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I diagnose manic inflation: the United States of America at the top of the power heap, no nuclear equals anywhere. A Chinese diagnosis of hyper-yang; Greek hubris; Latin
superbia, or is it suburbia; Wall Street, top of the bull. In Gaia talk, patriarchal arrogance.
I call it Titanism. We're aboard the Titanic. What is right action? What do you do while the ship goes down? ... Can the doctor prescribe? Hardly, since the
kairos [critical moment] has passed and there are no measures against Titanism anyway. Yet as a
psychological practitioner, I take the presenting symptoms seriously. Psychology takes all symptoms to be expressing the right thing in the wrong way. What do the symptoms intend? Follow their lead, for there's usually a myth in the mess; a mess is an expression of soul. So, take seriously the mood of isolationism -- not literally, but as a metaphor of desire to withdraw, find borders, retreat. Take lean corporations and small government not literally, but seriously, as an attempt at essence. Take seriously, not literally, prison building as a need for radical interiority. Take apocalyptic anxieties about the end of time not literally, but seriously, as ending the domination of time, the linear stress, the developmental fantasy of a demonic, history-obsessed old god who compels us ever forward, ever faster. Time? Give it up. To get out of history, get into geography. Take fundamentalisms not literally, but as an antidote to consumerism -- a desire for words of stuff and purchase instead of words to purchase stuff. Take seriously the epidemic of recovery groups as potential political communes with more desperate passion than salons. And therapy? Take therapy as a cell of revolution. Follow the symptoms in our children -- hyperactive, dyslexic, anesthetized, endangered, undernourished, obese, depressed, attention deficient, fearful, and violent -- not literally, but indeed seriously, as expressing what is actually emerging in our culture.
Give credit, literal bank credit, to all uprisings of the dark, invasions of yin. Respond to the soul in the symptom with receptive rituals. Welcome the shadow, for as Jung said, "The shadow knows." Let there be dark!
-- James Hillman
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