Politics & Power Quote by James Hillman

Hillman is taking aim at a particularly American reflex: when things break, find the individual to blame. His line pivots on a quiet provocation. If nothing changes until ideas change, then our obsession with “fixing people” isn’t just misguided therapy-speak; it’s a political and cultural strategy that keeps institutions, incentives, and shared myths safely off the hook.

The subtext is diagnosis-as-ideology. In a culture steeped in self-help, productivity gospel, and meritocratic moralism, personal pathology becomes the default explanation for systemic friction: you’re anxious because you’re not resilient enough, poor because you’re not disciplined enough, alienated because you haven’t “done the work.” Hillman doesn’t deny personal responsibility so much as he questions why responsibility is so often confined to the psyche of the lone subject. He’s pointing to how psychological language can be conscripted to maintain the status quo: if the problem is “the person,” then the solution is treatment, coaching, or correction, not reimagining the world that produced the symptom.

Context matters: Hillman, a post-Jungian and a skeptic of reductive clinical models, spent a career arguing that the soul isn’t a malfunctioning machine. Here he’s also critiquing an American faith in pragmatism without philosophy: we reach for interventions before interrogating the ideas that justify them. The sentence works because it flips the therapeutic gaze outward, insisting that the deepest work is cultural, not merely personal.