Carl Jung Quotations
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Dear Chuck,
I've never seen Braveheart, mostly because I dread confinement in a rumpus room with Mel Gibson's ego.
I agree: it is remarkable "how fast movies get dated." (In this regard, review "car ads" from any decade but the one we live in.)
As you suggest, the receding horizon of "edginess" is one reason for obsolescence.
Plus, the zeitgeist impinges irrepressibly.
Plus, the zeitgeist impinges irrepressibly.
If The Scale Of Sanity had not shifted tectonically in the years since Reagan, Tea Party ideology would induce continual displays of projectile vomiting.
Instead, bilge is construed as an essential nutrient.
This transmogrification of "meaning" is structurally similar to the rise of Nazism in the '30s.
Had we been there, there is an excellent chance Reifenstahl's movies and The Nuremberg Rallies would have felt cozy and sheltering.
Had we been there, there is an excellent chance Reifenstahl's movies and The Nuremberg Rallies would have felt cozy and sheltering.
Speaking of which, here's a tantalizing short:
Pax tecum
Alan
On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 3:12 AM, CH wrote:
On Mar 2, 2014 9:47 AM, "Alan Archibald" <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:
Been scratching my head over best picture most of my life. I remember thinking Babe was better than Braveheart.Funny how fast movies get dated. "Crash" seemed serious and edgy at the time. Never thought the stuttering movie was more than fluff. Last year, for me it was Cloud Atlas, Anna Karenina and Moonrise Kingdom.Fun to review lists of nominees and winners. A surprising number of great movies were appropriately rewarded, like Casablanca.The music and song categories have a similar history of hits and maddening misses.We should go over the list sometime. Fun to groan with injustice about awards the film industry awards itself!
C
On Mar 2, 2014 9:47 AM, "Alan Archibald" <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear C,I look forward to your comments.http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/03/what-was- biggest-oscar-night-mistake. html
Pax tecumAlan
Alan: The following blog post from "Thoughts on Thought" contains many good ideas although it is not particularly well written. http://thoughtsonthought.weebly.com/zeitgeist.html
The word zeitgeist translates as spirit of the times, from the German zeit – time and geist – spirit. It means not only the prevailing norms but more the thrust or direction of new, but becoming accepted ideas, a common purpose shared between people in a culture. This can include weighty moral issues, slavery and public executions, where once both were accepted in Europe now they are repugnant to the majority of people. I qualify this by saying Europe because although they are repugnant to people in many other places also, in some parts of the world they are still going strong, human beings in different cultural surrounding can hold radically different moral views. Zeitgeist can be more fun though, think of a decade and you can think of it's cultural zeitgeist, often more easily perceived with hindsight than at the time, Twenties - flappers and jazz, Sixties – Beatles and flower power, Eighties – yuppies and red braces. These trends come about not only because people are thinking in a similar way, but their ideas are changing in a synchronised fashion together. It is one thing for people to have to same ideas as others, Socrates was quoted as saying that the young people of his day had no respect for their elders, were frivolous, and dressed appallingly, and two and a half thousand years later people have the same complaints. Clearly not so much spirit of the age, as the eternal human condition. It is quite different to observe thousands or millions of minds moving along in unison like birds flying in formation to new lands. The nature of the times in which we live is of great interest to all of us, but of enormous interest to those with the most to gain or lose from these changing currents. Advertisers, politicians and music promoters can see fortunes gained or lost, careers soaring high or ending, based on the fickle public mood.
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim at the end of the nineteenth century called the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which bind a society together, the collective consciousness of that society. This is a good description but not a mechanism, the society is made up of the people within it, so where does it's collective consciousness reside and who decides what it is? In the early twentieth century Carl Gustav Jung, an analytical psychologist and contemporary of Freud, proposed the collective unconscious to account for these phenomena. Jung had been a close colleague of Freud, who had developed a theory of the unconscious mind and a personality theory of a mind of three parts, id, ego and super-ego. At the time Freud's ideas were pretty revolutionary, a mind that consisted of more than a unified whole and an unconscious whose workings we were not aware of, were forward reaching concepts. Freud developed his ideas from listening to his patients talking about their problems, 'the talking cure'. Unfortunately he lived in very sexually repressed times, many of his patients were suffering with guilt and anger from sexual feelings that would be considered unremarkable today. He mistook his patients difficulties in discussing sexual matters for repression of memories of sexual incidents, he could help people by getting them to talk about there difficulties but they must often have been more aware of their problems, before they could talk about them with a stranger than he gave them credit for. Post traumatic shock is now better understood, people are more likely to need help integrating memories of traumatic events and coping with sudden involuntary flashbacks, than with uncovering repressed incidents. Unfortunately one legacy of Freud's work is recovered memory 'therapy', where memories are implanted into patients minds, a surprisingly easy process, in the guise of uncovering their pasts. One give away with this highly harmful practice is that the therapists tend to find what they are looking for, an alien abduction specialist will find hidden memories of aliens whereas a child sexual abuse therapist will uncover forgotten sexual abuse. Freud's effort to get repressed middle class women to open up about their sexual desires were benign in comparison.
Jung first met Freud in 1907, when he was thirty and Freud fifty, upon meeting they talked for thirteen hours and began an intense collaboration. Their close association soured as intensely as it had began, and they last met 1913. They fell out over the nature of the unconscious mind, Jung thought that Freud saw the unconscious only as a dumping ground for bad thoughts and desires, a rubbish tip, whereas he saw it as a territory to be explored a vast collection of archetypes, neither good nor evil. These archetypes were to be found in the collective unconscious below the level of the personal unconscious and shared between all humans or all humans in a racial group. They were universal forms, ideas found in stories, myth and legend, but actually already present in the minds of all of us, such as the scarab beetle as a symbol of death or more generally the concept of masculine and feminine.
Jung's ideas have an echo in more modern developments in psychology. For many years psychologists debated whether psychology should be considered a scientific discipline or a more philosophical pursuit. Freud's approach was one of philosophising and story telling, a suitable anecdote was about as close as he ever got to offering any proof of his theories. Many later psychologist conducted careful and well designed research but lamented the lack of any overall theoretical framework for their endeavours. Chemists and biologists operate with a theoretical framework and physics is itself a framework, although a slightly incomplete one. The answer was to view the human being as part of the natural world and therefore use the same basis as biology the ideas of evolution and natural selection.
Evolutionary psychology (EP), is a fast growing area of psychology that seeks to understand the human mind by understanding the nature of it's evolution and the survival problems that our brains have developed to overcome. Evolution is a slow process and so evolutionary psychologists work on the premise that our brains have developed to survive in the stone age, which was hundreds of thousands of years long, and that there has not been time for any real evolutionary change to adapt us for more modern times, only a period of a couple of thousand years. This means we all share brain structures that evolved for palaeolithic survival, not only similar vision and hearing, but also an innate ability to learn language, patterns of sexual behaviour and even a fear of snakes and spiders, which makes a good deal of sense in most of the world where they can easily kill you. It would also explain why babies appear to instinctively avoid yellow flames made by a wood fire, but not the blue flame of burning gas. Seen from this modern perspective Jung's ideas of a collective unconscious of archetypes make some sense, and it may well be that this is how it will be remembered, reading Jung's own works though it seems less clear. It is unlikely that we would evolve anything as specific as a recognition of a scarab beetle as a symbol of death, a general fear of snake and spider shaped things is much more useful and generic. At times Jung's books seem to suggest a shared unconscious which we all tap into and through which ideas can peculate between individuals.
This is not so outlandish for Jung as we may think many of his ideas bordered upon the supernatural, he was fascinated by something he called synchronicity, and which he thought was evidence for his collective unconscious theory. Synchronicity happens when unconnected events, acausal events as Jung called them, form a meaningful pattern. One example he gives is of a Frenchman Emile Deschamps who wrote that he was given some plum pudding by a Monsieur de Fontgibu in 1805 and then in 1815 when he ordered plum pudding in a restaurant the waiter pointed out the man who had had the last piece and it was the same Monsieur de Fontgibu. Then in 1832 Deschamps was eating plum pudding and telling his friends about the earlier incident when Monsieur de Fontgibu happens to walk into the same room. These events are not subject to a common cause but do appear to form a pattern and Jung saw this as significant. In truth when these coincidences happen to us it does gives us a spooky feeling. It triggers the powerful pattern recognition centres in out brain without a cause being apparent. Also in truth though, even if the chances of something happening are pretty remote they still have to happen sometimes. A one in a million chance event must happen to a least sixty people in the United Kingdom every day, and Jung had to delve back one hundred years to find a story of a man's appearances coinciding with that of a type of pudding three times. Our brains by their nature see patterns as significant even if nothing actually connects them, because patterns are usually important and our unconscious processes can not tell a good pattern from a bad one. The really strange thing would be to live in a world where coincidences never happened, even occasionally, during an entire lifetime. Jung knew about conformation bias, but could not see his desire to see significance in coincidence was an illusion. At the time it was though by some that the collective unconscious and synchronicity would help explain astrology, however when astrology is put to the test, it fails to predicate any better than random chance and so there is no need to explain an underlying mechanism that helps it work.
he human brain is not just a blank general purpose information processing system, some of it's underlying assumptions are shared. It is not always easily to specify exactly which, but characteristics found across all cultures are likely to originate either from genetic instructions or our shared experiences of living in the same world. Children's minds develop in a similar way and to a similar timetable across the planet. All of this will lead to a basic shared unconscious where we might share a fear of the dark or death, but not details of different types of beetles, a simple form of Jung's collective unconscious.
In out lives though thoughts and ideas are shared much more than this Jung-lite shared evolutionary past, collective unconscious could explain. Morals, fashions political ideas, change throughout an entire culture in a short space of time, nothing to do with any change in our joint stone age genetic inheritance. Political ideas can change radically in months, fashions change with the season and moral panics can sweep though a nation in days. Some of this is due to deliberate conscious copying of others. People look to their peers and high status individuals when thinking how to present themselves or when facing moral choices. Imitation too, does not explain the spread of the zeitgeist in a culture, ideas are not just copied they are picked up seemingly out of the ether, people find themselves behaving in ways they have not consciously copied. The mechanism that does explain the seeming collective unconscious is memetics. Memes have no consciousness they are just pieces of information but they do spread and can do so unconsciously. A successful meme is one that spreads easily and stealthily, the stealth element meaning it will not arouse any resistance. A very successful meme can quickly become prevalent in the cultural milieu it inhabits, this could mean a niche group, a town or a country. It's spread is limited by borders of communication. Benign or malevolent memes both spread in the same way like viruses using their hosts to reproduce themselves until they have infected as many minds as they can spread to. In this way new ideas that tick all the correct boxes can spread through a population like wildfire. 'Everybody', meaning most of the members of what ever the target group is will soon start to act in the new way. Remember most memes are wild, i.e. not created deliberately, but they arise through natural selection. Man made memes such as fashions or pop records are also subject to the laws of natural selection but are deliberately introduced into their target populations.The rapid spread, and pervasive nature of memes means whole populations can share ideas not shared by their neighbours separated by barriers of communication. This can lead to startling differences in groups who are genetically very similar. We are all familiar with language and how in Europe in particular it is highly localised and exclusive, but behaviour can also be different. Under Nazi occupation during the Second World War in Denmark when the order came to arrest the Jewish population, the Danish resistance organised a huge effort and smuggled 8,000 Jews into neutral Sweden, 99% of Danish Jews survived the Holocaust. In Hungary there was no such rescue effort and over 75% of the Jewish population were murdered. Radically different behaviour from different populations. In this way we can see cultures as different collections of memes, or populations of memes within the human population. The changing spirit of the times is the drift due to the process of natural selection of the meme population within human minds, no one person or group is in control of this process, although many may wish they were, ideas catch on or become something nobody believes any more, through unconscious evolutionary processes.
Conspiracy theories are powerful memes in themselves, once believed they can generate a lot of cognitive dissonance to stay put, once they spread the numbers of people who believe in them can add to their seeming importance. Of course the number of people who accept a meme is a measure of the success of that meme rather than it's truthfulness. Conspiracy theories often depend on shadowy, unseen forces controlling things, these forces are groups of people hidden but having great power. Most, but not all, conspiracy theories are either contradictory or easily falsifiable and the theorist's answer to any criticism is usually to add another layer of hidden secret power seeking to control peoples understanding of conspiracy. The idea that it was the American government that organised the 11th of September attacks rather than a bunch of America hating Muslims, is distasteful and unlikely, but the conspiracy would have to include the terrorists who admitted to carrying it out. The conspiracy theory claiming that no astronauts went to the Moon would have us believe that the Russian government, America's deadly foes at the time, who could easily have exposed a hoax, were in on the cover up. A better understanding of zeitgeist and memetics could help a lot of people see how ideas right or wrong can spread without any person or group of people being behind it. The memes pass from person to person without any plan, but when we are aware of the process we see them for what they are and test ideas using evidence and reason rather than letting a good narrative run away with itself.
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