We Need to Talk About the End of the World

How myth and morality drive the collective unconscious

**I’m taking a break from publishing next week, see you on July 6th**

The process of writing is my container for sense-making. I’m in it with you each week, test-driving theories and insights before I share them. It’s usually the best part of my week, sitting down to write. But this week is hard because we need to talk about the end of the world.

Every time I read the news, it seems like something else is on fire. The uncertainty and growing sense of doom are destabilizing. It leads to dissociation. Anxiousness and overwhelm. Or worse—hopelessness. It’s hard to imagine building a new world when you’re navigating the end of this one. It feels like we’re in existential collapse if we’re not actually fighting for our lives. I don’t know what this moment calls for, but it can’t be fear. Fear tends to perpetuate harm, so whatever the opposite of it is, we need some form of that now.

Truth might be the medicine, not to solve our crises but to expose them. Truth has a way of coming to the surface, like roots breaking through concrete to find their way to the light. We may not actively seek it, but it’s always seeking us.

I think that’s what’s happening now in some vulgar form. Through the tension, truth is demanding our attention. I keep oscillating between “we’ve never killed each other less” and “we’ve never had more advanced ways to destroy each other.” Technology combined with a lack of humanity is catastrophic.

The shadow of the collective unconscious is manifesting through us. The shadow is the part of us we don’t want to claim. It hides within, beneath, somewhere out of reach. That would be ok if it stayed calm and quiet. If it had no power. But it’s a beast that rattles its cage. A relentless force of nature that wants to be free. To ignore it is to fuel it. Hunger does nothing to mediate its desire to be expressed. The more we deny and repress it, the more vicious it becomes. That’s because the shadow holds as much truth as the light. As above, so below.

Jung describes the shadow as the unconscious force that directs our lives. This is easier to understand on an individual level. But on a mass scale, it’s hard to conceptualize how some intangible energy can direct the course of history.

For the average person, the unconscious is mostly an internal struggle, impacting only those who come into close and intimate contact. But for leaders at the helm of countries, companies, and communities, it’s a social and cultural weapon. The collective unconscious exists in all of us and is most pronounced in our leaders. What we value and uphold is evident in who we appoint and follow. Who we appoint and follow is a reflection of our deep-seated fears and desires. The ones we may not even admit to ourselves.

Power without conscience

When criminals run the world and make decisions that harm us all with little to no accountability, it sets a precedent. Most of these men have no power on their own; they are incredibly tormented, insecure, and filled with shame. They harvest power from the people and systems that believe in their cause and enable their agenda. From family and friends to boards and advisors to governments, institutions, and media, groups of people are under their spell. Whether through charm, intimidation, or manipulation, they become bigger than they are. Bigger than ethics, morals, and the law. They control people’s livelihoods and freedoms. And every time they get away with abusing the power they did not rightfully earn, they become a little more dangerous.

Harm doesn’t always start with intent. It usually begins with disconnection from self, from others, from consequences. Over time, that disconnection grows into something destructive. When power meets unresolved pain, empathy erodes. And when we lose empathy, we lose our ability to sense or care about the harm we cause. That’s when we begin to inch toward cruelty and evil, not as an identity, but as a byproduct of avoidance. Because we can’t actually sever ourselves, we end up detaching from our humanity, becoming prisoners in our bodies and psyches. Desperate to escape the internal hell, we cause life-altering events in the outside world.

When our circle is small, the consequences are personal. But the more influence we have, the more widespread and harmful they become.

An evil person is often possessed by unintegrated shame. They are not whole, and no power or control can make them whole. This absence of meaning, this void, gets filled with everything from sex to attention to money to love to violence. Extraction, exploitation, and dehumanization become attempts to tame the inner beast. We see this over and over again in fictional stories—Darth Vader, Voldemort, Magneto—trying to put an end to their suffering through domination. But nothing is enough. The only way to transmute evil is to starve the beast. Few people can do this, and amongst them, even fewer choose to.

The problem with shame is that it compounds. The more we avoid it, the bigger it becomes—and the harder it is to face. Time also plays a role. The longer we live, act, and lead from an unintegrated place, the more harm we cause. The more harm we cause, the more shame we bury. That buried shame grows and gains more power.

This is what we’re experiencing now, and what we can’t afford to ignore any longer. The collective unconscious will get louder and fiercer. What may seem far away—some distant crisis in the Middle East—will spread, not just as violence but as ideology. And ideology spreads faster than any virus. Media, technology, and now AI have made it so.

The story is breaking

The world is ending as we know it. A world is upheld by its stories. Stories shape our reality and dictate our beliefs. When we see through the story, when the truth is revealed, when we recognize that the West does not care about human rights, personal freedoms, justice, equity, or democracy, the story collapses. Once the story collapses, that world fragments.

True power unlocks when a group of people begin to see the truth. The process of awakening lifts illusions, and we see reality in its raw form, without our own projections. It’s not people who control us, but the illusions they construct. When we can no longer be manipulated by any person or story, we move toward sovereignty.

The transition from the old world to the new can feel surreal. Stories govern our lives. They give us structure, meaning, and a sense of belonging. Stories about what it means to be good, to know god, or to contribute to something greater than ourselves are shared anchors. In times of chaos, we cling to them because they help us feel less alone, less lost. But feeling lost is a necessary part of writing new stories and creating new worlds. Liminal space is where we make sense of events and timelines. Only when we loosen our grasp on the current reality can we begin to imagine a new one. When we connect dots, we reveal patterns that seed our next evolution.

Storytelling is our most powerful tool for change—personal, cultural, systemic, societal—because stories are the foundation of world-building. Every movement, company, invention, and cultural shift begins with a story. And every story usually starts with a question: What if…? How might we…? Imagine a world…. These aren’t just questions but portals. When we go through them, we discover something we didn’t know before, even if they were obvious.

Reality is transparent, always offering data we choose to acknowledge, process, and synthesize—or not. Reality has no agenda. It’s our agendas that distort reality.

Stories emerge from our current level of consciousness. They’re always being written and rewritten. Whatever you’re dreaming or bringing to life will carry the imprint of your consciousness. That “you” might be personal or collective. And by consciousness, I mean how clearly you can perceive reality and your role in shaping it. Consciousness is our capacity to observe, understand, and participate in what’s unfolding.

But stories don’t just shape our inner worlds, they mushroom. When a story resonates widely enough, over time, it becomes something bigger than itself. It becomes myth.

Myth and meaning

Myths are meaning-making networks beneath culture. Like mycelium underground, they carry information and wisdom through space and time. They are inherited maps for how we understand identity and power. They tell us what’s real and influence what we’re willing to believe is possible.

Stories are time-bound because they’re personal, contextual, and often shaped by the needs or truths of a particular moment. Myths are timeless because they carry deeper universal themes. They speak to the human condition itself. We need myths because we need shared frameworks for sense-making.

Every myth begins with a fracture—something that disrupts the existing worldview. A system stops working. A story breaks down. Meaning loses resonance. And in that void, writers, artists, builders, activists, start telling new stories about who we are and what matters. These stories often begin on the fringes of culture. They live in our bodies and dreams before they gain mainstream attention and acceptance.

Myth has to move people. It has to speak to something deeper, like our need to belong, matter, and transcend. A story becomes a myth when enough people believe in it, organize around it, and begin to live by it. Myths work like source codes, defining the rules of reality. Once a myth is adopted, it informs how we behave, what we create, and how we relate. It provides a sense of right and wrong by being the foundation from which we explain our origins and values.

The politics of morality

Laws and social norms are shaped by the dominant myths of a culture. Some myths are cross-cultural, others are specific to a time, place, or people. From cities to communities to religions and companies, everything is built on myth. Even relationships.

Myths define the moral boundaries of a society. Shame is one of the primary tools used to enforce these boundaries, telling us what is allowed and who gets to belong. Myth and shame are deeply entangled. They reinforce each other by maintaining the illusion of order.

While groups and societies need order, right and wrong aren’t fixed truths. They’re contextual. They only have meaning within a worldview. Myth creates that worldview. Since shame is personal and cultural, it helps keep people in check. This isn’t a bad thing, but who decides what’s moral and what’s not?

Shame-driven control is incredibly effective. To break the spell, we have to recognize how it was cast. People use myths to justify their actions. The same strategies and tactics used in the micro are applied in the macro. Trump’s using nationalism to make control feel like freedom. Netanyahu is leveraging Zionist mythology to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And the Iranian regime uses authority and fear of the other (Israel and America) to justify violence against its citizens. The characters and impact are different, but the playbook is the same: rewrite the story, create confusion and division, make yourself the main character (the saint, the victim, the hero, the villain), and blur the line between belief and truth.

From governments to gurus, liberatory mythologies, emotional coercion, and narrative control are often weaponized as leadership. Power protects itself by creating dependency through love or fear (which often leads to devotion or obedience), appropriating moral language, and using the illusion of freedom to rewire how people perceive the world and themselves within it. We take our power back when we question what we believe and why.

But this kind of questioning wasn’t always possible or necessary. In the past, in many parts of the world, people lived in small, insular communities—some governed by gods or kings (or both), others by elders, customs, or nature. Worldviews were inherited or passed down through tradition, rarely questioned or compared. But everything’s changed. Technology, media, and globalization have enabled cultures to intersect and influence each other. We’re exposed to more perspectives and different ways of being. We don’t just know what’s happening in our small town, we know what’s going on across the world. More data means more insights. Insights lead to revelations. Revelations shatter illusion.

Some myths still serve us. But many are outdated. They no longer reflect the world we’re in or the future we’re trying to build. What we need now is a shared foundation—guiding principles that can expand and hold complexity across borders and belief systems.

The era of unravelling

Over the past couple of years, and more recently this week, I’m hearing people say, “I feel helpless.” We don’t know what to do with what we’re witnessing. It’s hard to process all at once. In a conversation with my dad, he said friends and family keep asking, “Where is god?”

This inquiry is profound. People questioning the presence of god signals a rupture. For centuries, we’ve held onto myths that have helped us make sense of the world, but we’re slowly realizing that perhaps they can’t make sense of this world. That coming to awareness is the beginning of change. Questioning dominant myths marks a significant power shift. Our minds, once under the grip of certainty, are reexamining reality. Something doesn’t feel right. Something’s not adding up. We have to pull on this thread even if it unravels all that we know to be real and true.

The act of questioning can bring up feelings of shame because it challenges the beliefs and narratives we’ve held onto, sometimes for generations. When we question something as fundamental as the existence of god or the goodness of a person, it can feel unnerving because it shakes the foundations of our worldview. And that destabilization can bring up shame because we might feel like we should have had the answers, or that we were somehow wrong or naive in believing the old narrative. But these questions are actually the gateway to new worlds. They help us move beyond old myths and create space for new, more authentic stories to emerge.

Most of the corruption and destruction of the world is caused by people not being able to let go of ideas, entities, and beliefs. We have to let things die—myths, stories, identities, worlds—so something else can take root in their place.

This is the power of myth. Believing it. Living it. Upholding it. But there’s also power in dismantling it. It will unravel on its own, but we have to support the natural evolution of consciousness by being willing to break free from the illusions we individually and collectively sustain, not from a place of shame but from a place of clarity.

The most powerful question we can ask right now comes from Jung himself: “What myth am I living?” What myth are we living? How honestly we answer these questions creates the outline for what happens next.

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