Zach Tollen

Zach Tollen

Jungian Mystic

Update, November 27, 2021

My current opinion is that the best way to bridge the distance between my state of mind and Society is to write a Book. It is the best thing I can think of, although I am not claiming it is a good idea. It is simply the best thing I can think of.

The difficulty is in realizing that what I produce must meet my own high standards, and also be acceptable to Society. Previous efforts to accomplish this goal have ended in failure. Necessity is pushing me to try again.

During this process it is inevitable that I consider posting snippets of the book to my blog, or writing the whole book as a blog. I am not certain enough to commit to either of these processes. My foremost concept of the book is that it will serve as a credential-establishing entity. Since Society has failed to produce (or preserve) any institutions which both meet my standards and whose standards I meet, I have to produce the work with the idea of meeting my own standards, which is what Society should demand and ask for, but has not. I have to bring Society up to my level.

Should such a credential-establishing book be written as a series of blog posts? It would depend on the type of dialogue which resulted. For starters, if I keep relatively quiet about the existence of the blog, and nobody hears about it otherwise, it will be little different than if I wrote the book in secret. This would be fine. I just don’t want the blog to incur more burden on me than the book itself would incur.

People are always worried about publicity, but until I have a firm grasp on the nature and contents of the book, this will be my last concern. My first will be ensuring quality. And since I am not a great, nor experienced author, doing my best on the book will be enough. Once it is in relatively good shape, I can turn my attention to publicity.

One thing I will say about why I am writing a book instead of doing anything else: I find that doing things with Society almost always comes with a cost I don’t want to pay. Becoming self-confident in such a situation is very difficult, because the human instinct is to assume that Society is fine, and that oneself is to blame. This instinct can be purged only through relentless examination of the facts, and refusal to submit to faulty reasoning. If the truth, no matter how uncomfortable, is followed, it is not at all hard to conclude that Society really does fail to accommodate certain good people in unavoidable ways. But it can take decades to get the strength to take that position. I wish my path could have been more convenient. I don’t like accusing a Behemoth such as Society of anything, because it is terribly inconvenient. Writing a book is one of the last options for someone who cannot reconcile himself with Society in any other way.

If Society didn’t want books like this to appear, it should have tried harder to stop them.

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