Only Ourselves to Blame

I am always amazed by what is available now on YouTube and other video-sharing websites. Aside from the ubiquitous videos of fat men on bicycles demolishing their own testicles or some other form of humiliation, you can also find much more serious and important material -- interviews with great thinkers and writers like Ayn Rand. Lectures by noble laureates like Milton Freedman. Debates about God with the likes of Christopher Htchens. Lessons in Quantum Mechanics and matters of scientific theory with John Hegelin. You can watch mainstream media heads like Dan Rather or esoteric gurus on the tattered fringes like David Icke. So much is available with seemingly endless possibilities.

The other day I was watching an old interview with an equally old Carl Jung: He spoke with a difficult German accent into a 1950s-era sound system with a video quality that reeked of archive, but I was mesmerized nonetheless. The interview is interesting just as much for the provocative content as it is for the fact that here is this lauded figurehead of psychoanalytical thought -- a man whose theories I was tested over in college, whose works I have conceptualized, whose ideas I find provocative and enlightening, a guy who only existed on paper until this very moment -- and now I get to watch his animated and colorless image defy mortality.

His thin form bears the curvature of age, energetic beyond his years -- I can get a sense of the man behind the theoretical models and case-studies. I can see him staying up late and writing into a relentless journal, testing hypotheses, investigating literature and art and history for evidence of that common realm of mystical consciousness that connects all mankind.

There is a great line in the interview when Jung emphatically asserts: We know nothing of man. Far too little. His psyche should be studied because WE ARE the origin of all coming evil.

And from this simple and elegant observation... I have been spinning all day.

***

Our systems of government and rulership are manifestations of our own psychological weaknesses. These rulers and institutions and politicians are the mutated growth of our own fears and phantoms. Just as religion speaks to our primitive need to be ruled from the seat of celestial power, our bloated government bureaucracy reflects a desire to be ruled from the secular throne as well. We are the source of our own enslavement. We exist in a sort of hypnotic trance and naively believe in the good intentions of man -- but we fail to see the clumsy brutality of government when we employ its power and force as the grand master of these good intentions. --Healthcare for all! Homeland Security!

Men and women who seek power are attracted to this manifestation as if by force of gravity. They believe that their own vision of a "just" society must be imposed upon everyone else... for their own shitty good. Others who share this vision seek the same source of power from which they can apply a similar conception. Those who disagree seek the same. And our rulers suckle the erogenous zones of power for the strength required to dominate their fellow man -- satisfying their sadistic psychological hedonism for the good of us all. As such, our system of government becomes a weapon of inevitable self-destruction.

Power creates a frenzy, an ecstatic orgy. And the orgy must go on...

Will we ever realize that we do not need to be ruled or governed? Will we stop employing the destructive power of government -- imposing restrictions on others so that we may force them to live as we imagine to be proper? It is merely a reflection of our own fears and weaknesses that we have created such a devious system of power and manipulation. Carl Jung was right. We are indeed the source of all future evil.

Our children will call it tyranny.