By: Borut S. Pogačnik
In a foreign place, mountains are foreign,
in a foreign field, grains are foreign
and foreign birds, foreign are distances
and I am eternally thirsty when I drink from the sieve.
Ivan Goran Kovačić: Mračen čas, Slovenian translation Tone Pavček
Unofficial English translation
Bloody bodies collapse into themselves, skulls split, and arms torn off. Spring 2022, like many other springs or summers: 1914, 1938, 1941, 1991, 2001… Hidden behind the horizon is an ominous reflection of the dawn, where the sun for thousands will no longer set. We look at the pictures on the screens, dreaming, unweakened, as if it were a film of fear and horror, where, as it will be, the inscription The End, Fine, Fin, Koniec, das Ende… will appear. But there is no end to this film. It is not possible to extinguish a show that then moves to the brain. Restless, vibrating, on the frequency of perceived Evil, which there from afar from the East, penetrates the membranes of reason.
I participated in two lectures last week. On Monday at the Faculty of Law for students of criminal law, and on Thursday for lawyers of the Bar Association of Slovenia, Ljubljana Regional Bar Association. The topics are different, but even here questions arise that have been tormenting humanity for millennia: is there a destiny? Does it even make sense to do anything if everything is already destined? Was the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, partly right when he believed in predestination? And neuropsychologist Benjamin Libet has not confirmed clearly enough that what we call free does not exist at all and never existed?
Were all the originators of wars and Evil just executors of something more powerful than them? Already in this millennium: the New York Twins, Iraq, the Balkans, Libya, Afghanistan, … There is no answer. The interviewers look at me and want my opinion. I turn to Carl Gustav Jung. All these beginnings and ends are in the collective unconscious. They are instincts, complexes, repressed contents. All surrounded by strong energy, they live their indigenous lives in this massive, never-bottomed ocean of unimaginable opportunities and endless slaughter scenarios. Despite all the digitality, cybernetics, all the theories and practices of human society, we are exactly where millennia ago we stared at the inhabitants of one cave group of prehistoric people versus another with the greatest hatred in our eyes. The unknown impulse within ourselves, then, called us to the annihilation of the Others. Was it Mars, the Lord of this world, the Demiurge, someone fourth?
And it was CG Jung who wisely realised as he approached the day of his departure from this unfortunate planet that man had and would penetrate to the borders of space, to the bottom of the oceans, but to the bottom of his Unconscious, which drives him again and again into tragedy, he will never arrive! It is right to condemn Evil and help the victims, but every century will continue to take its bloody toll.
Borut S. Pogačnik, B.Sc. sociologist and psychotherapist