There are as many masks as there are people: their variety is limited only by the ingenuity of the people who adopt them. Yet, the wearing of the mask is an excursion into a “let’s pretend” world. As the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone wrote, “Every mask and every pretense can be reduced to one great evasion: the desire to overcome the sorrows of life with . . . . tricks of the imagination rather than with sincerity….”
Do we put on masks to put people on? If we do, Jung and Silone remind us that we pay a price for the cover-up: we lose touch with the “real” person behind the mask.
— Loraine Moline, from “Multiple-Choice or True or False,” in Standpoints I: Choice & Responsibility, Alan Embree/Loraine Moline (eds.), p. 212.
“It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage, to pay the price . . . . One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as a cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”
— Morris L. West, from The Shoes of the Fisherman, in Ibid., p. 228.
“I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness . . . . I think that it all will come right, that this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
— Anne Frank, from The Diary of a Young Girl, in Ibid., p. 228.
In the formulation of Psychologist Abraham Maslow, work functions in a hierarchy of needs: first, work provides food and shelter, basic human maintenance. After that, it can address the need for security and then for friendship and “belongingness.” Next, the demands of the ego arise, and the need for respect. Finally, men and women assert a larger desire for “self-actualization.” That seems a harmless and even worthy enterprise but sometimes degenerates into self-infatuation, a vaporously selfish discontent that dead-ends in isolation, the empty face that gazes back from the mirror.
— Lance Morrow, from “What is the Point of Working?”, in Standpoints II:Distance & Encounter, Alan Embree/Loraine Moline (eds.), p. 207.
“We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling class. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in Ibid., p. 227.
“Thoughtful Americans understand that the highest patriotism is not blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher standard.”
— George McGovern, in Ibid., p. 227.
Technological man will be his own master. Prior to his emergence, the outlines of technological civilization must remain dim save for the knowledge that it will have to rest upon a unified view of the universe, on ecological balance and on the essential identity of the human species. Technological man will create his own future, and it may contain some surprises even for him. The Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart wrote at the beginning of the long journey that brought Western man from the cocoon of medievalism through industrial civilization to our own day and its choice between chaos and transfiguration, but his words have timeless meaning: “There is no stopping place in this life — no, nor was there ever one for any man, no matter how far along his way he’d gone. This above all, then, be ready at all times for the gifts of God, and always for the new ones.”
— Victor C. Ferkiss, from Toward the Creation of Technological Man, in Standpoints III: Portent & Design, Alan Embree/Loraine Moline (eds.), p. 147.
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