Introspectium — Philosophy & Psychology

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“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” —Carl Jung

"The catastrophe which menaces us, moreover, comes not from on high, but from man's own thoughts and deeds. He is begging for destruction at his own hands." ~ Henry Miller

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” —Aldous Huxley

“Contemporary man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food - and, above all, a large array of neuroses.” —Carl Jung

“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” ― Albert Camus

“We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within… By middle life, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.”

“People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water.” - unknown

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful. — Samuel Beckett

“For the majority of the earth’s population on whom it has been imposed, the internet complex is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration. All of its touted benefits are rendered irrelevant or secondary by its injurious and sociocidal impacts… Currently we’re witnessing the final act of the mad, incendiary project of a totally wired world, of the reckless belief that 24/7 availability of electrical power to a planet of 8 billion people was achievable without the disastrous consequences now occurring everywhere.” — Jonathon Crary

“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds...Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.” ― Jonathan Haidt

“If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.” —Thomas MertonDAN KOE (@thedankoe)You need to be delusional if you want to be successful because your goals shape what you perceive. You won't notice the rare opportunity or life path if your goal isn't so big that others think you are crazy.— 

"Boom! Boom! Just like that. The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives." -- Hunter S. Thompson

Stefan Zweig on the deluded optimism of Europe shortly before WW1. Sounds eerily relevant today. Except we don’t read or discuss poetry. We scroll and discuss TikTok. "We young people, however, completely wrapped up in our literary ambitions, noticed little enough of these dangerous changes in our homeland: we had eyes only for books and pictures. We did not have the slightest interest in politics and social problems: what did these shrill wranglings mean in our lives? The city was aroused at the elections, and we went to the libraries. The masses rose, and we wrote and discussed poetry. We did not see the fiery signs on the wall... And only decades later, when roof and walls fell in upon us, did we realize that the foundations had long since been undermined and that together with the new century the decline of individual freedom in Europe had begun."

“Western civilisation needs a complete overhaul or it will fall apart one day or another. It has realised the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Reign of matter, of gold, of machine, of number, it no longer possesses breath, or liberty, or light.” — Julius Evola

What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living. ~ Harry CrewsLiza Libes (@pensandpoison)Despite being a great writer, Ernest Hemingway was truly a terrible person, especially to the women in his life. Hemingway had four wives—and openly cheated on all of them. In his novels, he writes women primarily as objects of desire rather than as full characters. In the The Sun Also Rises, Lady Brett's primary purpose is to destabilize the inner lives of the men around her rather than to find meaning in her own. Hemingway has a lot of defenders because of the way that he revolutionized prose, but I’m personally not a fan—he paved the way for the sort of literary minimalism we see in publishing today and produced an entire generation of sentences absolutely devoid of soul. Hemingway’s writing is very soulful, to be sure, but it’s a slippery slope from his clipped sentences to what we see in contemporary fiction. That said, The Sun Also Rises is also one of my favorite books. I sort of hate it...

"Man will continue to invent technologies outside of himself until he either destroys the world or realizes that everything he's created is an inferior copy of the technologies that exist within himself. The question is: which will come first?" —Rudolf Steiner

“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.” —Sam Altmanₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ (@hamptonism)If you genuinely believe Ai will destroy us, you quite literally fell for this generations mass IQ test.—