Liberal, Conservative, and Mental Confusion

Liberal and conservative are not identities. They are functions, moods, or states of the psyche akin to the yin and yang forces and serve the same purpose — to maintain a certain equilibrium or balance in psyche and society. When they become confused with the identity, this is narcissistic mind. Times of extreme political polarisation are then often an indication that the psyche and the society have become divided against themselves and are now in a state we would call “schizoid”, and decaying into a war of all against all — a state of maximum disintegration.

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Magical Thinking and Technological Culture

The, by now, well-known Dunning-Kruger Syndrome or Dunning-Kruger Effect seems not at all different from Goethe’s parable of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1797). As you probably know by now, the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome is the delusion that one is more competent for something than one actually is. One has an unrealistic assessment of what one is actually capable of. There is, then, a close connection between the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome and what we refer to today as “magical thinking”, and that connected with the delusion that technologies confer upon us near limitless magical potency of the kind once only possessed by the gods. This is, of course, connected with narcissism and the culture of narcissism.

Metanoia: The Modern Mind Outrun

The people you encounter in everyday life may or may not be your contemporaries. Simply because they occupy what seems to you the same space, and may be companions or compatriots or neighbours, still you may not be contemporaries at all. Time is not homogenous and uniform throughout as space seems to us to be continuous, homogenous, and uniform. This is the problem that Rosenstock-Huessy addresses as a “time-thinker” — the problem of making people contemporaries. Friends are your contemporaries.