Feeding the Beast: Why exposing the illusion is never enough?
There is a persistent belief that by pushing the lie into the corner, screaming facts louder than the ambient noise, the machinery of collective hypocrisy will eventually break.
The expectation is that the system will bow when confronted with its own corruption.
This is the ultimate trap of La maya.
The body of the Beast
Jung had mapped it with precision: what the group refuses to see in itself, it projects onto whoever names it. The collective shadow does not disappear, it relocates. It seeks a receptacle, a scapegoat, a witness to disqualify.
When a single grain of sans pushes against a structural lie, the lie does not collapse. It mutates.
Collective hypocrisy is not a passive flaw; it is an autonomous organism. It lives through a silent social contract, the collective Persona that Jung describes with relentless exactitude:
“I validate your mask, as long as you don’t scratch mine.”
When one being refuses that contract, the group responds immediately: isolation.
The pack does not debate truth. It pathologizes the messenger. It projects onto him the Shadow it cannot face, whispering that the witness is unstable, bitter, broken. By shifting the argument from facts to personality, the system preserves its comfort.
Yet Jung himself had traced the way, not confrontation, but individuation. Not defeating the collective Shadow, but extracting oneself from it. The process begins with a recognition: you do not convert a system that has made falseness its condition of survival. You withdraw from it.
The Beast feeds on conflict. It absorbs anger, uses the other’s energy to regenerate its skin, and returns more venomous than before.
The industrialization of fragmentation
This psychic monster has now found its absolute technological weapon.
Digital streams pour millions of information fragments into the human mind every second. This is not communication; it is the industrialization of the veil.
Jung warned of the dangers of mass psychology: when the individual dissolves into the collective, the Shadow is no longer personal, it becomes systemic, anonymous, impossible to locate. The digital age has perfected this mechanism beyond anything he could have anticipated.
Attention is pulverized, the mind is kept in a state of permanent reaction, unable to anchor itself in the real. The Ego Market forces each person to become the director of their own fiction, trading authenticity for ephemeral validation.
The Persona is no longer worn; it is algorithmically optimized. Each profile, each post, each carefully curated image is a mask the system rewards for its coherence and punishes for its absence.
By fracturing the world into airtight digital bubbles, the matrix ensures that any vertical truth will be instantly lynched by the herd. The collective shadow finds its perfect hiding place in the noise.
The way of rupture
Fighting the illusion by its own rules is feeding it.
Jung called it the confrontation with the Shadow. But he was clear: the goal is not to destroy it. The Shadow cannot be destroyed. It can only be integrated or fled from. The system has chosen flight, collectively, permanently. And in that flight, it has become the Beast.
The Book of Revelation names the only posture worth holding. The witnesses raise no armies. They stand, stripped of everything, and speak the raw truth.
Muga* (無我), the dissolution of the false self.
Not the Jungian integration of the shadow into a more complete ego, something beyond that. The total dissolution of the performer. The refusal to bear the mark of the Beast, or to participate in the theatrical performance of the crowd.
Where Jung offers individuation as the path, “Muga” points further still: to the recognition that there is no self to complete. Only the witness, and even that, dissolving. Only seeing, with no one left to see.
When the witness withdraws all attention and energy from the simulacrum, the mirror cracks.
The Beast is not defeated by confrontation. It is defeated by immutability, by leaving the theatre empty until the hydra devours itself.
“La Maya” does not collapse.
It starves.
--- Neon Reflections ---
*Muga (無我) – Zen concept of non-self. The dissolution of the constructed identity, the performer, the one who plays a role for others.