It is no pleasant thing to spend an entire lifetime watching one’s beloved country descend into insanity, but this has been my fate, and of the fate of any who have come into consciousness within the past half century. I say “who have come into consciousness,” because it is not enough to live; it is necessary to understand what you are living, if only after the fact.
So many people around me are giving in to fear — nameless fear, formless fear, often enough the product of mistaking television for reality. Many others continue to believe in political or ideological panaceas that are, and must be, nothing but illusion.
Obviously these two phenomena are connected, and connected in an unsuspected way — they stem from the loss of meaning which in turn stems from loss of sure spiritual connection. For 150 years at least, and gathering momentum as it proceeds, the descent of our culture into materialist superstition has cut cord after cord that used to tie us to sanity. So now we are in the position of being spiritually rootless, incapable of perceiving what is reality and what is illusion, fearing shadows and continually sowing the dragon’s teeth that spring up as armed men, and wondering why we have no peace.
Why is it that people will follow every sort of leader but the ones who offer wisdom? The following quotations are from an interview that Carl Jung gave in April, 1934. He could be talking about us today:
Continue reading “I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word.”