Comparing/Contrasting 1780s France with the US in 2025
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.“
— usually attributed to Mark Twain (though there’s no evidence he actually said it)
Look closely at France in the 1780s and you’ll see how it rhymes with the US in 2025: extreme wealth inequality, rising debt, and a profound distrust in the very institutions meant to serve ‘the people.’ Even the disconnect between the elite and the working majority seems hauntingly familiar.
But here’s the key difference:
France was a sealed pressure cooker with no release valve. The collective shadow erupted in revolution—violent, chaotic, necessary perhaps, but unconscious.
America is a leaking pressure cooker—still functional, but the shadow material is seeping out everywhere. We see it in our polarization, our scapegoating, our collective projections onto ‘the other.’
The question isn’t whether we’re facing systemic breakdown. The question is whether we’ll choose conscious integration of what we’ve refused to face, or let it erupt unconsciously.
There’s a path forward that doesn’t require revolution. But it requires something most people aren’t prepared for: withdrawing our projections, owning our shadow, and doing the hard work of individuation—both personally and collectively.
We can’t heal the outer world without first confronting what lives in our inner darkness.
The choice is ours: unconscious collapse, or conscious transformation.
