We need to get serious, folks

"The task of confronting the brutal, destructive elements of the shadow has become the inescapable destiny of our species: if we fail, we cannot hope to survive." –Anthony Stevens, PhD., Analytical Psychologist

 

It's time to get serious, folks.

It's time to connect the dots while we still have some dots left to connect.

How many Native American children were killed when Europeans took over this continent?

How many children were killed at Dresden and Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

How many children have died when we interferred in other countries to protect American corporate interests? (Pick just about any country in Central America or the Middle East and start counting. See Overthrow, by Stephen Kinzer.)

How many children — that we will never even hear about — are being killed by our silent, deadly drones today?

How many of our own children are going stark raving mad now and killing other children before they turn the incredibly deadly weapons which are readily available on themselves? (Most mass murderers are white males between the ages of 25 and 35.)

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

 

 

Watch out for that family stuff during the holidays…

I'm just gonna let James Hollis cover the holiday/family/shadow issue. There's no one one better qualified, or more truthful, for the job. And this stuff is big. It's old, it's mostly unconscious, and it's BIG.

The following excerpt is from Hollis' book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:

 

"We all know that the normative power, the ingrained authority, and the stability of all great institutions — the church, the government, and the family — have undergone substantive, progressive enervation over the past two centuries, and are today most commonly attended by nostalgia, cynicism, habit and rootlessness. The first, nostalgia, is epitomized by the now banal songs that assault one beginning in November, such as "I'll Be Home for Christmas." Most of my clients have unhappy memories of the holidays. Or they have inordinate hopes for what can be repaired in their families and are always disappointed, or they are re-exposed at holiday time to those familiar dynamics lingering with them as pathologies, or they miss those who have died or from whom they have been estranged. Not the pretty picture one would expect based on the commercialized versions one sees on television! As with the fantasy of romantic love, perhaps the idealized family fails because we ask too much of it.

This very afternoon I sat with a man in his late forites, just back from a holiday visit to his extended family of origin. His scattered tribe had gathered from distant places and brought all their familiar madness with them. This tiime, Father was dead. Mother was now, finally, benign, half-senile, half the viper she once was. One brother was drifting through an alcoholic haze, another addicted to video games. One sister was having affairs with two different married men. Only one sister was willing to talk with my client about his life. I told him that he was a survivor, and that he was entitled to echo the words of Job, "I only have alone escaped to tell thee." He asked me, "How many of my family can I save?" And I said, "One. And I'm talking to him." Battered as he had been by their substance abuse, their continual denigration, and their mis-use of fundamentalistic guilt, he had in turn found intimacy with others so risky that, lonely as he was, he had never managed to commit himself to another. So much for over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go.

What then, in this current era, with its mobility, its transience, and its anonymity, might family be, and what is reasonable to ask of it? How is family to serve the task of soul building? While the family as institution was historically necessary for survival, the protection of children, and the transmission of cultural values, I am not always ready today to venerate the idea of family naively, for I have seen where family can also be a vehicle of tyranny, a sanctioned mode of constriction, and the inhibitor of developmental needs to the individual.

…we are obliged to ask tough questions of family in order to see if the institution in each particular instance serves the soul. We have to ask, "Does each person receive affirmation and support in being different, or is the price of being in the family conformity, the subversion of the agenda for individual growth that each of us brings into this world?" Just as each marriage has the right to ask fidelity, loyalty to the task of the marriage, and the willingness to work at resolution of discord, so every family has the right to ask the full participation of each member in the life of the family. Yet all marriage and family therapists know that family interactions are typically arrayed around its most damaged member. Except in the case of a catastrophic illness of a child, that damaged member is inevitably one of the parents, or sometimes both of them in their pas de deux. When I hear someone waxing sentimentally about family, I often detect nostalgia for what family is supposed to mean, rather than what they experienced.

Don't suppose that I am negative toward, or cynical in approaching, the idea of family. Yes, it's true that as a therapist I am almost daily in the thick of trying to repair some of the hurt that family has brought to the life of the person sitting before me. But in my own family I have also experienced, and been immeasurably enriched by, being loved beyond my merit, having others sacrifice on my behalf, and knowing there were those who worried for me as I made my bumbling way through the world. My point is rather that I believe nothing can escape the realistic scrutiny of consciousness. Of every family we must ask, "How well did the soul flourish here? How much life was lost through the failure of modeling a larger life, granting permission to follow one's own course, or was constricted by the glass ceiling of familial fears and limitations?" 

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, How to Finally, Really Grow Up, James Hollis, PhD, pgs. 129-131

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." –opening lines of Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

How do you spell relief? Obama.

I had no idea how stressed out I was by the looming Presidential election until after it was over. (Mainly because I swore to myself after the Bush/Gore debacle that I would never get that upset over politics again. Which didn't really work, as you can see. Apparently I was just as upset about this election, but repressing it.)

Wow — what a difference! A whole new lightness, brain and body, head to toe, inside and out.

Because this election was a fulcrum, a turning point. And even though I was trying to be cool about it, I knew it in my bones.

Had the majority of voters in America been backwards enough to believe what the Republican Right is saying and doing these days, it would have been a very bad sign indeed. Adding 4 years of Romney-rule to the 8 years of Bush-rule that we are still trying to recover from might have made recovery really, truly impossible.

And who knows? Maybe it is impossible. Maybe, like every other democracy so far in history, we will turn — have turned? —  into an oligarchy run by the rich and powerful who dominate the masses by spending money, putting on circuses and making small concessions.

But also maybe, just maybe, we could become a democracy that lasts.

One where people work together to govern themselves.

At least we have a shot at that now. At least we have a President who understands that lying, blaming, smearing and finger pointing are the shadow of human interaction, not the substance.

 

This Election is Projection

Projection happens all the time. It starts with denial, and ends in blame. We take some part of ourselves we don’t like —or are ashamed of, or don’t want to think about, or can’t bring ourselves to deal with— and then we project it out onto another person, where we can see it.

Imagine a movie projector. You would be the projector whirring in that little room at the back, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You’re creating the image, the image is coming from inside of you, but the other person is the only place where you can actually see that image. Thus we can hate someone else for having whatever quality we’re projecting, while remaining steadfastly in love with ourselves and not having to change a thing personally. {“I don’t have a bad temper. What are you talking about, you asshole? You have a terrible temper!”}

I'm sure you've heard that Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. Well, Projection and Blame ain't just small towns in Texas. We are not talking about a quaint practice only carried out by a few remote primitives somewhere on the other side of the planet. This cycle —denial-projection-blame— is a basic psychological mechanism. It’s a description of what went on at your dinner table last night. It’s a description of what we each do all day long unless we’re making a sincere effort not to do so, and probably a good 78.87% of the time even then. There’s no getting around the fact that human beings are now using their intelligence to project whatever they don’t like about themselves onto other people, rather than using their intelligence to correct whatever it is about themselves they don’t like.

Shoot—we’re taught to project whatever we don’t like about ourselves onto other people. Children hear their parents and teachers and leaders do it every day. Hang out in any schoolyard, anywhere in the world, for one whole recess period, and count how many times one kid blames another kid for what he or she just did. Where do they learn that?

Start looking around for the human shadow. It will not take you long to find it. In history, in current politics, in the news, in the paper, on the web, on television, in your own home, and in your own heart. Nor will it take you long to come to the conclusion that this is not some harmless procedure easily overlooked among friends. This is one of humanity’s biggest problems.

As Robert Bly put it, "Projection of shadow material causes most of the misery, injustice and warfare in the world."

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

Whoa. What? Extinction of the human race? What in hell is he talking about? Why’d he say that? Because we not only project blame individually, we also project blame collectively. Or: Whole Cultures Cast Shadows. A hat that looks really cool in a bar in Wyoming may not look cool at all on Fifth Avenue in New York. There are substantial cultural differences between the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South. Between being German and being Sudanese. Between Chinese and Chilean. We’re not just stuck in ego roles and family roles; we’re also stuck in social-historical-mythological eras and areas. And then, in practice, we refine our differences even further by only hanging out with people inside our era and area who are the most like us. Red State, Blue State.

As history has shown over and over again, if enough people deny and project the same qualities something really nasty occurs: like Inquisitions, or exterminations of native populations, or slavery, or the Third Reich, or Israelis and Palestinians, or Shiites and Sunnis, or genocide, or Corporate America—Where the Rich Get Richer! while the poor get laid off. Massive acts of evil simply could not be perpetrated without massive amounts of denial, projection, and blame.

The human shadow comes in layers, as does the unconscious: there’s a personal layer as well as a collective layer. Thus we each have a personal shadow that can get out of hand —for example, we might make fun of how others look if we feel insecure about our own attractiveness. And then we each participate in a collective shadow that can get out of hand —for example, we might accuse another group of evil if we can’t bear to look at the evil our own group has done.

An excellent example of the latter occurred in US history at the end of WWII. After the saturation bombing of German cities by British and US forces which culminated in a firestorm at Dresden so fierce it literally melted 100,000 people, the USA dropped two atomic bombs on a country that was trying to surrender to the Allied forces. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki 150,000 people were killed instantly, and tens of thousands later died slowly and hideously from radiation poisoning. We’re talking more than 300,000 dead people here, and not soldiers, either—completely innocent civilians who were going about their business in big cities. Gruesome. Way beyond gruesome.

Yet soon after these events, unable and unwilling to comprehend that such colossal evil could be perpetrated by their own country, citizens all over the USA (spurred on by their leaders), began to obsess about how dangerous Russia was, and to build bomb shelters in their backyards. I grew up with one of those bomb shelters in my backyard. {No lie: my Dad had an actual bomb shelter built on our property in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s. At first it was all clean and full of water and canned goods, later it got dirty and full of spider webs and snakes, and then finally, after many years of neglect, my Aunt Eddie planted iris all over it, so it eventually became a little hill of flowers with a hollow core.} I also grew up hearing stories about how brutal the Japanese were in WWII. No one ever mentioned Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden in my family.

In other words, there is a ‘me against you’ aspect to the personal shadow, and there is an ‘us against them’ aspect to the collective shadow. And projected out onto others, both types of shadow material harm—do actual damage to—the targets of their projections. Not just psychic mumbo-jumbo, real harm. “Bombs in the baby carriages,” as Paul Simon said in "Graceland."

Welcome to a Presidential election year! Where all the problems one party hasn't been able to address or fix will be blamed on the other party, while the problems themselves will remain unaddressed.

The Shadow in Warfare

Oregon Friends of CG Jung managed to convince Karl Marlantes to come talk here in Portland two weeks ago, and I'm still not over it. Marlantes is the author of Matterhorn, a novel based on his own experiences as a Marine during the Vietnam War, and the non-fiction What It Is Like To Go To War. You need both books. Buy them. Read them. Recommend them to others. This man has been there, done that — and then spent the next 40 years dealing with it.

The following quotes are from What It Is Like To Go To War:

"Part of us loves to destroy…  this feeling is just the other face of creativity, in Jungian terms, the shadow side of creativity…  What's scary is that it is far easier to take the path of transcendence through destruction than to take the path of transcendence through creation. And the destructive path gets easier as technology improves, while positive creating, whether spiritual, artistic, or commercial, is just as hard as it ever was." p. 63

Isn't that what Yoda said? The dark side isn't stronger. Just easier. Faster. More seductive.

"You can't be a good person until you observe how bad you are. It is only when the evil is conscious that it can be countered." p. 64

"The transcendent realm one reaches through violence is one that society says it condemns but in fact celebrates everywhere, on film, on television, and in the news. It is because of this split that these feelings are so very dangerous. This split is like the wicked fairy who isn't invited to the wedding but who will get her due. It is the darkness that haunts the lynch mob that in the daytime is dispersed as lawyers, doctors, and church aldermen." p. 66-67

"We are legion, says the Bible. We have a shadow, says Jung." p. 68

"Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow. This is the way of Charles Manson and terrorist cells. This is also the way of filmakers who suddenly get into its dark power and splatter it all over the screen in slow motion. This is the wrong way to relate to it." p. 69

"The critical psychological issue about weapons technology is the ability to distance the user from the effects. A constant martial fantasy is the 'clean kill'… This clean-kill fantasy avoids the darkness. It allows the hero trip without any cost… Even the language is getting neat and tidy, as in 'surgical strike'… Numbness and hypocrisy aren't learned in boot camp. When it comes to inurement to violence, boot camp is just a finishing school… Getting used to the extremes of violence in combat is just another level up from our everyday training. The circuitry is all in place, having been wired long years before. All that's happening is an increase in voltage. The problem is, however, that the voltage has been steadily and rapidly increasing in all of the entertainment fields… our psychic wiring is getting sized upward for higher and higher voltages." p. 71-73

"If you don't recognize your shadow sides, you'll be likely to cause a lot of damage trying to do your heroic deeds." p. 85

"Then we started seeing some hard-to-stomach reality on television. [during the Vietnam War] Rather than accept that this terrible reality was the result of our inflated ideas of being the good-guy soldiers we thought we were, and accept that we'd buried deeply our own despised Nazis and Tojos, it was easier to throw that darkness onto the people we asked to do the fighting. So the Vietnam veterans came home catching everyone's shadow, portrayed as dope-shooting,coke-snuffing, baby-killing mercenaries. They were far from that." p. 86-87

Well, this is ridiculous. I'll end up quoting the whole damn book.

Go buy Marlantes' books yourself:  Matterhorn and What It Is Like To Go To War.

Then read them.

We owe the people who fight our wars for us. Big time.

 

 

Is there another species I could join?

I was minding my own business today, tootling along being incredibly domestic, ironing some shirts that got so wrinkled in a neglected washload I'd shoved them into a plastic bag and stashed them in the freezer. (This is a highly recommended old-Southern-lady-ironing trick: put washed, damp linens or cottons in plastic bags and stash 'em in the freezer. They'll iron up beautifully whenever you finally get around to doing it.)

So I turned on the radio to keep me company while performing such a lonely and domestic chore, and there was Mitt Romney. Telling me that my husband and I are victims.

Moochers.

Losers.

Telling me that the several hundred thousand dollars we've put into Social Security by now — amounts we put in paycheck after paycheck, every paycheck, every year, all of our married lives, amounts which were matched by David's firm (which, incidentally, fired him after 40 years of service, a few months before he could legally retire, and then went out and hired a kid with no experience who'd work for a shitty salary) — did not count.

Yup. I'm serious. There was ole Mitt, on the radio, telling me that anyone who was asking the federal government for anything, even something they'd given to the federal government themselves in the first place, was some sort of creep. Weak. Grasping. Liable to vote for Obama.

i got sick to my stomach.

Still am, sort of, although it's hours later now.

Pablo Neruda, in one of his poems, says he's tired of being a man.

I can relate.

If that is all the Republicans have to offer, in a Presidential election, in the year 2012, I'm tired of being human.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Keep Running Into Myself In This Presidential Race

What makes political races so frustrating and so annoying?

The fact that we keep running into ourselves. That we're actually running against ourselves.

Your shadow — the part of yourself you don't like and don't want to admit — is part of your psychological make-up, and ignoring its presence will not get rid of it. As part of your psyche it has to, it will, show up somewhere in your life. So if there are some things you just can't stand to admit about yourself, if you just can't face some of your own stuff, then you're going to see your own stuff on someone else's face.

Guaranteed. The things we don't like about ourselves don't just disappear. They don't give up and go away because we don't want to think about them. They start showing up in other people. They pop up here and pop up there until they get our attention. And anyone we see doing whatever it is we don't like about ourselves will look worse and worse as time goes by.

Kind of explains why we hear so much ranting and raving about the other guys, doesn't it? Why it's so easy to get all hot and bothered about what someone else is doing… why we're so attracted to vicious speculation and hateful rhetoric… why we just can't seem to get off of certain subjects…

It's pretty simple, really: we dwell on what others are doing to keep from having to look at what we've been up to ourselves.

This process is called projection, in psychological terms, and it happens all the time. It starts with denial, and it ends in blame. We take some part of ourselves we don't like — or are ashamed of, or don't want to think about, or can't bring ourselves to deal with — and then we project it out onto another person, where we can see it. 

Imagine a movie projector. You would be the projector whirring in that little room at the back, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You're creating the image, the image is coming from inside of you, but the other person is the only place where you can actually see that image.

You don't look beastly… other people look beastly…

Your policies didn't ruin this country… the other guys' policies ruined this country… We didn't cause the depression and the deficit… They caused the depression and the deficit.

It would be easier to govern if we could turn off our projectors every now and then.

Hell, it would be easier to be human if we could turn off our projectors every now and then.

 

Homo hostilis

Given the news these days, it seems like a swell time to quote from an essay (feedbacks) that Sam Keen wrote for Meeting the Shadow some years ago.

"The problem seems to lie not in our reason or our technology, but in the hardness of our hearts. Generation after generation, we find excuses to hate and dehumanize each other, and we always justify ourselves with the most mature-sounding political rhetoric. And we refuse to admit the obvious. We human beings are Homo hostilis, the hostile species, the enemy-making animal. We are driven to fabricate an enemy as a scapegoat to bear the burden of our denied enmity. From the unconscious resudue of our hostility, we create a target; from our private demons, we conjure a public enemy. And perhaps, more than anything else, the wars we engage in are compulsive rituals, shadow dramas in which we continually try to kill those parts of ourselves we deny and despise." Meeting the Shadow, The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, Tarcher, edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, 1991, p. 198.

Leonard Pitts nailed it today

Leonard Pitts' article in today's paper, When Facts Don't Matter, eloquently illuminates the deep course that unchallenged shadow material eventually dredges through a culture. Get the whole article in The Oregonian, or from The Miami Herald, its source. Here are a few excerpts:

"Not long ago, if you told a whopper like Palin's and it was as thoroughly debunked as hers was, that would have ended the discussion. These days, it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them…

Indeed, falsehoods are harder to kill than a Hollywood zombie. Run them through with fact, and still they shamble forward, fueled by echo chamber media, ideological tribalism, cognitive dissonance, a certain imperviousness to shame, and an understanding that a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth…

It seems that not only are facts no longer important, but they are not even the point. Rather, the point is the construction and maintenance of an alternate narrative designed to enhance and exploit the receiver's fears, his or her sense of prerogatives, entitlement, propriety and morality under siege from outside forces…

This is the state of American political discourse… where a sense of dislocation, disaffection, and general been-done-wrongness has become sine qua non, coin of the realm, lingua franca of the true believers — and of their true belief in the desperate need to turn back the unrighteous Other and his unwelcome change…

The result of which is that Americans increasingly occupy two realities, one based on the conviction that facts matter, the other on the notion that facts are only what you need them to be in a given moment…"

Beautifully put. Frightfully true. Thank you, Leonard, for your clear eyes and eloquent voice.