The following excerpt is adapted from the book, The Son of Man & Its Mystic Awakening: Reclaiming Eschatology & Atonement During A Convergence of Globalization, Nihilism, Science, and Spirituality, copyright 2025 by Paule Patterson III. Reprinted here with permission.
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Carl Jung warned that the greatest danger to civilization lies within our own psyche: the unacknowledged shadow we cast onto an ego-driven humanity. As long as we project our darkness outward instead of facing it, we will all become what any large company can become. As he observed, “Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal.” The greatest danger to the world, Jung argued, was the psyche of humanity.
In parallel, René Girard cautioned that a fully globalized world would not pacify human rivalry but intensify it. Starting from families and up to politics, we triangulate as we attempt to make egoic progress in the world. When all of humanity is linked in one mimetic web, ideas and desires spread like wildfire across continents, and minor envies can metastasize into worldwide contests for status, resources, and meaning. The old release valves of conflict—local customs, distance, and slow communication—evaporate.
What remains is a planet-spanning tinderbox of triangulated emotion, each group mirroring and magnifying each other’s fears and wants (minds upon minds and worlds upon worlds).(9) Globalization, in Jung’s and Girard’s combined vision, becomes a double-edged sword: it offers unparalleled connection while priming a colossal psychological crisis if we do not evolve spiritually at the same pace. Underneath this precarious global dynamic lies a profound metaphor: civilization as an organism of organisms, a living holarchy rather than a mere linear saga or a static dialectic. Each society is a complex creature composed of smaller living units—individuals, families, communities, institutions—each a holon that is whole in itself yet part of larger wholes.
Civilizations grow, peak, and eventually decay not by some mechanical fate but by the accumulated health or illness of their constituent parts. When a culture is young, its founding narrative and values act like DNA, providing unity of purpose and identity. There is an energetic coherence—a sense that we are one people under a shared story of who we are and why we exist. As time passes, however, this cultural organism inevitably encounters entropy. Symbolic drift sets in: the vital symbols, rituals, and ideals that once pulsed with life begin to lose their immediacy. Language that was once plain and powerful grows abstract; doctrines that guided action calcify into dogma.
The result is an entropy of meaning. Each successive generation receives an increasingly degenerated copy of the original cultural code, much as a cell line accumulates copying errors over time. This generational entropy creates a widening fracture between generations. The founding vision that electrified great-grandparents often feels like a foreign language to their great-grandchildren. What the elders revered as self-evident truth, the young might now see as empty rhetoric or even hypocrisy. Knowledge builds on knowledge until there’s a gap; an ignorance of the knowledge required to maintain both the machine of civilization as well as the ghost in it (our psyches).
This isn’t due to simple rebelliousness, but in part to a genuine detachment: the inherited symbols no longer match the lived experience of the new era. We watch doctrinal entropy unfold here as well— core beliefs and social covenants lose their binding power. In their place emerges either nihilism (a sense that nothing means anything) or a splintering of micro-meanings across subcultures. Just as Tax law becomes entropic for a civilization over time, so does everything those dollars are tied to (“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”) The once-unifying constitution—be it a literal political document or an unwritten social contract—frays as its terms are stretched and reinterpreted into irrelevance. Each class and community begins to speak its dialect of purpose. Communities and civilizations pulse up and out over each other constantly, as living organisms constantly eating their own tail.
Crucially, as each cultural organism ages, it doesn’t simply break apart; it spreads and diversifies. Pluralism and complexity proliferate. New mini-globalizations emerge within the society itself: distinct tribes and ideologies form inside the whole, each with its own values and gods. A kind of internal Babel arises—narratives fragment into a cacophony of voices. What was once a singular institutional identity now hosts a clash of near-tribes under one roof.
As these competing values diverge and bifurcate into opposing extremes, they generate an ego/shadow bifurcation at the collective level. On one side stands the ego of the civilization: the official ideals it claims to uphold, the bright self-image it projects to itself and the world. On the other side lurks the shadow: all the disowned deeds and repressed truths—the historical injustices, unacknowledged greed, and lingering shames—that contradict the glowing myth. The wider the gap between a society’s self-image and its shadow reality, the more unstable the whole system becomes. Like a psyche split by denial, a culture split by unaddressed guilt and projection will eventually start to behave irrationally, even self-destructively. Jung observed that if a society refuses to integrate its shadow, that shadow will have free rein to wreak havoc—what is repressed returns as collective fate.
The Telos Adam: The Grandchildren of the Son of Man
If the first Adam was formed from dust, and the second conceived of Spirit and born of woman, then the coming of the Son of Man signals something even more radical: a third Adam. Not a new individual, but the emergence of a collective humanity, transfigured. If the first Adam is flesh and fall, and the second Adam, Christ, is Spirit and redemption, then what is the third? Not a replacement, but a telos. Humanity in union and unmitigated potential. This Adam is neither male nor female, but the collective realization of the Kingdom come. It is us—the healed human. Not just reconciled to God, but to neighbor, to body, to self, and to earth. Not Adam alone. Not Eve beside him. But the reconciled whole: divine and dust, bound together in a unity that is not naïve but integrated.
(9): I use “minds upon minds” and “worlds upon worlds” not as invented phrases, but as intuitive echoes of ideas long present in mystic and metaphysical traditions—from Kabbalah and Sufi cosmology to Neoplatonism and Mahayana Buddhism. These terms also gesture back to themes introduced earlier in this book: the recursive nature of human consciousness, the layered “worlds” we each inhabit, and the holarchical structure of reality itself.
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