Carl Jung's thoughts on America

How much closer America now seems in our imagination to Europe than when Jung visited. His first visit was in 1909.

To a keen European eye there is an indefinable yet undeniable something in the whole makeup of the born American that distinguishes him from the born European. [This is very true today.]

There is no country in the world where women have to work so hard to attract men’s attention. [Women have told me that this is still true.]


I made many observations on shipboard. I noticed that whenever the American husband spoke to his wife there was always a little melancholy note in his voice, as though he were not quite free; as though he were a boy talking to an older woman. He was always very polite and very kind, and paid her every respect. You could see that in her eyes he was not at all dangerous, and that she was not afraid of being mastered by him. But when any one told him that there was betting going on he would leave her, and his face became eager and full of desire, and his eyes would get very bright and his voice would get strong, and hard, and brutal. That is why I say his Libido, his vital energy, is in the game. He loves to gamble. That is business to-day.

It takes much vital energy to be in love. In America you give so many opportunities both to your men and women that they do not save any of their vital force for loving. This is a wonderful country for opportunity. It is everywhere. It spreads out. It runs all over the surface of everything. And so the American mind runs out and spreads over the whole country. But there is a dark side of this. The people of America do not have to dig deep for their own life. In Europe we do.


It may be that you are going to produce a race which are human beings first, and men and women secondarily. It may be that you are going to create the real independent woman who knows she is independent, who feels the responsibility of her independence and, in time, will come to see that she must give spontaneously those things which up to now she only allows to be taken from her when she pretends to be passive. Today the American woman is still confused. She wants independence, she wants to be free to do everything, to have all the opportunities which men have, and, at the same time she wants to be mastered by man and to be possessed in the archaic way of Europe.

You think your young girls marry European husbands because they are ambitious for titles. I say it is because, after all, they are not different from the European girls; they like the way European men make love, and they like to feel we are a little dangerous. They are not happy with their American husbands because they are not afraid of them. It is natural, even though it is archaic, for women to want to be afraid when they love. If they don’t want to be afraid then perhaps they are becoming truly independent, and you may be producing the real ‘new woman.’ But up to this time your American man isn’t ready for real independence in woman. He only wants to be the obedient son of his mother-wife.

Life is

Life is made up of the most differing, unforeseen, contradictory, ill-assorted things; it is brutal, arbitrary, disconnected, full of inexplicable, illogical and contradictory disasters which can only be classified under the heading of 'Other news in brief'. 

Guy de Maupassant 

Quotations

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Milan Kundera


And herein, I think, all the philosophers of the newest age are open to a serious criticism. What they do not possess is real standing in actual life. Not one of them has intervened effectively, either in higher politics, in the development of modern technics, in matters of communication, in economics, or in any other big actuality, with a single act or a single compelling idea. Not one of them counts in mathematics, in physics, in the science of government, even to the extent that Kant counted. Let us glance at other times. Confucius was several times a minister. Pythagoras was the organizer of an important

The secret of being a bitch is telling the truth in the nastiest possible way

“The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.” Steve Bannon 

President Trump, in a private conversation with congressmen, is said to have used an ugly word, 's-hole', to describe Haiti and African countries. 

A British diplomat seconded to the UN called Rupert Colville has denounced this as racist, which is piffle. 

Odi profano vulgus

I have given up on touristland. 

Angkor War (its Hindu temples are beautiful and romantic while comparatively untouristed Bagan's are neither) had seven thousand tourists a year in the mid 1990s. Now a million come many staying in swish comfortable hotels with swimming pools.

As Santayana said, luxury requires an aristocratic setting to make it attractive. Upmarket mass tourism isn't, though it is fun. 

It does bring a lot of money to poor countries like Cambodia, though a lot or most of the money goes abroad, while it does a lot of harm to ancient places too.

As a hotelier told me once, tourism is a branch of the entertainment industry.

Which is fine except that industry means being part of a factory line.

I'll stick to Romania and England in future and other offbeat places. Algeria is perfect for the moment. Georgia and Armenia should still be relatively undiscovered, though the Georgian seaside resort of Batumi went from being 1970s Havana to being Las Vegas in five or six years.

I just met a man who has been to Ethiopia three times and would like to go back. I want to return there too. And to Mozambique, Algeria, Egypt and Cuba, but not to other exotic places I've been lucky enough to visit. Unless exotic includes Georgia and Armenia, which it doesn't really.

I probably won't return to Asia beyond the Muslim world. 

"Yes, Sir; there are two objects of curiosity, — the Christian world, and the Mahometan world. All the rest may be considered as barbarous."

Dr. Johnson's aphorism is out of date, but those are the places that speak to me.