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Another Perspective

Converging Observations

Sometimes observations offered by different people at different times converge. This happened to me this morning well before dawn.

The first observation came to me years ago, perhaps more than a decade, from C.G. Jung. He wrote: “Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.”*

The second observation I heard earlier this week on National Public Radio. A history professor from Columbia whose name I missed suggested that the context for what is happening in the world today is the struggle between financial institutions and governments. Will the financial institutions control governments or will governments control financial institutions?

The convergence started coming with the third observation. It is a stanza from a poem by Tomas Tranströmer entitled, “Three Stanzas.”**

Jesus held up a coin
with Tiberius in profile
a profile without love
power in circulation.

The anger of the Tea Party movement is fuelled by too much government (power) in their lives while the anger of the Occupy Wall Street movement is fuelled by the financial institution’s will to power lacking love.


*C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” (1942) as found in Volume 7 of the Collected Works, para. 78.
** Tomas Tranströmer, “Three Stanzas,” The Great Enigma, New Collected Poems, Robin Fulton, trans. (New Directions Books: New York, 2006) 208.
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