Mrs Calloway’s Reviews > The Undiscovered Self > Status Update

The bigger the crowd the more negligible the individual becomes. But if the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning – which, after all, is not identical with public welfare and higher standards of living – then he’s already on the road to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has becomes its proselyte.

[The heads of state] are more likely, however, to be the slaves of their own fictions. Such one sidedness is always compensated psychologically by unconscious subversion tendencies.

The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should leave his own wife, and instead is ruled, fed, closed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amuse in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses.

The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself.

Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore in parts and unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role.

On the one hand, [the doctor] is equipped with the statistical truth of his scientific training, and on the other hand, is faced with the task of treating a sick person who, especially in the case of psychic suffering, requires individual understanding.

This conflict cannot be solved by an either or but only by a kind of two-way thinking: doing one thing while not losing sight of the other. {being present whilst still doing.}

Since scientific knowledge not only enjoy universal esteem but, in the eyes of modern man, counts as the only intellectual and spiritual authority…

I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general.

He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can neither be known nor compared with anything else.