A mind-blowing interview with Howard Bloom:
Right now, the jigsaw puzzle of human culture is so primitive that it defies belief. The clichés we use to try to discuss what we are and to understand our emotions are extraordinarily primitive. Until 1812, we did not have the word “unconscious” or “subconscious.” The guy who invented the word took it nowhere. He didn’t market it. He didn’t promote it. And consequently it did not enter the public mind. It didn’t become a tool in the cultural tool kit-a cliché — until somebody who had studied the art of promotion by studying Moses took it up. Specifically he tried to figure out how Moses had promoted, marketed and publicized, how Moses had created a chosen people from nothing. The guy who put the unconscious on the map — the man who gave the concept to you and me — traveled from Vienna to Rome every year to ponder Michelangelo’s statue of David so he could figure out exactly how you start a movement that spreads your ideas. This guy took up the idea of the unconscious and the subconscious and implanted it in our vocabulary. His name was Sigmund Freud. So it took roughly 88 years from the first mention of the conscious and the unconscious before it got into our common cultural toolkit. And it took the skills of a man with many curiosities, the skills of a man who was as fascinated by the science of the mind as he was with the science of idea-planting, the science of benevolent marketing.