From natural oscillation to forced capture
The human psyche, when allowed to function, oscillates. It moves between opposites seeking integration. When one pole has been sustained for too long, the unconscious begins to generate the opposing force, and eventually something is reorganized. This movement, slow, sometimes painful, profoundly corrective, was what Jung (1951) called enantiodromia.
What is happening in society today interrupts that process.
The system you live in—and by system I mean the whole comprised of the algorithm, the attention economy, the performance market, polarized political discourse, and media that thrive on conflict—doesn't reward integration. It rewards capture at one extreme. The collective psyche no longer oscillates: it's trapped. The pendulum doesn't complete its swing toward wholeness because there's an active force holding it at one of the poles.
This produces, on a societal scale, the same symptoms that occur in an individual when an identity becomes too rigid: exhaustion, fragmentation, loss of coherence, existential crisis. The difference is that now it happens to millions of people simultaneously, and the machinery that produces it is designed to make it happen.
The antagonism machine
The algorithm, the market, and public discourse operate under the same logic: polarization retains better than nuance.
Extreme content triggers quick emotions, generates lingering interest, and produces a reaction. Nuanced content requires time, attention, and a willingness to engage with complexity. From a system perspective, the latter is inefficient. Shoshana Zuboff (2019) described it precisely: what gets monetized isn't what you think, but the behavior you generate. And the most profitable behavior stems from activation, not reflection.
The same applies to the performance market. A clear, simple, optimizable, and productive identity sells better than a complex, contradictory, and evolving person. Byung-Chul Han (2010) has shown how the performance society pushes you to become an entrepreneur of yourself, where your value depends on your ability to be a consistent brand, a pole, a position.
And the same is true in contemporary political and media discourse. Conflict sells. Tribal identity mobilizes. Left and right, north and south, traditional and progressive, masculine and feminine are now presented as opposing sides rather than as real human tensions that need to be considered together. Mark Fisher (2009) spoke of capitalist realism as the feeling that we can no longer imagine alternatives to the system. A more current version of that idea: we can no longer imagine identities that are not aligned with one side or the other.
These three mechanisms—algorithm, market, discourse—operate together. There is no single agent driving antagonism. There is a complete architecture designed to make integration costly and polarization profitable.
Identity as a product: why you're pushed to one extreme
The more rigidly you identify with one pole, the more predictable you are. The more predictable you are, the easier you are to mold, mobilize, and monetize.
This operates at every level. Politically, if you identify completely with one side, you vote predictably, consume media predictably, and react predictably. Economically, if you identify completely with performance or well-being, with productivity or spirituality, you consume the corresponding products and discard those of the opposite pole. Relationally, if you identify completely with radical autonomy or fusion, with masculinity or femininity understood as opposing essences, you repeat patterns that generate more content, more conflict, and more consumption.
Integration, on the other hand, makes you unpredictable. A person who embraces both strength and vulnerability, discipline and rest, reason and emotion, is not easily captured. They don't fit into a box. They aren't mobilized by a slogan. From the system's perspective, that person is commercially useless.
That's why the push towards the extreme is systematic. It functions as infrastructure.
Contemporary false opposites
A significant part of the problem is that real polarities have been turned into factions.
Productivity and rest represent a real human tension that every body needs to balance. Modern society has turned them into opposing forces: the hustle culture versus the soft life culture. As if you belonged to one tribe or the other.
Rationality and spirituality are two legitimate forms of knowledge that enrich each other. Contemporary discourse turns them into opposing camps: militant skepticism versus magical thinking, science versus holism. As if you had to choose one side or the other.
Autonomy and connection are two basic human needs that every well-balanced person sustains simultaneously. The current narrative portrays them as opposing lifestyles: radical independence versus romantic dependence, individualism versus community.
Masculine and feminine, understood as symbolic polarities that every person contains, have been turned into a permanent cultural war.
Left and right, which for a long time were legitimate ways of sustaining real political tensions, redistribution and freedom, community and individual, have become almost religious tribal identities.
Body and mind, which the best neuroscience and the best clinical practice are trying to reintegrate, continue to be presented as separate territories with their own opposing industries.
In all cases, the operation is the same: take a real polarity, artificially separate it, assign sides, and profit from the conflict that is generated between them.
The body in a polarized society
Living in permanent antagonistic activation has a physiological cost that is almost never mentioned.
The human nervous system is not designed to sustain continuous hypervigilance. Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory (2011) describes how prolonged sympathetic activation—that state of alertness, conflict, and reactivity that the current environment relentlessly produces—ultimately leads the organism to a dorsal vagal collapse: disconnection, apathy, profound fatigue, emotional numbness, and a feeling of emptiness.
A polarized society produces bodies trapped between two equally dysfunctional states: either in constant activation, defending positions, reacting to stimuli, in permanent alert; or in defensive disconnection, exhaustion, withdrawal from the world. Bessel van der Kolk (2014) formulated this in clinical terms when describing how systemic trauma is inscribed on the body: the organism stores what the mind can no longer process.
What appears to be public debate is, physiologically, a chronic activation of the nervous system on a massive scale. What appears to be disinterest or cynicism is, often, the dorsal vagal response of millions of bodies that can no longer sustain any more activation.
And here's something crucial: a dysregulated person cannot sustain complexity. When your nervous system is overloaded, your prefrontal cortex is less available, and your capacity to maintain nuance, contradiction, and ambivalence diminishes. That's why polarization is self-perpetuating. The system dysregulates you, and once dysregulated, you can only function in black and white.
The blocked enantiodromy
Under normal circumstances, the enantiodromic movement is corrective. A culture that has pushed itself too hard toward performance eventually begins to generate movements that champion rest, vulnerability, and slowness. A society that has pushed itself too hard toward rationality begins to develop an interest in the symbolic, the corporeal, and the spiritual. This movement would be healing if it could be completed.
The current problem is that it's not completed. Every compensatory move is captured and turned into a new market pole.
Rest becomes a consumer identity, with its products and aesthetics. Spirituality becomes an industry. Criticism of performance becomes another personal brand. Authenticity becomes performance. Vulnerability becomes content. Every attempt by the collective psyche to seek balance is intercepted, emptied, and resold as a new extreme.
This produces a particularly cruel effect: symptoms become chronic instead of transforming. Exhaustion doesn't lead to profound reorganization; it leads to buying a cure. Anxiety doesn't raise existential questions; it opens a market. Crisis doesn't initiate a process of individuation; it initiates a cycle of therapeutic consumption. The collective psyche attempts to move toward wholeness, and the system returns it, time and again, to profitable polarity.
Integration as an act of resistance
In this context, maintaining internal complexity ceases to be a private choice. It becomes, without you having to actively campaign for it, a political act.
A person who embraces both their strength and vulnerability, their discipline and their need for rest, their critical thinking and their openness, their autonomy and their capacity for connection, their cultural belonging and their critical perspective on it, is someone the system cannot easily mold. Not because they have placed themselves outside the system. That is impossible. But because they have recovered, within it, their capacity for internal fluctuation.
That person can consume content without being consumed by it. They can hold a political position without becoming a caricature of it. They can use the app without the app using them. They can work intensely without building their identity around performance. They can rest without turning rest into another form of disguised productivity.
Internal coherence here functions as a form of sovereignty. It's not about withdrawing from the world. It's about inhabiting it without letting its logic dictate your internal structure.
Recovering the ability to inhabit tension
The real question isn't which side you're on. The real question is whether you still have the psychic capacity to inhabit tensions without collapsing into one of the two extremes.
That capacity is eroding on a massive scale, and it's being deliberately eroded, because its erosion is profitable. Every time you react automatically, every time you fully identify with a position, every time you need the other person to be wrong in order for you to exist, something in you becomes more easily captured, and something in the system wins.
Recovering that capacity is not a political project in the conventional sense. It is a work of internal reorganization that has political consequences. It involves regulating the nervous system, listening to the body before it screams, enduring the discomfort of thinking against oneself, accepting that psychological maturity implies living with unresolved contradictions, ceasing to seek the perfect identity and beginning to seek true wholeness.
Enantiodromia, as a natural movement of the psyche, continues to attempt to occur. It continues to push society and each individual body toward integration. What has changed is that now this movement must be actively defended against a machinery designed to prevent it.
The psyche's ultimate goal was never to defeat the system. It was to become indivisible itself.
Sources and references
Jung, CG (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Princeton University Press. Psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology.
Jung, CG (1957). The Undiscovered Self. Routledge.
Porges, SW (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. WW Norton, PhD, neuroscientist, Indiana University.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, MD, psychiatrist, professor of psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Public Affairs. PhD, Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, Sociologist.
Han, BC. (2010). Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (The Burnout Society). Matthes & Seitz. PhD in philosophy, professor at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Han, BC. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and new techniques of power. Herder.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Zero Books. PhD, cultural theorist, professor at Goldsmiths, University of London.