Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at least bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.
Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est--all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.
Jung, a famous Swiss psychiatrist (though that's only the label of his profession, I'd say he goes far beyond that) wrote this at 81 in 1957. This is by no means an isolated view of the so-called improvement of lifestyle given to us by technology and the clawed conveniences hidden therein. Buddhism and Taoism speak of a person's "root" as well and it is no surprise he brings it up here after having researched those and Chinese and Indian philosophies.
Another book I raced through yesterday, e.g. in a single day, brought the same sort of thing to light:
We live in a world of entertainment. We are always looking for ways to distract ourselves. We try to save time and make everything easier and more productive. Now, we are bored. Work is boring. Home is boring. People are boring. What do we do?... and ...
I turn around in my lazy, cushioned, roll chair in the place where one reads books (library), and I see four people typing away, working hard. They could be writing books or finishing homework. So much production is being pumped out of the four I witness. I glance at the monitors and see them all on the same web page. It looks like a famous social network. How wasteful are we?He defines "Social Networks" in his Mini Dictionary section as a way to keep in touch with people you don't care about, except to make sure they're not more successful than you.
That is all from How to Talk to Famous People: and make your grandma laugh which I purchased due to its low price, pleasing easy-to-read style, and the motivation of overcoming my own shyness. Perhaps the parallels I draw between two separate authors and potentially disparate subject matter (Jung may refer more to the military machine, having gone through two world wars) is tenuous but there is a truism and a seriousness to it that I hold to be worth pursuing.
I would like a stronger root, focused attention, and deeper meaning. How about you?
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