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The ability to express power promotes survival in a world full of threats and it helps create a life worth living in a world that can bog us down with suffering and boredom. It is the ultimate antidote to what Carl Jung calls “the eternal experience and the eternal problem of mankind”, namely “our helplessness and weakness” (Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious), and thus power is needed if we are to flourish. Without power we stagnate, with power we venture out into the world in active pursuit of what we need and want. We can deny our will to power, or our will to power can be crushed by external forces, but as Jung notes when an impulse as strong as our will to power is thwarted we suffer:
“[We] may be able to suppress [an impulse], but [we] cannot alter [its] nature, and what is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded with a resentment that makes the otherwise . . . natural impulse our enemy.”
Carl Jung, Aion
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