CARL JUNG

1/29/2008 2:32:19 PM

consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being. The carrier is the individual, who does not produce psyche of his own volition, but is preformed (performed?) by it.

there are many apparently normal people with latent psychoses, and they are all the more dangerous for their outward normality. their chimerical ideas appeal to collective irrationality, expressing all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight. a source of infection precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only limited self-knowledge (which they think is completely granted by the mere fact of acknowledging an ego-presence)

man requires an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. the individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.

Merely intellectual or even moral insight into the stultification and moral irresponsibility of the mass man is negative recognition only and amounts to not much more than a wavering on the road to atomization of the individual. it lacks the driving force of religious conviction.

fanaticism under state absolutism is overcompensation for the secret doubts generated by abandoning individual religious functions to the state. people believed especially in fascism because of their very doubts, not a lack of scruples.

there is a feeling of security in the 'magical', since all decisions are one-sided and therefore felt to be a risk. the dictator employes brass bands, flags, banners, parades, to scare off demons. this engenders a collective security which gives the individual no protection against his inner demonism. hence he clings all the more to the state, putting the finishing touch to his social depotentiation.

religion arose naturally because primitive man observed discrepancies between his actions, their consequences, and his intentions. thus he had a 'natural' knowledge of external forces and their power. i.e. his conscious functions may at any time be thwarted by uncontrollable forces, either internal or external.


yesterday:

Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into conflict .. the accumulation of individuals in this critical state starts off a mass movement purporting to be the champion of the suppressed.

In accordance with the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world, the cry goes up for political and social changes..

but this is a simple reversal: the underside comes to the top, the root of the evil is untouched and merely the counterposition has come to light. the freedom of the "liberated" underdog must suffer Draconian curtailment.


The communist revolution has debased man far lower than democratic collective psychology has done, because it robs him of his freedom not only in the social but in the moral and spiritual sphere.

this creates a great psychological disadvantage for the West: we can now point a finger at the shadow. He is clearly on the other side of the political frontier. Western man is in danger of losing his shadow altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and the world with the abstract picture painted by scientific rationalism. His spiritual and moral opponent, who is just as real as he, no longer dwells in his own breast but beyond the geographical line of division, which no longer represents an outward political barrier but splits off the conscious from the unconscious man more and more menacingly.

Thinking and feeling lose their inner polarity, not even a god can check the sovereign sway of unleashed psychic functions.

Even today psychology is still, for the most part, the science of conscious contents, measured as far as possible by collective standards. The individual psyche has become a mere accident, a marginal phenomenon, while the unconscious, which can manifest itself only in the real, "irrationally given" human being, has been ignored. this is downright resistance to the possibility of a second psychic authority besides the ego.

the religious person is accustomed to not being sole master in his own house, so long as he can hold fast to his traditional beliefs and the circumstances do not demand stronger emphasis on individual autonomy. but with the appearance en masse of those who have lost religious beliefs, the believer is forced onto the defensive, no longer sustained by the tremendous suggestive power of consensus omnium.

Absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs.

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