What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? [300] It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called. That is why the legends say that
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung stops the sentence there — "That is why the legends say that" — and the cut is not accidental. What the legends say is left to you, because the legends are yours, not his. That structural move is itself the argument: vocation cannot be delivered from outside. Necessity doesn't do it. Moral resolve doesn't do it. Neither does the accumulated pressure of circumstance, which breaks nine people out of ten back toward the familiar. What tips the scales is precisely what refuses to be argued into existence — an irrational factor, Jung says, which means not amenable to the will's management. You don't choose it any more than you choose the timbre of your own voice.
The daimon here is not a romantic ornament. It is a logic the soul runs on when every other logic has failed — when the pneumatic promises (rise high enough, purify enough, transcend the mess) have shown their limits, and the mass's well-worn paths have turned visibly hollow. Vocation appears not as reward for preparation but in the wreckage of all the plans that were supposed to work. That is what Jung means by "ruin means nothing": ruin is not the obstacle to vocation, it is frequently the condition under which vocation finally becomes audible. The man who hears the daemon at noon was not ready for him at dawn.
Carl Gustav Jung·The Development of Personality·1954