marlo candìa

The sexy Bob Ross Halloween costume and the QAnon shaman attire belong to opposite sides of the earnestness spectrum, but they're both costumes. The antidote to a soulless age that uses everything without paying is not to take refuge in egocentric, sometimes totalitarian make-believe. In fact, both strategies come from a place of denial that reality may be bigger than our conception of, or use for it. ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.

He did dress like a professor. Tweed suits, button downs, the iconic round eyeglasses and the cigar or pipe, typical of many intellectuals of his age. But also, there are some interesting details. He wore a ring with an intaglio of the Eudaimon, the good demon, the good spirit of the Gnostics, an ascending snake with a halo around its head. Jung never looked like a witch doctor, he didn’t overdo it. His style blended very well within the consensus reality, but he could signal that he was also onto something else. This is a secret to emanating your personal myth the right way, in a real life setting, so that you’re not dismissed as an eccentric. You want to insinuate consensus reality, not to play pretend. 

People sick with Arcadia will try to overwrite History with myth, and practice the same alienation and violence they accuse the rest of the world of. Either it’s failure by design, or it means that we often envy the means more than we criticise the results.