These noble spirits, throughout history, have spoken only truth. You had but to listen.
Thought allied fearlessly to purpose becomes creative force.
Just as knowledge without action is impotent, truth without focus is absurd.
Publicly we’ll continue our work in publishing, radio, printing, music, etc. but privately we will create something else, something to be shared freely but never consumed passively, something which can be discussed openly but never understood by the agents of alienation, something with no commercial potential yet valuable beyond price, something occult yet woven completely into the fabric of our everyday lives.
– The Temporary Autonomous Zone, by Hakim Bey
All these obstacles make it more difficult to arrive at a correct appreciation of the human psyche, but they count for very little beside one other remarkable fact that deserves mentioning. This is the common psychiatric experience that the devaluation of the psyche and other resistances to psychological enlightenment are based in large measure on fear–on panic fear of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious. These fears are found not only among persons who are frightened by the picture Freud painted of the unconscious; they also troubled the originator of psychoanalysis himself, who confessed to me that it was necessary to make a dogma of his sexual theory, because this was the sole bulwark of reason against a possible “outburst of the black flood of occultism.” In these words Freud was expressing his conviction that the unconscious still harbored many things that might lend themselves to “occult” interpretations, as is in fact the case. These “archaic vestiges,” or archetypal forms grounded on the instincts and giving expression to them, have a numinous quality that sometimes arouses fear. They are ineradicable, for they represent the ultimate foundations of the psyche itself. They cannot be grasped intellectually, and when one has destroyed one manifestation of them, they reappear in altered form. It is this fear of the unconscious psyche, which not only impedes self-knowledge, but is the gravest obstacle to a wider understanding and knowledge of psychology. Often the fear is so great that one dares not admit it, even to oneself.
– Carl G. Jung “The Undiscovered Self”
“The percussed victims of the new technology have invariably muttered cliches about the impracticality of artists and their fanciful preferences. But in the past century, it has come to be generally acknowledged that, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, “The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.” Knowledge of this simple fact is now needed for human survival. The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old. Equally age-old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot sidestep the new violence, to recognize their need of the artist. To reward and to make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific of humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.”
– Marshall McLuhan, in ‘Understanding Media’
