Most people who’ve looked at it seriously realize that the idea of the self is failing apart. We invented psychology a hundred years ago because we had to. The concept of the self we cobbled together from assumptions readily at hand was anthropologically indefensible, and whenever you try to actualize an idea of self that is anthropologically unstable, you’ll produce all kinds of pathologies. The communists tried this, and they ended up slaughtering millions of people. In the west, we’ve been trying to actualize a different kind of flawed anthropology, and the devastation has been similarly massive, though more subtle, because it has been spiritual.
–Gil Baile, author of Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, in an interview in the most recent issue of Image: a journal of the arts & religion.
