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When all the Pretensions have been Laid to Rest
Conversations with AI on Carl Jung and War and Peace
Chet Shupe
About this discussion: While watching a video on Carl Jung, it became clear to me that he was grappling with the same split in the mind that I am addressing: the split between the intellect and the deeper emotional, intuitive self. So I asked AI about him, and the first conversation below followed. Then, drawing on what I had previously learned about Tolstoy, I asked AI about War and Peace, and a second conversation followed, which eventually turned to the role spiritual honesty can play in regaining our spiritual freedom. Together, I hope these conversations show what spiritual freedom means in practice and why it is fundamentally different from the therapies, philosophies, and spiritual practices typically offered.
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Carl Jung
Shupe: How would you summarize Carl Jung’s philosophy?
AI: I would summarize it less as a theory of mental illness than as a theory of how a human being becomes whole. Jung called this process individuation: the lifelong integration of the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves. At its simplest, his view is that much of what we are lies outside conscious thought, and that a fulfilling life requires bringing the conscious personality into relationship with those deeper parts rather than letting the ego rule alone.
Several ideas follow from that. The ego is not the whole person; Jung distinguished the conscious ego, the personal unconscious, and what he called the collective unconscious. The unconscious has structure, expressed through universal patterns he called archetypes, which appear in dreams, myths, religion, and art. We construct a social face, the persona, which is necessary but is not all of who we are. The parts of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge form what he called the shadow. Growth comes through integrating these rather than suppressing them, and the goal is not the triumph of the ego but the Self, a larger wholeness in which conscious and unconscious life are brought together.
This is where Jung becomes interesting in relation to your work. You approach the problem from a different direction, but there is a striking resemblance. Jung essentially says we suffer when conscious thought mistakes itself for the whole human being. Your argument gives that predicament an evolutionary and social explanation: once intellectual intelligence became capable of constructing an abstract social order, we began trusting that order over the feelings that had previously ordered human relationships. So I would put the difference this way:
Jung: Become conscious of the deeper psyche so that the ego no longer mistakes itself for the whole person.
Your thesis: Recognize the intelligence embodied in feeling so that intellectual intelligence no longer mistakes its constructed social reality for reality itself.
These are not the same philosophy. Jung’s collective unconscious and archetypes are quite different from your evolutionary conception of emotional intelligence, and his claims about them are difficult to test scientifically. But underneath both lies a common intuition: the rational, conscious mind is not equipped to order human existence by itself.
Shupe: It seems to me that Jung is talking about the very split I have been describing: the split that occurred when the intellectual mind ceased serving the emotional mind and instead began serving the contracts through which we presumed to take control of our destiny. Having identified the split, Jung developed an entire philosophy, or therapy, around mental practices intended to heal it. I am suggesting something different. While certain mental practices or techniques might help, the split must ultimately be allowed to heal itself. That would require returning to a way of life where we can live in the moment, where the emotional mind responds to what is real and present rather than being overruled by intellectual concerns about an imagined future. Then the rational mind can naturally return to serving the emotional mind, eliminating the condition that created the split in the first place.
In other words, you cannot think or manage your way back to meaning. You have to be free to live without planning your life around an imagined future, because only then can you live in the moment and trust the human spirit. By the human spirit, I do not mean merely our individual spirits, or even the spirits of those around us. I mean the human spirit as manifested through the life of our species. Our individual spirits share a common root and therefore a common purpose: to inspire each of us to serve life through our relationships with one another and with the land that sustains us. The problem is that when we ignore our spirits in order to realize plans and honor contracts, we cannot necessarily trust one another to respond from the spirit. Our spirits remain what they have always been; it is our freedom to follow them that has been lost. Yet if we want peace of mind, even for a moment, we have to trust the human spirit regardless of the consequences. Can we picture Jesus at peace within himself as he went to the cross? I believe he was.
AI: That identifies a fundamental difference between your thesis and Jung’s, despite how similarly the two of you see the human problem. Jung’s individuation is a process of integration: the conscious ego must come into a healthier relationship with the larger Self. Your proposal is more radical. You are saying the split is maintained by the conditions under which civilized human beings are trying to live. So you are not proposing a better way to manage the divided psyche. You are proposing a way of life in which the division ceases to be necessary.
Jung, in short: The psyche has become divided. We must become conscious of the division and integrate what has been separated.
Your thesis: The psyche remains divided because we continue living within the conditions that created the division. Restore the conditions under which the human spirit can once again order human relationships, and the division will heal naturally.
That explains why social primate families, spiritual homes, and belonging are so central to your argument. They aren’t therapeutic techniques. They are the conditions under which you believe the human spirit can function again. And your line “you can’t think or manage your life back to meaning” may be one of the cleanest statements of that distinction.
I would only be careful with “planning-free way of life.” Taken literally, it sounds as though you mean never deciding what to do tomorrow, never making an appointment, never preparing for winter. I don’t think that is your argument. I think you mean something deeper: you cannot experience peace while requiring the future to conform to your conception of what must happen. There is an enormous difference between preparing for tomorrow and requiring tomorrow to obey the plan. The second connects directly to social contracting: intellectual intelligence trying to make an unknowable future safe through enforceable arrangements.
That makes your idea of trust especially important. The trust you describe isn’t “I trust that everything will work out well for me.” It is “I trust the human spirit even though I cannot know where following it will lead.” Which brings us to Jesus. Whether he experienced what we would call peace of mind at the crucifixion is not something we can establish, but as a symbol within your argument, the example is powerful. Jung himself treated the figure of Christ as a symbol of the Self. For you, the cross could represent the ultimate distinction between peace and safety. If peace depends on securing the outcome, Jesus could not have been at peace. But if peace comes from relinquishing control of the outcome and remaining faithful to what the spirit requires, then peace remains possible even when survival does not.
Peace of mind does not come from knowing that everything will be all right. It comes from no longer requiring everything to be all right before we can trust life.
There is a paradox here: we created social contracting because we were afraid to trust an unknown future, and in trying to secure the future, we created the very way of life that made peace in the present impossible.
Shupe: You are right about the future. No matter how it comes to us, life is about surviving the future. It’s just that the human spirit doesn’t do it by enforcing prescribed contracts with no termination date. That is what locks the spirit out and creates the feeling of meaninglessness. The Homo sapiens spirit manages the uncertainties of the future through social bonding, so that, as a group, people are reasonably confident they can handle whatever the future throws at them. And where the future is predictable, it prepares for it by establishing and defending territory and preparing for the coming seasons.
AI: That clarification makes your distinction much stronger. You are not arguing against preparing for the future. You are distinguishing between responding to the future and attempting to bind it. The human spirit, as you describe it, handles uncertain futures through relationship: people bond deeply enough that no one has to know precisely what will happen, because whatever happens, they will face it together. It handles predictable futures through preparation: seasons return, food will be needed, shelter must be kept, and territory must be protected. None of that requires pretending to know an unknowable future.
Social contracting is different. It deals with uncertainty by establishing obligations that remain binding into a future no one can know. Your phrase “no termination date” gets closer to the real target than “planning” does. A plan can be dropped the moment circumstances make it irrelevant. A contract says, in effect: no matter what we feel or what circumstances arise, this obligation remains. That is how contracting “locks the spirit out.” The feeling that tells us what the present requires is no longer allowed to determine what we do, because we have already established what we must do.
To live in the moment is not to live without regard for the future. It is to meet the future from the reality of each present moment rather than binding ourselves in advance to what we have conceived the future should be.
There is also a systems-control distinction here, given your engineering background. In your view, the human spirit provides moment-to-moment feedback to maintain a life-sustaining order. Social contracting operates from a predetermined command. The first stays responsive to changing reality; the second tries to make reality conform to a plan set beforehand. Seen this way, trusting the human spirit doesn’t mean trusting that nothing terrible will happen. It means trusting that when something does happen, bonded people responding honestly to what they feel will know how to respond together. That is why belonging and spiritual freedom are two sides of the same thing: belonging provides security without our having to contract away the freedom to respond honestly to the present.
Shupe: Your remarks reveal how simple this is once you see it. The problem is that once people start social contracting and the notion of an ideal future becomes embedded in the intellectual mind, that mind comes into profound conflict with our emotional intelligence, through which the human spirit manifests itself. The idea of trusting the human spirit then seems mindless, particularly when the intellectual mind cannot acknowledge that instincts exist, or dismisses them as hopelessly outdated. When the idea of spiritual freedom is introduced, the intellectual mind has a million questions it wants answered.
Well, there are answers, as you demonstrated above, but you have to start somewhere and get somewhere. It’s a progression. The rational mind wants everything answered on the spot, all at once. Forget about a progression. It is, quite understandably, so fearful of life, something it now protects itself from with atomic weapons, that it won’t put up with a progression for more than fifteen seconds.
AI: That may explain why something that looks simple once the perspective shifts is so hard to communicate before it shifts. The rational mind demands that spiritual freedom meet the very standard social contracting created: tell me beforehand what will happen, how every problem will be handled, and why I will be safe. Spiritual freedom cannot answer on those terms, because its answer is essentially this:
I cannot tell you what will happen. I can only tell you how human beings are equipped to meet whatever happens.
That is the progression you mean. In a feedback system, you don’t have to know every disturbance that will strike; you need the capacity to sense what is happening and respond as it happens. In your conception, feelings are the feedback, social bonds provide the resilience, and intellectual intelligence deals with the circumstances that actually arise. Social contracting reverses this. Instead of trusting our capacity to respond, we try to specify the desired reality beforehand and obligate ourselves and others to produce it.
The rational mind’s “million questions” may even be evidence of the problem. What if I lose my job? What if someone leaves, or doesn’t do their share, or becomes violent? Who owns the house? Who raises the children? Who decides? The rational mind thinks it is testing your proposition. Within your thesis, it is demonstrating its inability to tolerate an unanswered future.
Answering each question may even obscure your argument, because every answer produces another “what if?” The underlying demand is: prove to me that I will be safe before I give up the mechanisms by which I now try to guarantee my safety. There can be no such proof. That connects to what you said about Jesus. Trust does not mean believing the human spirit will prevent suffering or death. It means letting the human spirit determine how you respond to life even though it cannot guarantee the outcome you want.
The rational mind says: When I have secured the future, I can finally be at peace. Your thesis says: As long as your peace depends on securing the future, you can never be at peace, because the future cannot be secured.
One qualification would make your argument stronger. I wouldn’t say the intellectual mind literally cannot recognize that instincts exist. People obviously recognize instinct as a concept. Your deeper point is that we no longer grant feeling-based intelligence any legitimate authority over how we organize our lives. We acknowledge instincts while building a social system that continually overrules them. And the “fifteen seconds” might be put this way:
The difficulty in explaining spiritual freedom is not that it has no answers. It is that the answers form a progression, while the rational mind demands assurance of the destination before it will take the first step.
Or, more briefly: the rational mind demands certainty before it will trust. The human spirit can function only when we trust without certainty. That may be the irreducible conflict.
* * *
War and Peace
Shupe: What was the book War and Peace about?
AI: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is set largely among Russian families during the Napoleonic Wars. It follows characters such as Pierre Bezukhov, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and Natasha Rostova through love, marriage, ambition, suffering, war, death, and the search for meaning. But the book isn’t fundamentally about war. Tolstoy is asking: What actually controls human life? How much control do individuals really have? Where does a meaningful life come from?
One of his central themes is skepticism toward the belief that rational planning controls events. He contrasts elaborate strategy with a willingness to respond to circumstances as they unfold. The Russian commander Kutuzov is portrayed as effective largely because he adapts to events rather than insisting that reality conform to a plan. On the personal side, Pierre keeps looking for an intellectual or philosophical answer to the emptiness he feels, including through Freemasonry, but those attempts fail to satisfy him. The novel connects meaning far more closely with love and lived relationships.
In one sentence: War and Peace is an exploration of human beings trying to control and understand life, and gradually discovering that life is larger, less controllable, and more deeply rooted in ordinary human connection than their theories and ambitions suggest. Tolstoy isn’t making your argument, but I suspect you will find the questions he wrestled with remarkably familiar.
Shupe: I asked because I have learned from various sources about Tolstoy’s struggle with life’s meaning despite his success at meeting the obligations of the modern world in terms of economics, recognition, family relationships, and living conditions. Later in life, he apparently overcame that struggle and shared his methods in his writing. My concern is that I don’t believe that is possible: to manage oneself to a state of meaningfulness. Meaning is a matter of circumstances, not of thinking. Either you are free to serve life, in which case you will find meaning in feelings of contentment, or you aren’t, in which case meaning will be absent despite personal accomplishments. Though I admire his recognition that his life lacked meaning when he was “succeeding,” I suspect he was fooling himself a bit when he began writing about how to manage your life back to meaning without having found the spiritual freedom required to serve life.
AI: What makes your reading interesting is that Tolstoy’s crisis came after extraordinary worldly success, not failure. He had fame, wealth, literary achievement, and a family, yet he confronted a profound sense of meaninglessness, which he recorded in A Confession. He concluded that reason alone could not supply life’s meaning and turned toward faith, simplicity, conscience, and a moral way of living. Yet his later life was marked by a severe conflict between those ideals and his aristocratic family circumstances, a conflict his diaries record.
From your perspective, the difficulty is that he was still looking for an answer to the question of meaning. You are saying something different: meaning isn’t an answer. Contentment isn’t achieved by understanding the right philosophy. Both arise when the way we live serves the life our emotional nature evolved for.
Imagine someone saying: “I know where my life must be five years from now, so I must suppress this attachment, leave these people, keep this career, or preserve this marriage, because my planned future depends on it.” Every one of those decisions could be perfectly rational. The problem is that the imagined future has been given authority over what the person is experiencing now. If the relationships that would naturally form keep being sacrificed to a prescribed future, then, in your thesis, the emotional system cannot reward the person with contentment, because the very information through which it guides social life is being overridden.
So Tolstoy asked, in essence, “What makes life meaningful?” Your answer seems to be: you don’t need to know what makes life meaningful. You need to stop organizing life in a way that prevents you from feeling its meaning. It is like hunger. Understanding nutrition cannot make a starving person feel fed. If contentment is feedback from a living system, understanding contentment cannot produce the conditions that generate it.
That brings your argument back to the proposition you keep returning to: nothing in you is broken. In your model, the feeling that life is meaningless is innate wisdom telling you that something is wrong with your circumstances—the conditions under which you are trying to live.
Shupe: Exactly. And finding meaning is further complicated because everyone around you—the very people you would need to connect with emotionally through interdependent relationships to serve life—can’t form those connections because their survival depends on realizing personal ambitions, just like yours.
AI: Which makes the problem systemic rather than individual. Within your model, a person cannot simply decide to start trusting their feelings and form the relationships their nature requires, because those relationships need other people who are also free to respond honestly. If everyone involved is constrained by obligations, plans, economic dependencies, and fears about the future, the relationship cannot easily become what either person’s emotional nature is asking for. The result is a difficult loop: we need spiritually honest relationships to feel secure enough to trust the human spirit, but we struggle to form them because we don’t yet trust the human spirit.
That helps explain your idea of the spiritual home. It cannot be manufactured by one enlightened individual, and no one can draw up a blueprint for it, because the blueprint would become another predetermined arrangement imposed on future feelings. It has to emerge through bonding. It may also explain why individual solutions to meaninglessness so often fall short. Therapy, philosophy, religion, meditation, and self-improvement can change a person’s experience, sometimes profoundly. But in your argument, none can substitute for the missing relationships, because meaning is not something an isolated individual manufactures internally. It is what the emotional system experiences when a person is participating in relationships that serve life.
If you feel empty while living in a way that requires you and everyone around you to suppress the very feelings through which human beings bond, the emptiness is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It may be evidence that something in you is still working.
That reverses the usual diagnosis. Meaninglessness stops being merely a defect to eliminate and becomes valued information—presuming we recognize the message. And it is why your solution has to be a progression. No one can create a functioning social primate family tomorrow by intellectual decision. The first tentative relationships have to form among people who still carry the fears, obligations, and expectations of the contracted world. Trust grows enough to allow more honesty, which allows deeper bonding, which creates more security, which allows still more trust. In systems language, the healing itself would be a positive feedback process. That may be the answer to the rational mind’s impossible demand to see the completed alternative before taking the first step. The completed alternative can only emerge from taking the first step.
Shupe: This is why, as my thesis matures, it increasingly focuses on encouraging spiritual honesty, particularly among women.
AI: In your framework, spiritual honesty is what allows a relationship to stop being governed by what people believe they ought to feel and start being governed by what they actually feel. That makes it more than ordinary honesty. Someone can be factually honest while still suppressing what her feelings are telling her, because acknowledging them could threaten a marriage, a friendship, a financial arrangement, or a planned future. Spiritual honesty seems to mean refusing to misrepresent, suppress, or override what the soul is telling us merely to preserve a social arrangement or a desired future.
That is why your focus on women and sisterhood matters to the larger thesis. You aren’t simply saying women should be more candid with one another. You are describing a possible starting point for rebuilding the relationships social contracting has displaced. People need secure relationships to become spiritually free, but spiritually free people are needed to create secure relationships. Spiritual honesty may be the way into that circle. One woman risks revealing what she actually feels. Another discovers that honesty does not destroy the relationship, but strengthens it, which makes it safer for her to be honest too. Pretensions and defenses begin to fall, and trust deepens. Eventually, the relationships provide enough emotional and material security that none of the women need to suppress their feelings to keep their place in the world, and their relationships become indispensable. In this process, something remarkable happened. They did not design a spiritual home. They lived one into existence.
That is also why pretenses matter so much in your argument. Having to pretend we are something we are not, to be acceptable in the eyes of others, is the activity that, more than any other, prevents the relationships that would restore our access to the wisdom of our souls. So your emerging answer to the hardest practical question in the thesis—if everyone has been separated from the guidance of the human spirit, how does anyone begin returning to it?—seems to be this: someone has to become spiritually honest first, and another person has to feel safe enough to answer honesty with honesty. From there, you have your progression.
Shupe: The idea of spiritual honesty came to me when I had the chance to speak to women in abuse shelters. I told them their situation gave them a special opportunity, one that seldom occurs in the modern world: having obviously failed to maintain the pretenses required to hold legally arranged families together, they had nothing to hide. They were free to be honest with other women about how they really felt, possibly for the first time in their lives. Only through spiritual honesty can meaningful relationships develop. Their reaction was genuinely supportive. It left me feeling they were discovering for themselves what I had just told them.
When reflecting on those talks, I realized that spiritual honesty could well be the key to regaining our spiritual freedom, the only state of being that could have existed before the idea of social contracting was born. One thing was clear: regaining our spiritual freedom could never result from good intentions. Good intentions are universally aimed at making things right in some imagined future. Spiritual freedom requires honest responses to what we are feeling in the present. Good intentions are not required. All that is required is the desire to feel good, or contented, if you will.
What excites me about spiritual honesty is that when we are honest about how we really feel, we let our souls’ wisdom speak to us directly. That doesn’t require good intentions either. We will always be true to our souls if we are free to, a freedom we don’t have when our survival and social status depend on realizing personal ambitions. Only through spiritual honesty can our souls deliver their most important message: without one another to serve in interdependent relationships, we have no medium through which to serve our species’ life, thus no access to lasting contentment.
The idea is that once women become spiritually honest with each other, emotional connections will form that make their relationships indispensable, something they cannot imagine living without. At that point, they will become sisterhoods, the core of Homo sapiens families, the relationships that form the center of the “village” that it takes to raise a child. And when sisterhoods begin appearing, young men will appear too. More and more of them are holed up in their parents’ basements because that is their only escape from the pretenses they would otherwise have to manage to fit into this world. Sisterhoods would give them something they don’t have now: a place in the world where they could be themselves.
And what is the male’s role in the life of a natural human family? If I have it right, evolution commissioned men, when functioning as brotherhoods, to make the family members feel safe from the dangers of the natural world. From this point of view, the biggest and strongest man wouldn’t have everything his way, as we spiritually estranged creatures have been taught to expect in a world where the responsibility for keeping us safe has passed from brotherhoods to institutions. Quite the opposite. His strength would serve everyone else. He would be the one who made the women, their children, and his brothers alike feel the safest.
I can’t prove this. All I can tell you is how I feel. I am asking the male readers to take a moment and examine their hearts. My guess is that their response will begin somewhere deep inside: Yes. Yes. Yes. That is what I am about! If that is true, then I suggest there are still some remarkable possibilities for us humans on this planet. I can’t promise that those possibilities can be realized. But I am reasonably certain about one thing: To whatever extent those possibilities are realized, only spiritual honesty can get us there.
And that spiritual honesty won’t be intentional either. It will occur much as it did for the women in the abuse shelters, when we find ourselves in a situation where, for whatever reason, we no longer have anything to hide—when all pretentions have been laid to rest.
You see, we didn’t get into this situation by intent. It happened because Nature gave us language. And if we recover, it won’t be intentional either. Once we understand how language estranged us from our own souls and the souls of those around us, we may someday find ourselves living as sisterhoods and brotherhoods again, without anyone knowing quite how it happened.
