On Fundamentalism

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–from The Battle for God, A History of Fundamentalism, by Karen Armstrong. Ballantine Books, pg. 366-369.

 

“FUNDAMENTALIST FURY reminds us that our modern culture imposes extremely difficult demands on human beings. It has certainly empowered us, opened new worlds, broadened our horizons, and enabled many of us to live happier, healthier lives. Yet it has often dented our self-esteem. At the same time as our rational worldview has proclaimed that humans are the measure of all things, and liberated us from an unseemly dependence on a supernatural God, it has also revealed our frailty, vulnerability, and lack of dignity.

 

Copernicus unseated us from the center of the universe, and relegated us to a peripheral role. Kant declared that we could never be certain that our ideas corresponded to any reality outside our own heads. Darwin suggested that we were simply animals, and Freud showed that far from being wholly rational creatures, human beings were at the mercy of the powerful, irrational forces of the unconscious, which could be accessed only with great difficulty.

 

This, indeed, was demonstrated by the modern experience. Despite the cult of rationality, modern history has been punctuated by witch-hunts and world wars which have been explosions of unreason. Without the ability to approach the deeper regions of the psyche, which the old myths, liturgies, and mystical practices of the best conservative faiths once provided, it seemed that reason sometimes lost its mind in our brave new world. At the [beginning of the twenty-first century], the liberal myth that humanity is progressing to an ever more enlightened and tolerant state looks as fantastic as any of the other myths…

 

The premillennial vision, which views some of the most positive institutions of modernity as diabolic, harbors genocidal dreams, and sees humanity as rushing toward a horrific End, is a clear indication of the dread and disappointment that modernity has inspired in many Protestant fundamentalists. We have seen the nihilism that can inform the fundamentalist program. It is impossible to reason such fear away or attempt to eradicate it by coercive measures. A more imaginative response would be to try to appreciate the depth of this neurosis, even if a liberal or a secularist cannot share this dread-ridden perspective.”

 

–from The Battle for God, A History of Fundamentalism, by Karen Armstrong. Ballantine Books, pgs. 366-369

Care vs. Cure

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–excerpt from Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore

 

“A major difference between care and cure is that cure implies the end of trouble. If you are cured, you don’t have to worry about whatever was bothering you any longer.

But care has a sense of ongoing attention. There is no end. Conflicts may never be fully resolved. Your character will never change radically, although it may go through some interesting transformations. Awareness can change, of course, but problems may persist and never go away.

Our work in psychology would change remarkably if we thought about it as ongoing care rather than the quest for a cure. ”

 

—Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore, HarperPerennial, pgs 18-19.

The Sociopath Next Door

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–excerpts from Martha Stout’s excellent book, The Sociopath Next Door, pgs. 9-13

 

“About one in twenty-five individuals [4%, or 4 in every 100 people] are sociopathic, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. The intellectual difference between right and wrong does not bring on the emotional sirens and flashing blue lights, or the fear of God, that it does for the rest of us. Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all…

…Most of us feel slightly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person. Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers…

…The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender. What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron — or what makes the difference between an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer — is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions…

…For something like 96% of us, conscience is so fundamental that we seldom even think about it… But not to care at all about the effects of our actions on society, on friends, on family, on our children? What would that be like?…

…all other psychiatric diagnoses (including narcissism) involve some amount of personal distress or misery for the individuals who suffer from them. Sociopathy stand alone as a “disease” that causes no dis-ease for the person who has it, no subjective discomfort. Sociopaths are often quite satisfied with themselves and with their lives, and perhaps for this very reason there is no effective “treatment.”

 

—The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout, PhD, Broadway Books, New York, excerpts taken from pgs 9-13.

 

 

Enemy-making

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“Enemy-making seems to serve a vital purpose: those qualities that we cannot tolerate in ourselves we can unconsciously and painlessly attribute to our enemies. When observed through psychological lenses, enemy-making is a transposition of shadow onto others who, for often complicated reasons, fit our images of the inferior. We need only to think of the people whom we judge or dislike or against whom we hold secret prejudices to find ourselves in the grip of our shadow nature.

At the level of nation, race, religion, or other collective identity, we can witness enemy-making being enacted in mythic, dramatic, and often tragic proportions. Wars, crusades, and persecutions are the terrible estate of this form of the human shadow, which is, to some degree, a legacy of our instinctual tribal heritage. The greatest cruelties in human history have been carried out in the name of righteous causes, when the shadows of entire nations have been projected onto the face of an enemy and thus an alien group can be made into a foe, a scapegoat, or an infidel.”

–Introduction to Part 8, “Enemy-making: Us and Them in the Body Politic,” from Meeting the Shadow, edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, pg 195.

“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 residue 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.”

–Essay from Meeting the Shadow by Sam Keen, “The Enemy Maker,” pg 198.

 

Alas, Our Collective Shadow Doesn’t Just Share the Good Things

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James Hollis is one of the great psychological thinkers, lecturers, and authors of our time. Here’s a quote from Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding Our Darker Selves, Gotham Books, pages 108-109, about the power of  the collective shadow.

 

“Everywhere we move, our Shadow trails us–its hidden agendas, its repressed motives, its imposing history, its un-lived life, its fear-driven stratagems. Into relationships, into work life, into the dream I dream tonight, the Shadow elements are dynamically active. And if this is so of any and each of us, only one person, what happens wherever more than one are gathered?

Does not the shadow go with each of them, occasion contrary, or mutual, projections, blend together, provide an even greater sum of darkness? Is not the Shadow of a group more than the sum of individual Shadows, and might it not create a whole new dimension of unconsciousness?

Just as two persons can intermingle their Shadows, producing the famous folie a deux, so groups can suffer a collective contagion, a group madness, a communal enthusiasm. We have only to look at the sad chronicle of human history to see collective contagions, participatory madness, wars and witch hunts, and the violence that may rise from collective possessions.

 

Just as the ego of the individual is predisposed to defend itself, prejudice its limited purview of reality, reject those elements that are discordant, disruptive, and threatening, so, too, groups always have a fluid, amorphous, but highly vulnerable “ego.” From any region of our psyche excluded from sustained self-examination, much energy may be released, for good or ill, no matter how benign the intent of the group may be.

 

Moreover, that fluid, amorphous ego is always highly susceptible to the manipulation of a charismatic leader. Each individual in the group brings complexes, needs, and hidden agendas waiting to be activated. Dictators, politicians, and televangelists skillfully exploit this group fluidity–comprised both of collective insecurities and the unexamined lives of each individual multiplied.”

 

 

And alas, collective shadow contagions are easier to share than they have ever been, as it is easier than it has ever been for like minded kooks to share their contagions.

Projecting Our Own Evil Onto Others

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“If we do not see our own shadow, we project it onto other people, who then have a fascinating effect on us. We are compelled to think about them all the time; we get disproportionately stirred up about them and may even start to persecute them. This does not mean that certain people whom we hate are not in truth intolerable; but even in such cases we could deal with them in a reasonable manner or avoid them–if they were not the projection of our shadow, which never fails to lead us into every possible exaggeration and fascination.”
–Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche

Imagine a movie projector. You’d 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 actually coming from you, but the other person is the only place where you can SEE the image. Thus we can hate someone else for having whatever quality of our own 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!”

“A predominant behavior characteristic of those I would call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their image of self-perfection… Since deep down they feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.”
–M. Scott Peck, from “Healing Human Evil,” in Meeting the Shadow

It Ain’t Just Donald

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In “The Strongmen Strike Back,” (Washington Post, March 18th) Robert Kagan did a very thorough job of making it clear that Donald Trump is not just some isolated aberration in American history. Trump is part of a world wide wave of authoritarianism endangering the very idea of democracy.

Kagan brilliantly covered the subject from a political perspective, and I heartily recommend his article. But my curiosity reaches toward the psychological.

WHY do so many people — not just in the USA, but all over the world — follow cruel and unethical strongmen whom they know they cannot trust?

WHY do so many of us so long to be told what to do?

WHY do so many of us long to be told who to hate?

That’s what we need to be worrying about.

Not how much we love or hate Trump, but what how much we love or hate Trump says about us.

Apocalypse by Clicking

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“We are unlikely to face a rebellion of sentient machines in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability, at the behest of a human elite, to try to sell us something–be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots might identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use them against us.

We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their prejudices.

While science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we may be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.”

–from “Why Technology Favors Tyranny,” by Yuval Noah Harari, October 2018, The Atlantic

Beyond Us and Them

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Seeing where others have failed us — parents, teachers, cultures, etc — is an important developmental step. It helps us process the hurts and injustices we’ve experienced.
But it’s only the first step.
Seeing where WE have failed OTHERS is the next — and far more difficult — step.