Public Comment

As a mentally ill and yet hopefully a studious person, I have had some exposure to Carl Jung’s philosophy both through reading some of his books and talking with Jungian therapists. Some of his ideas are applicable to phenomena occurring in Obama’s presidency. 

The story of the pied piper is fairly Jungian if you substitute mindless masses of people going off a cliff in the place of rats. Part of Jungian theory is the concept of the collective unconscious. This is the idea of a group consciousness, but one that most people are unaware of. It expresses itself in the phenomenon of angry mobs, and also when you see everyone at a baseball game doing the same thing at the same time. The idea of a relatively unconscious group of people following their leader is the same thing. That leader doesn’t need to have a clue as to how to do things, but simply must be able to determine the direction of the masses. 

Sarah Palin and other charismatic individuals in the Republican Party are very much Pied Pipers who are leading their followers in a direction of universal destruction. 

We have a segment of the population in the U.S. that isn’t adapted to the future and which instead keeps trying to go back to the past. President Obama represents the changes we need to make now in our society if the human race is to survive into the twenty second century. 

I was pleasantly surprised and shocked when the health care bill passed and when this was followed by Obama moving on to accomplish more. I was proven wrong about Obama because I believed he wasn’t living up to his campaign promises and that he was essentially the same as many other Presidents have been; saying one thing and doing another. 

A lot of people are afraid of President Obama because they are also afraid of the future. The future we are looking at will demand a lot more adaptation from each individual compared to how it has been. People who cannot adapt to advances in technology, and to advances in how people do things on a day to day basis, will be left behind. Another way of saying this is that a lot of changes are coming our way, and we had all better be ready for it. 

Those who think we are having an “Armageddon” are experiencing psychotic delusions brought on by their terror concerning the future and magnified by the fact that whole groups of people are having the same delusions. There is no such thing as the Armageddon that some people think is predicted by the Bible. I don’t believe that is a valid interpretation of the Bible, nor do I believe that everything in the Bible need be taken literally. I don’t believe the Bible is the word of God either—it was written by human beings. You may as well believe that Chilton’s Auto Repair Manual is the word of God. Such a belief either way flies in the face of common sense. 

Part of our future then, will be finding ways to deal with the people who can’t or won’t adapt and who make the world more difficult for the rest of us.