Carl Jung, as quoted by Deegocracy. I suspect we long ago passed a population level at which our evolutionary development suited us well for comprehension, cooperation, empathy, and confidence. We are anthropologically incapable of emotional and cognitive operations involving six billion individuals. The crowd is an ocean.
Tribalism abounds: we break the world into pieces we can process; we partialize it.
In some of the parts I’ve elected to ignore, all Hell has broken loose: earlier this morning, I was looking for a photo of Jung that adorned one of my father’s books. I searched for “Jung” and looking at images produced.
Mixed in with imaged of the psychiatrist were immediately disturbing photos of an older woman with something terribly wrong with her shape:
(I don’t know how long I can bear to have this image up here, incidentally, so gape while you can).
The inevitable life-killing Internet detour eventually yielded some information. Her name is Cathie Jung and she is a 71-year old lifelong aficionado of corsets, who now has a 15-inch waist. If you’re interested, she naturally has all the archetypal qualities of the odd: she maintains that it’s healthy, she is married to an orthopedic surgeon, etc. And of course, she has a web site.
I’m not going to comment on the catastrophe that is our desire to compress, bleach, stretch, inflate, cut, color, laser, or poison ourselves into attractiveness; I have no idea what sort of pathos led Cathie Jung to this. Perhaps she’s an utterly normal woman who merely likes sculpting flesh.
But after seeing her while looking for Carl Jung, it was interesting to read the above quote as though a message from the two of them. In the crowd of contemporary society, the negligible individual will do whatever is needed to avoid negligibility. A distinction of our age is the obsession with fame, as opposed to success. Until recently, one wanted to be famous for something: as a painter, as a statesman, as a hero, as a lover, a success.
Now, our entire popular culture is arranged around the haphazard distribution of fame -non-negligibility- to the detritus of the media-classes. Even they rarely maintain that they posses talent; fame has replaced talent, because it emerges that as we are buried in the crowds not art or skill or bravery is what matters: one must just not be subsumed in anonymity.
It’s likely that these blogs of ours are no different.
Update: The correct attribution of this quote is to Alex Carnevale, of This Recording, who posted it here. I apologize to him (and would delete and reblog were comments not already attached).
