Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

Search for the Self 63
“I also saw that their concerns overlapped.”
Brillig paused then and grasped the back of a chair. I could not
tell if he was about to do a hand-stand or was simply gathering
strength. I did wonder if at his age he was really up to this.
Presently he inquired as to the possibility of some water. I ran to
fetch a glass from the kitchen. Brillig thanked me and wet his
throat before going on. 64 “Rousseau and Kierkegaard were opposed
to most of the values upheld by their contemporaries in the name of
‘progress.’ Both viewed material advance as evidence of—and factors
contributing to—moral and spiritual decline. According to
Rousseau—whose thinking was of course much influenced by the
prevalent eighteenth-century ideal of the unfettered ‘noble savage’—society
was an evil influence that denied a person’s selfrealization
in accordance with his true nature. 65 Instead of following
the dictates of his own inner promptings, he lamented, man had
become a slave to his social self.
“Kierkegaard, out of a similar concern for personal authenticity,
deplored the influence of ‘the crowd,’ and what he called variously
the leveling process or the tyranny of equality.”
He took the book Norman handed him and read:
To battle against princes and popes is easy compared with struggling
against the masses, the tyranny of equality, against the grin of shallowness,
nonsense, baseness and bestiality. 66
“For Rousseau, it seems, salvation lay in a withdrawal into oneself,
the tapping of so-called natural resources. Kierkegaard too
saw the fulfillment of the individual as strictly a private affair, but
he challenged men to become individuals ‘before God.’ ‘The whole
development of the world,’ he wrote, ‘tends to the importance of
the individual; that, and nothing else, is the principle of Christianity.’
67
“Dear old D.H., on the other hand—and what a handsome fellow
64 During the following dissertation, as it seemed, he had frequent occasion to do
the same, and I was quick to refill his glass as necessary.
65 I trust my readers will not cavil at Brillig’s use of the generic “he.” There are
still many who use it without disrespect for women.
66 The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, entry no. 1317.
67 Ibid., p. 116.