Why Do Good People Do Bad Things

I wanted to share an excerpt from a book I am reading. It really gave me an aha moment, since I speak on this topic and having been putting more of this together. I’m not a fan of more legislation as it is my firm belief that most laws are keeping us from the highest level on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs- self-actualization.

“In 1939, with World War II gathering to unleash the greatest destruction in the history of humankind, Jung gave a speech to the Guild for Pastoral Psychology in London. He noted that our species ill tolerates a meaning vacuum and will drift into or be seduced by powerful ideologies. On the right, he noted, were the hysterical throngs of fascism, and on the left, the sullen masses of communism. From neither could there be much hope of renewal of the spirit, for each required an abdication of personal responsibility and an arrogation of power to the leaders. Only the “neurotic,” he believed, having internalized the struggle, kept hope alive for the tending of the human spirit. As individuals prove willing to work through their personal suffering, so the tendencies of the larger culture are treated and amended. Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one’s own complexes as the norm for others.”–James Hollis, Ph.D. Why Good People Do Bad Things

 

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