Sunday, December 21, 2025
Reddit front page, shortly before Christmas
https://old.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/1pse19b/be_weird/
New York, The Cooper Union
Joseph Campbell
Wednesday, March 1, 1967
Audio recording transcript
To make myself clear, let me pause for a minute to say a few words about what seems to me to be the Western idea of the individual. I will take a few rather well known examples to illustrate the fact. Carl Jung in his work speaks of the integration of the personality, and uses the word “individuation” rather frequently. And to make clear what he means, he points out that each one of us is, by his society, invited to play a certain role, a certain social role in order to function. We play roles. These roles he calls personae, from the Latin word for the mask worn by an actor.
We all have to put on a mask of some sort in order to function in the society. And even those who choose not to function in the society — to revolt from the society — put on masks too. They wear certain insignia, you might say, that indicate, I am in revolt.
One can be impressed by a persona, by a mask. For example, if one meets a person and is talking to him and thinks one is beginning to establish some kind of rapport, and then learns, let us say, that this is the distinguished ambassador from such and such a place, the mask comes in front of that person and a certain awe in your relationship to him, and this person becomes what Jung calls a mana personality — a personality with magical powers — so that you are not talking directly to him.
In order to be individuated, in order to be an individual, we must distinguish between ourselves and the mask that we wear. Now this mask goes very deep; it includes moral ideas, it includes judgment systems. These archetypes for action have been impressed upon us by our society.
Now I take Jung’s idea of the individuation as a rather clean-cut example of an Occidental ideal: that one should put on the mask and take it off. When you come home in the evening are you still Mr. President, or do you leave that in the office? If you keep your mask on, you know what we say of such a person: he is a stuffed shirt. The personality gradually disappears, and this is a particular disaster if one becomes impressed by one’s own mask. Here we have a real mirage phenomenon: nobody there.
Now let me say that the typical ideal in the Orient is that one should become identified with the mask. The whole pattern of education throughout the Orient is: Believe what you’re told, do what you’re told, do not ask questions. For an Occidental teaching Oriental students, it is absolutely bewildering — the submissiveness (March 1, 1967). For an Oriental teaching Occidental students, the challenges are shocking. There is no respect for the professor qua professor.
The traditional notion of a mature adult is a person who behaves as he ought to behave — who behaves as the society has always asked him to behave. Grandpa behaved this way; so did Great - grandpa. And every kid who didn't was eaten. So we all behaved this way; that is to say, the adult is the one who accepts and represents the order of the society without question. This you get in all traditional societies.
Now, you know what we call a person who behaves that way: this we call a stuffed shirt. He has never built anything particular out of himself. He has simply done as told. He's sure of what's right and what's wrong, and that's that. Now we can't have this anymore, and we don't want it. Our notion in our society today of an adult mind is a mind that accepts responsibility for its own actions, that judges in terms of values, not saying, “Oh, I want this because I like it,” but in terms of an ordered, considered value scale. The individual is to judge, the individual is to criticize, and the individual is to represent — with courage and loyalty — his judgments.
Now, this asks a lot of the society itself that wasn't asked before. This also tends to shatter the idea of authority. Now that idea was formally validated by—say it came from God; the Lord of the Universe ordered things this way for the society. A point I want to make is this: that all of these divine interpretations of local laws, of local social orders, are simply cooked up; they are not true. The society has changed with time. These are functions of conditions — of geography and history. One must realize that the moral order is in flux, is changing. There is no God-given right, wrong, true, false, moral, immoral. And with that kind of relativism, one is free to live as a human being, not simply as a robot, repeating patterns that have been enforced from the past. So we have a much more sophisticated idea toward the social order.
However when it comes to this other problem of the natural order, one's nature as man, the thing is not quite so relativistic.