If the culture is dying (and they do that sometimes) then what?

[Guest guest]

We are inheritors of a culture largely intact since before the Induatial

Revolution. Trying to think about that whole culture and how it worked and is

changing makes my head swim. Most books on the culture pull a thread here or

there then stop short, for fear of unravelling too much.

The Jungian approach combined with an attempt at current structural trends seems

a better place to start. (Freud was a great help to my generation but is so

discredited that only Jung is useful.)

Jung goes to the question of what it is to be human. He lays out more of that

than was reasonable to expect, but then he dealt with life story after life

story. He did not obscure the part that landscape or culture or technology

played. Thus it is easy, thinking Jung to include a different landscape or

culture or technology.

That's a very good thing since the earth and it's landscapes seem to be going

through one of those shifts which we knew happened, although we didn't expect it

for ourselves in our lifetimes.

The technology merges with landscapes and our human beingness -- cell phones

every where that can call for help cross planet, or undercut official reality

with the real thing.

The result is naturally revolutions in culture, but that is a very unsettling

thing -- and seems silly where the elder culture still could be operated (if it

weren't for some people.)

Now we think inside cultures Thinking outside or beyond culture is called

psychic or creative or insanity. Jung as a resource has the advantage that he

was inclusive of that larger thinking.

Part of politics today is an attempt to get Others (surely the plural of Thou?)

to stop living outside the dying culture.

Most of the international War on Drugs is about stoping illicit thinking.( Why

else is a roadside weed such a force for enlarging the prison system in the

United States?)

If there is a perverse version of Jungiansism it must be the demand to always be

sweet, to discard the dragon within instead of finding excellent work suitable

to dragons.

Hopefully replacement culture or cultures are naturally growing everywhere, but

like grass under cement, destroying the indestructible by accident during the

growing.

Realistically we are likely to have extreme local reactions to new life

container options. We have already observed a plenty and history if full of

such.

Hopefully, by stressing the humanity in every kind of cultural container,

Jungian concepts can do that helpin, healing, raising and such that Buber talked

about.

Jane Axtell