Excerpt from current reading

[degringolade]

 

THE PLIGHT OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN MODERN SOCIETY (i)

 

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What will the future bring? From time immemorial this question has occupied men’s minds, though not always to the same degree. Historically, it is chiefly in times of physical, political, economic, and spiritual distress that men’s eyes turn with anxious hope to the future, and when anticipations, utopias, and apocalyptic visions multiply. One thinks, for instance, of the chiliastic expectations of the Augustan age at the beginning of the Christian era, or of the spiritual changes in the West which accompanied the end of the first millennium. Today, as the end of the second millennium draws near, we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction. What is the significance of that split, symbolized by the “Iron Curtain,” which divides humanity into two halves? What will become of our civilization, and of man himself, if the hydrogen bombs begin to go off, or if the spiritual and moral darkness of State absolutism should spread over Europe?

We have no reason to take this threat lightly. Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally

stable stratum of the population. One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about forty per cent of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a-rule, ‘the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.

Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish- fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic. Under these conditions all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums, For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behaviour, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced unconsciously by pathological and perverse factors. There are, of course, no medical statistics on the frequency of latent psychoses—for understandable reasons. But even if their number should amount to less than ten times that of the manifest psychoses and of manifest criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population figures they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people. Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies. In a milieu of this kind they are the adapted ones, and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, sustained by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there; they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight. They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self-knowledge.

(i)  Jung, Carl Gustav, 1990, The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of dreams. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Comments

[k_a_nitz]

"What is the significance of that split"?
It makes me think of how the period from the start of the twentieth centuries has been defined by just that word - 'split'. The split between socialism and capitalism, the splitting of the atom, organic vs GMO, the split between axis and allies in WWII (and between the central powers and the allies in WWI), between fascism and communism, between the left and right, between the 1% and the rest, between democracy and autocracy, between the east and the west, between Islam and the west, the developed and the developing world, the north and the south, the media vs disinformation, science vs conspiracy thinking, and in politics in the west it is mostly a dualism of blocs, even in multi-party states (ie the respectable parties vs the AfD in Germany, etc). The Zeitgeist seems to be driven by the split with most reactions more about favouring one side than finding an alternative.
Given that an argument could be made that it was all set off by dialectical materialism, there seems little evidence of any synthesis, let alone a third way.

But what really bothers me about this text is "Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population."
One person's critical reason can be another's subversive incendiarism, and I think Steiner lacked the awareness here that he might be viewed as one of that subversive minority.

Good Thoughts

[degringolade]

In a nutshell, I don't particularly like Hegel, but his Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis (TAS) description holds strong in a bunch (perhaps a slight majority) of theoretical descriptions of political/cultural processes. It doesn't work a significant amount of the time, I would guess that the total is 60:40 in favor of the TAS.

In my limited view, Jung has a lot to offer, but you have to remember that Jung, while not as bad a Freud, was arrogant and crazy enough to consider himself a prophet. He thinks that he has it figured out and that he is right.

That being said, and in my stochastic/Baysian worldview, he has a great deal of insight about how his mind works, but seems to forget that his mind is not a template for how everyone else's mind works.

I think that his direct descendent must be Josep Borrell. He sees the worldview and the comfort of Europe as the garden that Jung would approve of.

One of the issues of delving into one's personal psyche is the mistake of thinking it universal. Jung was arrogant throughout his work.

I think that I will write more about this later today after my walk. I find value in Jung's work. But as in every work created by humans, it is a blend of true:false, good:bad.