From Anlauf to Reedsport: Escape from Eugene and the Devil's Racecourse

The Reedsport Public Library. Reedsport, Oregon. Not far now from the Oregon coast. Have been driving along one of the most quietly picturesque highways in many a day. Others were spectacular, dramatic, like the mountain passes through Colorado and Utah especially. But this is Highway 38, the western route, through miles and miles of mountain forest land, where the road is bordered in the shade of tall spruce and pine on either side, curving down along clear streams and rushing rivers. Far from the madding crowd.

Yesterday’s drive took me into the very heart of the madding crowd, through the rush hour traffic and into the urban life of Eugene, Oregon. I should have known better, but I was remembering the Eugene where I had spent some happy months nearly fifty years ago. It was a place of intelligence and culture at that time, still lacking in those abominations of our time, the tangled labyrinths of six lane roads to Everywhere and Nowhere and as fast as you can and must go (even if you don’t know where you’re going). So I stopped in at a 7-11 “convenience store” to ask for navigational help in exiting Eugene by the nearest back road leading nowhere near any devious link to the Devil’s Racecourse.

An altercation was in progress. One of the thousands of lost souls, all too common in Eugene as in almost every urban population over 537 or so, high on pot, meth, heroin, or all at the same time, was threatening to shoot the manager of the store for infringing on his freedom of speech. The trouble being that his speech was more of a bellowing rage against all and everyone of an ethnicity or color different from his own. Probably without his understanding why, the police were called and he was escorted Elsewhere.

As I said, this scene has been a burgeoning part of nearly every urban environment I have passed through since leaving Cincinnati. The media refers to it as an opioid epidemic, or crisis. But behind the drug related epidemic is another – the crisis of despair that we seem unable to understand, let alone transform. Why is this? Again, I quote Jung:

“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled. Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop. It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them. Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. The heaping up of arms is itself a call to war. Rather must they recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious bursts the dykes of consciousness and overwhelms it.”

I have emphasized part of the above passage because it echoes what the Sufi, Idries Shah, said in a 1970’s interview with Elizabeth Hall, published in Psychology Today:

Elizabeth Hall: For the sake of humanity, what would you like to see happen?
Shah: What I really want, in case anybody is listening, is for the products of the last 50 years of psychological research to be studied by the public, by everybody, so that the findings become part of their way of thinking. At the moment, people have adopted only a few. They talk glibly about making Freudian slips and they have accepted the idea of inferiority complexes. But they have this great body of psychological information and refuse to use it.
People in this civilization are starving in the middle of plenty. This is a civilization that is going down, not because it hasn’t got the knowledge that would save it, but because nobody will use the knowledge.