Inner child / adult and their respective urges. Dependent / independent. Feeling / thinking. These human integral dichotomies are reasons for pessimism – relative to the optimism we would like to have – about individuals, cultures, and the future. A seeming dichotomy that most people would cite – good / evil – is subsumed within the others and does not exist in itself. Good should be considered the natural benevolence that a loved child will have for self and others. Evil, the projection of the unloved child's pain into the world and absorption into the self.
We can't avoid experiencing the pressure of our childhood unmet needs and the pain this starvation caused. We are therefore dependent, but also an individual not collective mind. We are grounded in body sensation and emotion but we think our way away from our feelings. Is there any method to measure, in the individual psyche and in the mass culture, the summary effect of these contradictory forces? Which, in the broad arc, wins and which loses? Could the Book of Humanity, written at the end of time, have the prosaic title: "Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back"?
Why pessimism and not optimism? Emotional pain is prepotent. It sickens us when it happens and is not healed. And this is generally at birth and in childhood. Human dysfunction comes down to early pain and the timeless abyss it carves into the timeline.
We should look at the individual, the microcosm. Do most people "win," or "lose"? Before the end of their lives, have they found meaning and contentment, or struggled for it, or given up? My view, which I don't think will change for the rest of my days, is that there is no real movement forward or backward. We remain one and the same, barring healing work. That does not include advice taking or thinking things, which I read so often. It involves going to where we're wounded.
Alice Miller mentioned that a person can grow intellectually but remain the emotionally injured child. This is evident in the macrocosm: Civilization grows and deteriorates, and people juggle their dichotomies.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.