C.L. Jung Speaking, Interviews and Encounters

Early this morning I was reading this book I have found, edited by William Mc Guire and R.F.C. Hull from Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press. On page 47, Americans must say "No". We are in January 1931, and Jung is invited to lecture by the Vienna Kulturebund.

"What America needs in the face of the tremendous urge toward uniformity, desire of things, the desire for complication in life, for being like one's neighbors, for making records, success, is one great healthy ability to say "No." To rest a minute and realize that many of the things being sought are unnecessary to a happy life, and that trying to live exactly like one's successful neighbor is not following the essentially different dictates, possibly, of a widely different underlying personality which a person may possess and yet consciously try to rid himself of, the conflict always resulting in some form, sooner or later, of a neurosis, sickness, or insanity.

We are awakening a little to the feeling that something is wrong in the world, that our modern prejudice of over-estimating the importance of the intellect and the conscious mind might be false. We want simplicity. We are suffering, in our cities, from a need of simple things. We would like to see our great railroad terminals deserted, the streets deserted, a great peace descend upon us.[...]

When whole communities avoid these warnings, and fill their asylums, become uniformly neurotic, we are in great danger. The last war, I thought, had taught us something. Seemingly not. Our unconscious wish for deserted places, quiet, inactivity, which now and then is being expressed in the heart of our great cities by a lyrical outbreak of some poet or madman, may project us, against our conscious wills, into another catastrophe from which we may never recover. We may gas our lives out, and then will we have deserted refuges and none of us left to sit, and dream, in the sun."