Daily Inspiration Quote by James Hillman

Hillman is poking at a late-20th-century reflex: the cool-kid suspicion that all authority is automatically corrupt, and that every institution is a mask for domination. His phrasing is bluntly repetitive - "give value", "give value", "office", "in office", "holding office" - because he is trying to re-literalize something modern life has flattened into bureaucracy or scandal. "Office" here isn’t just a job title; it’s an archetypal container. In Hillman’s psychological register, roles are not disposable costumes but psychic forms that organize responsibility, limits, and public meaning.

The intent isn’t to flatter leaders. It’s to rescue the idea that authority can be symbolic before it’s personal. When a culture refuses to "give value" to office, it forces everything onto personality: charisma, branding, vibes. The result is paradoxical: we become more vulnerable to demagogues precisely because we distrust the impersonal dignity of institutions. If the chair has no inherent weight, we’re left judging the sitter by spectacle.

The subtext is also a critique of therapeutic individualism. Hillman spent his career resisting the notion that the psyche is best managed privately, through self-expression and personal healing. He’s arguing for a civic psychology: authority as a shared fiction we must actively maintain if we want law, service, and accountability to mean anything beyond the ego of whoever happens to be in charge.

Contextually, it lands in an era of Watergate hangover, shrinking trust, and media-driven anti-politics - a moment when cynicism started to pose as sophistication. Hillman’s wager is unfashionable: that reverence, carefully placed, is a democratic technology.