“A puff of wind swept away in the storm.”

“A puff of wind swept away in the storm”

“The West has unfortunately not yet awakened to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere sound and fury. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted that faith may appear to us. We are faced, not with a situation that can be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times, and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation.” Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1957)

In this quote from The Undiscovered Self, Jung was writing about Marxism and Communism. Anyone who lived through or grew up during the Cold War as I did will remember the constant tensions that rippled through the whole of society in the West. These are tensions that are renewed and given new and horrible life in each generation. Events in Paris last week have rocked the entire world. I have no answers. Humankind needs to reach a maturity of spirit before we destroy each other utterly.