09/04/97 3:34 PM from The Voice of the Earth, Theodore Roszak, Touchstone paperback first edition, Simon and

Schuster, New York, 1993, pages 276 - 278, Part Three Ecology, Chapter 10 Narcissism Revisited section 6 Socrates and Freud. The deepening psychological tone of late twentieth century life, however amateurishly expressed, is born of a healthy sense of unlived life and alienated power. Just as neurosis recogized and diagnosed, can be the first step toward unity, so a narcissistic facination with the self can be the beginning of cultural renewal. Let us think of the psyche as a self regulating system that deals in emotions, passions, aspirations the way the living cell deals in proteins and energy transfers. The environment that the psyche must confront in its task of adjustment is the culture that psyches before it (those of the parents and ancestors) have created as a second nature. Accordingly, the psyche strives to cope with the stresses and strains this cultural environment imposes upon it. Even when the demands are severely out of balance with its own internal biological economy, it struggles to conform, if needs be by way of crazy distortion. At last, having gone as far as it can to accomodate the pressures, it asserts its desperate need for healthy balance. What the modern cultural environment has required of us, is an enormous extroversion of attention and energy for the purpose of reshaping the Earth into a global industrial economy. For twp centuries we have been subordinating the planet and our deepest personal needs to that project. This great act of collective alienation, I have suggested, lies at the root of both the environmental crisis and individual neurosis. In some way, at some point, a change of direction, a therapeutic turning inward, had to take place within a culture as maniacally driven as ours has been by the need to achieve and conquor. In this great and far from finished task, Socrates and Freud, philosophy and therapy, are allied as mid-wives of self-knowledge. But Freud was the beginning, not the end, of the project. He could

not be the last word. The humanistic therapies can be credited with devising a more refined analysis of guilt than Freud had to offer. We can now see that there are two kinds of guilt. There is the guilt that legitimately attaches to acts of violence and betrayal against our fellows. But there is another (some would call it shame to make the distinction) that is essentially societys chief means of regimenting its millions. Shame stems from our anxiety that we have failed to honor the identity that society has assigned us in life. If we are not what a man-husband-father is supposed to be, if we are not what a woman-wife-mother is supposed to be, we are made to feel ashamed. Human history has for the greater part been populated by such types and stereotypes. The false identities they wear are what William Blake called the Mind-Forged Manacles. No scociety gets its work done, its taxes collected, its wars fought, unless millions will accept the bondage of these chains. But now we arrive at a point in the life-story of the planet where that discipline needs to be broken; the great industrial armies, the technological systems must be hobbled in their runaway career. I think this is how it is done. At least in art, narcissistic facination is the way we break the manacles. Whatever Gaia may be, impersonal system or immanent divinity, she speaks to that within each of us that wishes to be known peculiarly and personally, the self that fits no mold, the me that cannot be made interchangeable. This song of myself may be no more than a brief discordant tune. But sang by a sufficient number, it is enough to halt the rhythm of the great machine. In that moment we become what Charlie Chaplins little victim-hero became in Modern Times when, falling out of synch on the assembly line, he wound up jamming the man-eating gears. In becoming even a small piece of ourselves, we beomce what the burdened planet needs: creatures with some more urgent calling, some greater joy than comes of waging war on nature. Was Montaigne a narcissist? Was Whitman? Was Rilke of Kierkegaard or Dostoyevsky? Or are they excused from the label because they possesed the talent to raise their obsessive soulsearching to the level of great art? Are the rights of self knowledge then to be restricted to genius? It is a question intellectuals have never asked: what would an ethos of democratized self-knowledge

look like? The answer may be around you. This is it. Or at least this is how it begins. How beautiful the feeling experienced while reading these passages of text. It became particularly noticeable when reading the next chapter Toward an Ecological Ego where Roszak returns to a more classical discussion of Freuds thoughts regarding id ego and the unconscious. It had a dullm mechanical, uninteresting quality (or lack of quality) to it that contrasted so sharply with the deep joy experienced in the former state of awareness of personal experiences of breaking manacles and chains and of contemplation of the phenomena of consciousness. I se it now as a a ket that opened a door to a part of spyche that is particularly beautiful. Roszaks works allowing a beautifying legitimizing light to fall on my awareness of my personal experiences of these last twenty one years in particular. Beautifully legitimized by the form/idea that breaking the chains that bind us to a false identity is an act of courageous yielding up to the current of evolution of the whole Earth, univers and human culture and consciousness. Like finding ones self singing in perfect harmony with a enormously loud song that seemed silenced for so long by an artificial contrivance of the industrial culture - like ear plugs secretly put in place by the baronial management elite which carries out the whims of the great global industrial machine that I have myself coined the name t-3 for. Hows that for narcissism. Fourteen years ago I, yes I, I I I I , invented t-4 which from the start, I I I I, (four I), envisioned as a discrete system with respect to the obsolete Industrial technosystem. elements of T-4 are already thriving in a form similar to the primal amino acids that may have pre-existed independently prior to assembly into proteins, DNA, RNA in the first organic cells created at the beginning of the evolution of organic entities on Planet Earth. The design of the system (the ghost in the technosystem to come) is already in existence and is unobtrusively going about the

tasks of assembly of the new technosystem t-4, just as the fossil fuel technosystem, t-3, came into existence from assembly of its basic components in the early steam engines buring coal in England, in textile mills and railroads; in the coal buring steel plants for the rails and the buildings. Many characterize the culture that has ravaged the eco system of the Earth with words of revulsion like Patriarchal, Western, European, Reductionist, Industrial, Scientific, Mechanical, Objectivist,