Several of my patients have warned me about the world …
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I am a treating psychologist in Australia and I would like to support this article on the obsessions of being special – Apart from the political comment about Iran ( I think you should be more concerned about the gun laws in your own back yard)
America seems to be the leader in “group” narcissism and events such as Jonestown are pretty much peculiar to the US. Occasionally some freakish cult in Japan reaches the underground train system, but the US seems to be the leader in these sort of predictions and then suicidal reactions to being wrong. Perhaps the nation has been built on the notion of being “Special,” its philosophy fueled by will fullness, ego centricity and the sky is the limit thinking. in my blog I ask some questions that I think America needs to ask of itself rather than worrying about predicting the future.
As horrible the recent tragedy in Connecticut, the prospect of any country with the stated mission of wiping another country from the map holding nuclear weapons should provoke fear in anyone. And the odds of a shooting in a school, as horrible as it is, remain orders of magnitude below the odds of a nuclear Iran.
As to your thoughts of Americans being ‘uniquely obsessed with uniqueness’, I’ve read in the Internationa papers (primarily from the U.K.) that people in some parts of the world, e.g. Eastern Europe, are far more concerned about doomsday scenarios than people in the US– where true believers are a fringe element at best. I think your views of America result from the same limited perspective that fuels exactly what I am referring to… We are a large country, with many people and many sets of beliefs, usually existing in harmony. Sorry– but there is something special about that.
Some of that ‘sky is the limit’ thinking has led to incredible technology– some that benefits even Australia! Jonestown, by the way, started in the US… but found no welcome here– which is why we call it ‘Jonestown’.
Mr junig,
Why worry about iran…only?
I am worried about those nuclear nations/state…including iran.
Are u a jew?
The worry is because of the Iranian President’s stated objective, as noted in my comment.
No.
A very good article for which thanks are in order. Your perspective of feared events in the past parallels my own experience to a certain degree.
A very wise man once said ” Dwell not in the past or dream of the future. Now is the only moment we can experience (in a linear sort of way, so worrying about anything in the future is not very helpful to our present reality.
Yes, similarly, I will not lose sleep over this non-event.
loved this blog post! no, LOVED this blog post. And your response comments.
Come back December 22.
I’ll try!
Thank you. I am on this site because i’ve been battling a severe depressive episode again (trying without meds) and all the recent events/media are making it extremely difficult. Your post has, at the moment, brought me back down to earth. Reading it makes me think, why am I stuck in my head all the time? I feel like im constantly living in fear of all this crap I hear about on the news and read on the internet. Your post said to me- these kinds of things get out of hand all the time, and correct themselves, so go on with your life. I really hope I wake up with the same feelings!
I hope you do too. Remember that you have some degree, at least, of power over what you see and hear. The modern news cycle is not a natural phenomenon, and I sometimes choose to turn it off for a week. I usually discover that I didn’t miss anything that I needed to know!
8 AM in Wisconsin and all’s well. I admit, it was frightening last night when we lost power, as over a foot of wet, heavy snow brought down trees and power lines! But the grid is back up today. Time to get out the shovels!
Of course we live in a special time in history, as has everyone since the Crucifixion nearly 2000 years ago; we live in the latter days, during the inbreaking (to borrow a phrase of Meister Eckhart) of the Kingdom of Heaven, the age of Grace. We live in an age of transfiguration, where grace completes nature (as the Angelic Doctor showed); but throughout all, we have the greatest possible inheritance of cultural and spiritual treasure of any of those that have come before us. The Greeks inherited nothing and built great systems; the Latins inherited the Greek and conquered the world, and Christianity was born within its borders.
But we, the West, are the greatest spendthrifts in history. We have the inheritance and ignore it: that is the Weltgeist. We have the inheritance and squander it: that is the Weltgeist. We live in an age of unbridled decay (I’m a young man by all accounts, not yet reached the middle of his third decade, so I’m not remembering the “good old days” of youth); we live in an age where the “vertical” (metaphysical) has been closed off by the High Priests of Science, at least to their followers – a considerable number of individuals – so the only way left to go is “forward” – to collectivize and evolve ourselves right in to the Millennium and New Jerusalem.
But, undoubtedly, we live in a special age – what age can not claim that? – but whether it be infamous or famous in the future, if the Lord delays his coming, is anyone’s guess: I imagine infamous, and the period of late modernity/postmodernity, starting in the third quarter of the 19th century, will be known as the “Great Folly”. But a great folly is still great; it is still unique, and important.
Now, you may say, Titus Livius points out very well in his Ab urbe condita libri that everything is repeated ad infinitum; bread and circuses, war and peace, a new dictator and new consuls, the peasants crying for agrarian reform and wealth redistribution, party politics, class warfare: the tribunes against the consuls: and the generals throw forth the golden eagle standard in to the ranks of the enemy in order to spur their soldiers on to victory once more – I’ll tell you, there is much valuable in Livy.
You may say that Tullius Cicero showed us to believe nothing, refuting the Stoics, the Peripatetics, the Pythagoreans, and the Platonists in his De natura deorum, in favour of his own Academic skepticism.
But even in the Bible, Solomon – who asked God for wisdom alone – penned the immortal words: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…there is nothing new under the sun.”
Those who know not history are doomed to repeat it. Livy and Solomon add this: those who do know history are also doomed to repeat it.
My $2.02