The Sum of Our Parts

By Cecilia Sepp, CAE, ACNP, LPEC

I’ve lived here on Planet Earth for a while now, and the longer I live here,  the more I don’t understand why people act the way they do. There are many theories about this depending on where you live, what you believe, or your favorite psychiatrist. My favorite psychiatrist happens to be Carl Jung. 

Jungian theory speaks to me as a human being because he studied and wrote about the Collective Unconscious, which is where the theory of Archetypes lives. It focuses on our shared experiences as humans, and it continues to evolve as we evolve. It’s the thread that binds us together no matter the era. 

It’s universal and we all inherit it. 

Speaking of eras, our current time is the 21st Century and it offers advances in healthcare research, access to information, instant communication, and interactions between people all around the world thanks to easy-to-use technology. 

Thanks to these advances in technology, we are living in another era of rapid change. This should be an exciting and mind-expanding time as we push the boundaries of human understanding and experience. The use of A.I. tools and implanted medical devices is bringing us ever closer to transhumanism. 

But instead of embracing the change and its possibilities, we choose to be afraid of it. Humanity has become quite anxious over “external factors” that we created. We overlook this glaring fact: we can control the pace of how quickly we adopt new things because we made them. We don’t have to give in to peer pressure to do a thing, try a thing, or like a thing. We can choose. 

What are we choosing? 

We are choosing fragmentation and insularity. We don’t look the same. We don’t think the same. We don’t always speak the same language. Those who are “not like us” must be the problem. It’s safer to withdraw and to hide in this bubble and pretend that it is not our responsibility. 

The comfortable and the familiar become a barrier to the new, and we start looking at each other like we are not all humans. We blame others for our situation because we are not willing to admit that our own choices landed us where we are. Things are “beyond our control” and “those in power” will handle these things. After all, I’m just one person. 

It is my personal theory that despite physically living in the 21st Century, mentally we are living in the Middle Ages. That was a time that was ruled by feudalism, which included a strict class system that was governed by a favored few. For such a system to work, fear must be used as a tool. Fear of punishment. Fear of “the other.” Fear of standing out. 

It was also a time when the individual did not believe they could make a difference or take a stand. Better to go along and get along. 

Dear reader, you may be saying, what is she going on about this time? How does she get from here to there? Does she really believe that our bodies are in one era and our minds in another? 

Yes, she does. 

Why do I believe this? Because our societal structures still are built on hierarchies and systems that allow the favored few the opportunity to tell everyone else what to do. Rather than creating modern societies where individuals work together to find solutions, we continue to look “up” to a small group of people who don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. 

Despite being what might be called mature adults, too many of us shrug and say “well, that’s just the way it is.” I hate to break it to you, but it’s the way it is because we made it that way. And we keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. 

Here on Planet Earth, we continue our petty squabbling as if it is still the 1930s. We look backwards instead of forward – it’s why Putin is trying to bring back the Soviet Union. Yeah, Vlad, how is that going for you because it worked so well the first time.  

We want change as long as we don’t have to do anything differently. Let the other guy change the way they do things. 

But the unavoidable fact is that we are all human, and we all live here on Planet Earth. There is no “other” – humans are variations on a theme. 

Our next stage of evolution depends on us coming together as humans. To accomplish this, we must open our minds, open our hearts, and embrace one community here on Planet Earth. 

Despite the fragmentation and the insularity, when you take a step back and look at it from a distance, you will see that we are greater than the sum of our parts.