Carl Jung: What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation?

Carl Jung: What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation?

Civilization in Transition CW 10

What, then, has the West, with its political and denominational schisms, to offer to modern man in his need?

Nothing, unfortunately, except a variety of paths all leading to one goal which is practically indistinguishable from the Marxist ideal.

It requires no special effort of understanding to see where the Communist ideology gets the certainty of its belief that time is on its side, and that the world is ripe for conversion.

The facts speak a language that is all too plain in this respect.

It will not help us in the West to shut our eyes to this and not recognize our fatal vulnerability.

Anyone who has once learned to submit absolutely to a collective belief and to renounce his eternal right to freedom and the equally eternal duty of individual responsibility will persist in this attitude, and will be able to march with the same credulity and the same lack of criticism in the reverse direction, if another and manifestly “better” belief is foisted upon his alleged idealism.

What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation?

We accuse the Germans of having forgotten it all again already, but the truth is that we don’t know for certain whether something similar might not happen elsewhere.

It would not be surprising if it did and if another civilized nation succumbed to the infection of a uniform and one-sided idea.

We permit ourselves the question: which countries have the biggest Communist parties?

America, which—O quae mutatio rerum!—forms the real political backbone of Western Europe, seems to be immune because of the outspoken  Counter-position she has adopted, but in point of fact she is perhaps even more vulnerable than Europe, since her educational system is the most influenced by the

scientific Weltanschauung with its statistical truths, and her mixed population finds it difficult to strike roots in a soil that is practically without history.

The historical and humanistic type of education so sorely needed in such circumstances leads, on the contrary, a Cinderella existence.

Though Europe possesses this latter requirement, she uses it to her own undoing in the form of nationalistic egoisms and paralysing scepticism.

Common to both is the materialistic and collectivist goal, and both lack the very thing that expresses and grips the whole man, namely, an idea which puts the individual human being in the centre as the measure of all things. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 523

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