nations. A question that only history can answer” (1993, p. 89). Jung’s symbolic thought, we believe, is very important to combat the deep nihilism of man, now ‘postmodern’. According to Jung, he is a “soulless” man, because as we saw in the quotes above, having a soul would imply experiencing the collective unconscious, Henri Corbin’s imaginal field. The Liber Novus or Jung’s Red Book, published in 2011, 50 years after his death, was entrusted to the historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani is the account of the method that Jung used for 16 years, to make his experience of the unconscious; and this experience illuminated all of Jung’s life and work for nearly 50 years; created the Active Imagination method which is one of his contributions to help man in the search for his own soul.

This book must be considered as being the master key to understanding the genesis of his complete works, but also a powerful effort for his individuation process, that is, to become an undivided, complete being. Jung’s attitude to contemporary culture rests on both the avoidance of communist materialism and the materialist psyche of capitalism. Whoever dedicated his life to doing his own experiment, has the legacy, as the Magnum opus, to help humanity to do its own experiment. It is about the archaeological search for the sacred, not outside, in dogmatisms or fundamentalisms, but inside oneself.

Edinger (1984), a Jungian analyst, explained: “If religion is self-oriented, science is egooriented. Religion is based on Eros and science on Logos. The age that begins to dawn will provide a synthesis for this thesis and this antithesis. Religion sought bonding; science sought knowledge. The new world view will seek linked knowledge” (1984, p.55). … a new mode rises on the horizon, namely, depth psychology. The new psychological dispensation discovers man’s relationship with God in the individual’s relationship with the unconscious; it centers on experience with the psyche itself.

None.

No conflict of interest.

1. Aristotle (2009) The politics. Publisher Martin Claret.
2. Barcelos G (2012) Psyche and Image. Editora Vozes, Petropolis/RJ, Brazil
3. Boechat W (2014) The Brazilian Soul-Lights and Shadow. Editora Vozes, Petropolis/RJ, Brazil
4. Callia M, Oliveira MF (2006) Terra Brasilis: Prehistory and Archeology of the Psyche-Moitara. Publisher Paulus, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
5. Cassirer E (1977) Philosophical Anthropology – essay on man. Editora Mestre Jou, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
6. De Castro J (1953) Geografia da Fome, Rio de Janeiro, Livraria Editora da Casa do Estudante do Brasil.
7. De Moraes WA (2014) The Brazilian Soul. Editora Barany, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
8. Edinger EF (1993) The Creation of Consciousness – Jung's Myth for Modern Man. Cultrix Publishing, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
9. Gambini R (1999) Another 500 – a conversation about the Brazilian Soul. Editora Senac, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
10. Galtung J (1995) Apud Han B (2017) Topology of Violence. Petropolis, R.J. Voices Publisher.
11. Han B (2017) Topology of Violence. trans. Enio Paulo Giochino. RJ, Editora Vozes, Petropolis, Brazil.
12. Heller A (1999) The Crisis of Social Paradigms and the Challenges for the 21^st Rio de Janeiro: Editora Contraponto.
13. Jung CG (1994) The Nature of the Psyche. Petropolis/RJ, Editora Vozes, CW VIII/II.
14. (1993) Psychology in Transition, Petropolis/RJ: Editora Vozes, CW X.
15. (1991) Psychological Types. Petropolis/RJ: Editora Vozes, CW VI.
16. (1981) Studies in Analytical Psychology. Petropolis/RJ: CW VII.
17. Laraia R De B (1986) Culture – an anthropological concept. Rio de Janeiro: Publisher Jorge Zahar.
18. Mithen S (2003) The Prehistory of Mind. Sao Paulo: Editora Unesp.
19. Mesquita In, Callia M, Oliveira MF (2006) Terra Brasilis: Prehistory of the psyche- Moitara. Sao Paulo: Publisher Paulus.
20. Morin E (2012) Method 5 – the humanity of humanity/human identity. trans. Juremir Machado da Silva. Porto Sulina.
21. Oliveira H (2020) Death and Rebirth of Indigenous Ancestry in the Brazilian Soul. Petropolis/RJ: Editora Vozes.
22. Ramos D (2000) The Latin American Identity. Publisher, Sao Paulo.
23. Ribeiro D (2006) The Brazilian people. Publisher Company of Pocket.
24. (2000) Civilizing Process – stages of cultural evolution. Companhia das Letras – Publifolha, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
25. Sachs I, et al. (2001) Brazil: A Century of Transformation Sao Paulo: Editora Companhia das Letras.
26. Singer T, Kimbles SL (2004) The Cultural Complex – Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society. Hove and New York, Eds. Brunner-Routledge.
27. Souza, Santos B (2021) The Grammar of Time – towards a new political culture. Belo Horizonte and Sao Paulo: Editora Grupo Autentica.
28. Steiner R (1961) The Living Economy – the world as an economic organism. Sao Paulo: Ed. I become Anthroposophical Widor.
29. Vieira TLF (2021) article: Introduction to an Analytical Psychology of a Civilization in Transition. In Willey (Eds), Journal of Analytical Psychology.
30. Von Franz ML (2005) Puer Aeternus – the struggle of the adult against the paradise of childhood. Sao Paulo: Publisher Paulus.
31. (2007) Web Sites, GEETZ, Clifford.
32. (2022) SACHS, Ignacy.