There could be no better illustration of how the human shadow works than the news these last two years. We’ve let ourselves be whipped up into opposing camps, gotten too busy blaming the other party to practice democracy or face obvious problems.We elected a feckless buffoon because he instinctively knew how to turn us against one another, because he was the brashest bully on the playground, not because he knew anything about how to respectfully lead a powerful country on a small, rapidly changing world.

And now we’re reaping the rewards. Democracy is in decline all over, aided by creepy technology we are just beginning to find out about. Russia and North Korea are waving their nuclear arms, China is turning into a dictatorship, the USA has gone from world leader to world laughing stock, and children at school are gunned down by weapons that have no business being anywhere except on a battlefield.

Know why book sellers can’t keep George Orwell’s 1984 in stock? Because the middle chapter of the book, “Why There Must Always Be A War,” feels like it’s coming true: the rallies to deride others, the hateful rhetoric about whole groups of people, the poverty and misery in most people’s everyday lives, versus the wealth and privilege accorded the powerful and the few.

THAT, dear reader, is what I’ve been talking about. THAT is how the collective human shadow works.

“Learning to integrate shadow material is the single most important task facing mankind, as the failure to do so will lead to the extinction of the human race.” — Carl Jung

“We need an essentially new way of thinking if mankind is to survive.” — Albert Einstein