Category: General Insights

“Nothing is more useful or fitting than to be a normal human being; but the very notion of a ‘normal human being’ suggests a restriction to the average.” – Carl Jung, “Modern Man in Search of A Soul” Curiosity, rebellion, moral courage – the traits we usually expect to see in young people, seem to be in short supply among our promising youth. Take a look at college graduates of top universities. We can see that most of them are robotically marching into a couple of the same professions where they will hold the same job titles and try to fit themselves to a handful of standardized descriptions written by corporate managers. They are smart and “excellent”, but are apparently directionless and without purpose  (even without the basic idea that it…

“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab.” –…

“The lack of a balance of intellect and vision in our lives leads to the pursuit of doubtful cults of the supra-rational.” “Beyond such formal, religious affiliations, the hunger for wonders expresses itself in countless forms of pop psychiatry and lumpen occultism which thinly disguise the same impetuous quest for personal salvation.” – Theodore Roszak, “In Search of the Miraculous” In his essay “In Search of the Miraculous”, historian Theodore Roszak looked at what he called the “hunger for wonders”.  This is an insecurity that comes from the human spiritual impulse that he claims is starved in our time. This probably comes about when one feels that their life fails to realize their potential. We are told that everyone is unique and has something to offer while we sit in…

Large decisions that people make in life often have no connection to any moral ideal or any principle that is personally valued.  We take this for granted nowadays, even though it’s quite a remarkable thing that may have dangerous consequences for human well-being, fulfillment, and ultimately the growth and productivity of society.  Charles Taylor points this out in his book, The Ethics of Authenticity, and suggests that this non-morality to our lives is a pervasive characteristic of our modern world. People in modern society are expected to make all kinds of decisions based on purely mechanistic, rational calculations. In other words, the starting point contains no awareness of the importance of adherence to one’s own moral vision, principles, belief system, or originality. For example, I choose a city in which to…

Most of us have some familiarity with a sense of being engaged in the act of discovery.  We may not consciously think of it using this word but it might happen when we have a unique idea about a situation or are applying a new solution to a problem.  Different people’s attitudes vary in the extent to which they value this “discovery”. On one end, some think of the world as having nearly endless opportunities for the discovery of all kinds, given their own initiative and intent.  It is this that gets children genuinely excited about school, for instance. On the other end, some see the world as a place where one lives inside of a fixed system. In this view, the only role you play is one where you just…