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Carl Jung
The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and
the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest
passes for a prophet and Führer, and sometimes it is luckily
the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since
have perished of stupidity.
Man needs difficulties;
they are necessary for health.
Resistance to the
organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well
organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
I
cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we
feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who
are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an
atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is
not a virtue but a vice.
Who has fully realized that
history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very
blood?
An inflated consciousness is always egocentric
and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is
incapable of learning from the past, incapable of
understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing
right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself
and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms
itself to calamities that must strike it dead.
Just as
the body reacts in a purposeful way to wounds or infections or
an abnormal way of living, so the psychic functions react to
unnatural or injurious disturbances with appropriate means of
defence. One of these purposeful reactions is the dream, in
which the unconscious material constellated round a given
conscious position is presented to the conscious mind in
symbolic form. In this unconscious material are all those
associations which have remained in the unconscious because
they were only weakly emphasized but which nevertheless have
sufficient energy to make themselves felt during sleep.
Naturally the purposeful character of the dream-content cannot
be directly seen from the manifest dream-content; it requires
an analysis of this manifest content to reach the actual
compensatory factors of the latent dream-content. But most
physical defensive reactions are of the same scarcely
recognizable and, so to speak, indirect nature, and their
purposeful character also has only been recognized through
deep investigation and exact observation. I might recall, for
instance, the meaning of fever and the processes of
suppuration in an infected wound.
If one does not
understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
It is just man's turning away from instinct, his
opposing himself to instinct, that creates consciousness.
Instinct is nature and seeks to perpetuate nature; while
consciousness can only seek culture or its denial.
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Scott Adams (Dilbert creator)
[After quoting a passage from Shakespeare] Now,
maybe someone drugg'd my posset, but I'm fairly certain
that none of that makes any sense.
When I was a
kid, if something made no sense to me, I assumed the
problem was on my end. But now that I am an adult, and I
know everything there is to know, I realize that the
source of most confusion is Induhviduals - sometimes
economists, occasionally poltergeists, but mostly
Induhviduals.
Maybe the word "bard" meant
something different a few hundred years ago and that's
what caused the confusion - as in, "He was so full of
bard you could grow squash in his earholes."
Or
maybe some Irish people attended Shakespeare's plays and
said they were BORED, but it came out sounding like BARD
to the English. That could've happened.
There's
really no excuse for Shakespeare's shoddy work. If you
were Shakespeare, and you had nothing to do all day but
sit around in huge pants and write plays, don't you
think you could at least make them comprehensible? To
me, that seems like the minimum requirement for a play:
The audience should have a vague idea of what the actors
are saying.
I'm certain that the fans of
Shakespeare will tell me I would enjoy his work if only
I took the time to understand it. But that's like saying
I would love polka music if I took the time to translate
it in my head into the sound of a band I like.
I
guess I just expect more from my bards.
Lately I have found myself in e-mail discussions
with Induhviduals who employ debating tactics that are
very similar. I suspect they are learning these methods
in some sort of top-secret Induhvidual training
facility.
The Induhvidual debating technique
involves four steps:
1. Exaggerate your
opponent's statement into an absurd absolute.
2.
Make an inappropriate analogy.
3. Change the topic
to something easier to defend.
4. Claim victory.
For example:
Me: Vegetables are good for
you.
Induhvidual: That's ridiculous. If you ate
a truckload of vegetables all at once you would die.
Me: No one eats a truckload all at once.
Induhvidual: Let me give you an analogy. If you
tried to swim across the ocean, and you didn't know how
to swim, and you had no arms or legs, you'd never make
it. Surely you can agree with that.
Me:
Um...that's different.
Induhvidual: Ha! So now
you agree with me that swimming is good exercise!
The worst part is that not only will you be
frustrated at your inability to make your point, you
will be branded as the person who thinks swimming is bad
exercise.
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