10/14/2011
Ruthann Duncan recently posted the following discussion topic:
The quote from Jung which heads the home page of this website is from the essay "Mind and Earth" in Volume 10 of the CW. I am working through this volume with a small reading group, and coincidentally Civilization in Transition, the title of this volume, is also the topic of a conference to be held in New Mexico in the fall. Jung's essays in this volume on the collective psychological situation in Germany before, during, and after the two world wars have much to ponder in our time, especially his comments on democracy and the State. Speaking about projection of inner conflict onto outer objects, he says, in "The Fight With The Shadow", "Anything that disappears from your psychological inventory is apt to turn up in the guise of a hostile neighbour, who will inevitably arouse your anger and make you aggressive. It is surely better to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart. Man's warlike instincts are ineradicable--therefore a state of perfect peace is unthinkable. Moreover, peace is uncanny because it breeds war. True democracy is a highly psychological institution which takes account of human nature as it is and makes allowances for the necessity of conflict within its own national boundaries."
"The great Western democracies have a better chance (of learning the lessons from Germany), so long as they can keep out of those wars that always tempt them to believe in external enemies and in the desirability of internal peace. The marked tendency of the Western democracies to internal dissension is the very thing that could lead them into a more hopeful path. But I am afraid that this hope will be deferred by powers which still believe in the contrary process, in the destruction of the individual and the increase of the fiction we call the State."
He ends the essay with these thoughts:
"The state is expected nowadays to accomplish what nobody would expect from an individual. The dangerous slope leading down to mass psychology begins with this plausible thinking in large numbers, in terms of powerful organizations where the individual dwindles to a mere cipher. Everything that exceeds a certain human size evokes equally inhuman powers in man's unconscious. Totalitarian demons are called forth, instead of the realization that all that can really be accomplished is an infinitesimal step forward in the moral nature of the individual. the destructive power of our weapons has increased beyond all measure, and this forces a psychological question on mankind: Is the mental and moral condition of the men who decide on the use of these weapons equal to the enormity of the possible consequences?" CG Jung, CW 10, Pp.456-7. First presented as a talk in 1946 on BBC radio.
I wonder if anybody in the State Department ever reads Jung?
