This is a single-speaker YouTube discussion (Connor Beaton) arguing that the Internet and social media function as an externalized collective unconscious, exposing others' unconscious reactivity and creating a shared, digitally-mediated 'collective nervous system.' The speaker emphasizes that frequent exposure to triggering online content can dysregulate individuals, and suggests that the capacity to self-regulate will be an increasingly important skill (a near-future 'superpower'). The talk connects these dynamics to societal polarization and frames collective trauma healing and increasing interpersonal coherence as central responses.
Chapters
There's a social practice aspect to awareness that how we are in society as citizens needs to become like a spiritual or inner awareness practice. Especially in the times when our. Our data speed is speeding up constantly, so we are more and more exposed to triggering impulses more and more often. So the access we have to society and to news. And if we are not regulated in ourselves naturally, then we become more and more dysregulated through that flood of information. So I think that's a very important question. I mean, we could have just an own conversation just about. That is interesting. I often say that the people who are able to regulate in the coming years, especially in the next sort of like five to 10 years specifically, are going to have a kind of superpower.
Because I'm a big. I studied Jung for a long time, and I've said it on the show before, but I think from my frame, we've sort of externalized the collective unconscious, right? We've created the Internet and social media, which operates as a external medium of the collective unconscious that we then interact with on a daily basis, right? We can see other people's commentary and their unconscious thoughts and their unconscious reactivity and their shadows and all those. It's just all spewed out online and. And we've never, ever, ever had the experience of our nervous system being in relationship, even in a digital form, to other people's nervous system. And I think one of the things that I hear as, again, as an undercurrent to what you're talking about is how I would sort of summarize it, is that we share a collective nervous system and that our nervous system is deeply impacted by the nervous systems around us. And part of my. My guess, part of how we deal with this polarization is by creating more coherence and more congruence within ourselves, but also within the people that we are surrounded by, that we interact with, that we speak with. But I would. I would maybe love for you to expand on that a little bit, like, how do we deal with this poison polarization? Because I would imagine that this kind of leads us into the collective trauma healing. I would guess that those two things are interconnected. So how do we start to approach this collective trauma healing and this dealing with polarization, and where do we begin? Yeah, you said it already. Many aspects yourself right now, beautifully, because we are using similar metaphors. I love what you just said because I often say, look at the Internet. We externalized our conscious and unconscious collective dimension. And look at the Internet and the dark web and it's beautiful. I mean, on the one hand, it's. It's tragic. On the other hand, it at least gives us the opportunity to subject, object, transcend, like, our inner identification. When if we consciously. Look at that, what you just said, then it's a kind of a. Aha. Wow. Yeah, right. We unconsciously build something that kind of externalized our inner architecture. I find this always fascinating.
