Academy of Ideas

“To live alone one must be either a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both…” Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols According to a 2010 study published in the journal PLOS Medicine, the health risks of chronic loneliness are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. To mitigate […]

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”   George Orwell, 1984 George Orwell’s writings have experienced a spike in popularity over the past several decades and for a good reason – modern societies are becoming ever more like the dystopia Orwell depicted in his […]

“Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.”    Hippocrates Modern medicine has achieved remarkable results. Its ability to save people from ailments which a mere generation ago would have led to an untimely death, borders on the miraculous. But when it comes to chronic illness modern medicine has its limits. Sometimes the […]

“The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just […]

“. . .you must look at who you are and make an effort to know yourself, which is the most difficult knowledge one can imagine. When you know yourself, you will not puff yourself up like the frog who wanted to be the equal of the ox. . .”   Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes […]

“Since ultimately people heal themselves with or without the tool of psychotherapy, why is it that so few do and so many do not? Since the path of spiritual growth, albeit difficult, is open to all, why do so few choose to travel it? It was to this question that Christ was addressing himself when […]

“…more people look for salvation through relationship than in houses of worship. One may even suggest that romantic love has replaced institutional religion as the greatest motive power and influence in our lives…the search for love has replaced the search for God.” James Hollis, The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other Half of […]

“Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia [in the 20th century]: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”   Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1983 Templeton Address Is secularization a sign […]

“Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer […]

“And the word “courage” should be reserved to characterize the man or woman who leaves the infantile sanctuary of the mass mind.” Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly In the privacy of our minds many of us disagree with the ideologies, political agendas, and government mandates of our day, yet in public we comply. We […]

“I must be myself, I cannot break myself any longer for you. . .If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance The great 19th century American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that to flourish […]

“Fatherlessness is the leading cause of declining child well-being in our society. It is also the engine driving our most urgent social problems…Yet, despite its scale and social consequences, fatherlessness is a problem that is frequently ignored or denied.” David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America Families are microcosms of society. Strong and stable families contribute to social […]

“Human predators populate our society.”   Stefan Verstappen, Defense Against the Psychopath Psychopaths are human predators. They coerce, manipulate, lie, steal, defraud, abuse, and take life, without feeling guilt or remorse. A leading expert on psychopathy, Robert Hare, estimates that 1% of people are psychopaths; while the clinical psychologist Martha Stout suggests this figure is […]

“We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Sometimes we accomplish our greatest deeds in dreams.” Carl Jung, The Red Book Are dreams the product of random brain activity, or a side effect of the mind consolidating its memories? Are they, as Sigmund Freud suggested, the expression of repressed wishes […]

“Most people can never, even for a moment, disentangle themselves from the restraints imposed by those around them, nor can they disregard their approval. From the moment they begin to understand their parents’ smiles and frowns they have needed the moment to moment approval of everyone, even strangers…These people measure their entire worth by what […]

“Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.” Carl Jung, The Red Book None of us are as good as we like to think. We possess animalistic drives for sex and power. We have a cruel and aggressive […]

“…the world would be most happily governed if it consisted not of a few aggregations…with their accompaniments of despotism and tyrannic rule, but of a society of small States.”   Saint Augustine, The Political Aspects of Saint Augustine’s City of God Should the states and provinces of nations separate and become politically autonomous? Should counties, cities, […]

Central banks have spent decades flooding the global economy with newly created money. We are told this policy, or what is called a monetary inflation, is needed to stimulate economic growth and to keep unemployment low, but like so many of the justifications that politicians and bureaucrats offer for their actions, this one is a […]

“There are just as many people who become neurotic because they are merely normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. That it should enter anyone’s head to educate them to normality is a nightmare for the former, because their deepest need is really to be able to lead “abnormal” […]

“…not increase of consciousness is the goal, but enhancement of power.”   Nietzsche, The Will to Power In the quest to live a good life, each of us, consciously or implicitly, chooses an ultimate value around which to orient our life. For many this value is wealth, for others it may be status, social-acceptance, happiness, […]

In 1888, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:  “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.”  Nietzsche, The Will to Power Nihilism is the conviction that there is no meaning to life, that the world is inhospitable to […]

“Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science The chance of living a good life is increased by attaining success in two main areas. Firstly, we need to make money, as poverty is limiting and […]

“…if inflation is not eliminated very soon, all our technological and scientific improvements will not prevent us from a tremendous financial catastrophe that will destroy practically all that civilization has created in the last several hundred years.”   Ludwig von Mises, Ludwig von Mises on Money and Inflation The philosopher George Santayana stated that “Those […]

“I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that… your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages…were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States.”  Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Are we living in an age of civilizational collapse? In […]

“This is precisely the risk modern man runs: he may wake up one day to find that he has missed half his life.”   Carl Jung, Practice of Psychotherapy Psychotropic drugs have become one of the most common forms of treatment for anxiety disorders and depression. But these drugs are not very good at curing […]

“Humanity is arming itself, in dread and fascinated horror, for a stupendous crime.” Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious While we cannot create a heaven on earth, we can create a hell and history is full of examples. Many of these man-made hells are the result of war and conquest, but many others are […]

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?”   Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Suffering is inevitable. It is an essential component of the human condition, and the sources of suffering are many. Some have gone as far […]

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”   Carl Jung, Practice of Psychotherapy We live in a world consumed by an endless series of crises. But of all the crises we face the one that may be of the greatest concern, is one […]

“Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. The altered nature of attention can appear to abolish parts of the world, collapse time and space [and] eviscerate emotion. . .It is a profoundly moral act.”   Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things As was explored in […]

Is the modern world caught in the grip of a fear psychosis and has a cult of safety entrenched itself the West? In this video, we are going to explore these questions. “Quite an experience, to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” Blade Runner Today we live longer […]

“Anxiously we look round for collective measures, thereby reinforcing the very mass-mindedness we want to fight against. There’s only one remedy for the leveling effect of all collective measures, and this is to emphasize and increase the value of the individual.”   Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition We live in an age where two visions […]

“The real question is whether the ‘brighter future’ is always so distant. What if it has been here for a long time already – and only our own blindness and weakness have prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it.” Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless […]

“Authoritarianism in religion and science, let alone politics, is becoming increasingly accepted, not particularly because so many people explicitly believe in it but because they feel themselves individually powerless and anxious. So what else can one do…except follow the mass political leader…or follow the authority of customs, public opinion, and social expectations?” Rollo May, Man’s […]

“The State takes the place of God…the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship.” Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self Since the birth of totalitarianism in the 20th century much has been written about this form of rule and millions have read George Orwell’s depiction of it in the classic novel […]

“I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.” Henry David Thoreau, Walking If this claim of Henry David Thoreau’s is true – that we must […]

“What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.” Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence In the Buddhist’s conception of the universe, the wheel of life revolves through 6 realms, each representing a different […]

In the book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt describes the rudimentary mass surveillance system used by the secret police force of the Russian Empire. “Every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles […]

“WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?” These were the first words sent over the newly invented electric telegraph machine in May 1844. This message proved to be prophetic. For the communication technologies that followed in the wake of the telegraph, from the telephone, to the radio, to TV, computers, the internet, and now smart phones and social […]

“And the lie has, in fact, led us so far away from a normal society that you cannot even orient yourself any longer; in its dense, gray fog not even one pillar can be seen.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Lying has always been used for political purposes. Lies cover up corruption, past mistakes and […]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on the Soviet Union’s descent into totalitarian rule in the mid-20th century, and all the things that could have been done to prevent it, wrote the following:  “If…if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. . .we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! … We purely and simply deserved everything that […]

In 1940 George Orwell wrote:  “Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships – an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.”  George Orwell, Inside the Whale George Orwell’s dystopian novel […]

In his 1958 book Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley wrote the following:  “If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers — and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific […]

Referring to the individual who descends into the depths of the mind, Nietzsche wrote:  “He enters a labyrinth, and multiplies a thousandfold the dangers that life in itself brings with it – of which not the least is that nobody can see how and where he loses his way, becomes solitary, and is torn to pieces by […]

In January of 1889, the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went mad. One year later, Nietzsche’s friend Peter Gast visited him in a mental asylum in Jena. He wrote the following:  “He did not look very ill…I believe Nietzsche would be just about as grateful to his rescuers as somebody who has jumped into the water […]

“. . .when all is said and done, our own existence is an experiment of nature, an attempt at a new synthesis.”   Carl Jung, Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche While Carl Jung is best known for his ideas on the unconscious, be it his theory of the archetypes or his writings on the shadow side […]

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the […]

“Man does not make his ideas; we could say that man’s ideas make him.”   Carl Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis Ideas are the seeds of our greatest creations, but they can also sow destruction. Ideas, when put into action, lead to individual and social flourishing or to individual suffering and social ruin. And certain ideas, […]

“All one’s neighbours are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.” Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion According to the psychologist Carl Jung the greatest threat to […]

“Put up with being laughed at on occasion; look around you, and give yourself a good shaking to find out who you really are.”   Epictetus, Discourses Common sense tells us that a modicum of concern for the opinions of others is useful in the cultivating of good relationships and the maintenance of social cohesion. But most people care too […]