Enantiodromia

Something about the comment thread in the last post on myth and history has suggested to me that I post something further about the meaning of “enantiodromia” and the panta rhei of Heraclitus. “Enantiodromia” was a term invented by the depth psychologist Carl Jung, following Heraclitus, to describe a reversal at the extremity, or how actions turn into their ostensible opposites.

Advertisement

Myth, History, Mytho-History, and Whitewash

Now, here’s a bit of a representative story of our corrosive “post-Enlightenment” condition.  And for a change, I get to say something this time about Australia and the so-called “Anglosphere”.

The Reactionary

Once upon a time, it was de regueur for the loyalists of liberal democracy to mock dictatorship (and particularly the Soviet Union at the time) for being “afraid of the little mouse of thought”. In fact, it was taken as the very essence of dictatorship that the dictator was deeply afraid of “the little mouse of thought”.

Given McCarthyism, COINTELPRO and the well-documented covert operations (“black ops”) against dissidents in the US and elsewhere, the accusation was always more than a bit disingenuous, duplicitous, and hypocritical. But it is also self-revealing of the state of uneasiness, insecurity, paranoia and simply the bad conscience of the ruling powers.