Conventional wisdom conflates self-interest and selfishness. It makes sense to be self-interested in the long run. It does not make sense to be reflexively selfish in every transaction. And that, unfortunately, is what market fundamentalism and libertarian politics promote: a brand of selfishness that is profoundly against our actual interest.
Yaneer Bar-Yam, the American complexity theorist . . . argues that the level of complexity of modern human society has recently overtaken the complexity of any one person belonging to it . . . . But our individual complexity, as we’ve seen above, serves an important function: it helps us adapt to changes in our circumstances, because it gives us a wider repertoire of responses to those changes.
“The first thing people must grasp, . . . is that we must view Earth’s systems as a functioning whole. We must learn what makes them tick as a whole, not merely the mechanisms of their component parts.”
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants. A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. Thus the Master is available to all people and doesn’t reject anyone. He is ready to use all situations and doesn’t waste anything. This is called embodying the light. What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret.
“We used to believe that modern capitalism was capable, not merely of maintaining the existing standards of life, but of leading us gradually into an economic paradise where we should be comparatively free from economic cares. Now we doubt whether the business man is leading us to a destination far better than our present place. Regarded as a means he is tolerable; regarded as an end he is not so satisfactory.”41 Keynes could not stomach the Soviet experiment. But neither could he tolerate the cultural stagnation he found when he returned to Britain. His country was addicted to an era that had ended a dozen years earlier, incapable of embracing the present.
To this new neglect of economic factors on the part of those who make politics must be added the new over-emphasis on power. Mr. Gross takes Russia’s arguments against a possibly non-democratic federation at their face value and solemnly reassures her of the longing of the peoples concerned for truly democratic and peaceful institutions. He completely overlooks what, after all, is obvious, namely, that Russia being a big Power wants nothing so much as to become an even bigger Power.
If anything, the depth psychology of soul-making, as I have been formulating it, is a via negativa. No ontology. No metaphysics. No cosmology. A knight errant, always off at a tilt, iconoclastic. Archetypal Psychology’s main claim to positivity has been its paradoxical insistence on allowing the shadows to be lit by their own light — hence the long encounters with pathologizing: the underworld, depression, suicide, senex, and the pathologies of the puer.
Accountability. Being wrong is undesirable, but it is also inevitable. We want people to feel safe making mistakes; otherwise they will not venture new hypotheses.
Chronic disease is mitochondrial dysfunction, and mitochondrial dysfunction is chronic disease. They are one and the same.
In any machine structure is one thing, function another; for a machine has to be constructed before it can be set in motion.
The historical re-enactment of past thought which is essential to history proper depends on inferences drawn from present evidence.
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