“Groups always have a fluid, amorphous but highly vulnerable group “ego.” Moreover, that fluid, amorphous group ego is always highly susceptible to the manipulation of a charismatic leader. Charismatic madness touches and activates the “mad parts” in otherwise quite sane people. Psychological contagions, Shadow plagues, do occur, and few of us, if any, are exempt.” —James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things

“Hate has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them… the hater longs for the object of his hatred.” —Vaclav Havel, The Shadow in America

“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 own shadow, which never fails to lead us into every possible exaggeration and fascination.”—Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche 

“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

 “The collective Shadow can take form as mass phenomena in which entire nations become possessed. When a minority is forced to carry the projection of what a majority of the society denies about itself, the potential for great evil is activated.”—Connie Zwieg and Jeremiah Abrams, Meeting the Shadow

“Consider the convenience of knowing who the enemy is, always. If the enemy is there, they are not here, so I have no burden of consciousness, no obligation of self-examination.”—James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things

“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’ll see your own stuff on someone else’s face. It’s called projection, 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, whom we then condemn vociferously.

Imagine a movie projector. You’d be the projector whirring in that little room up at the back of the theater, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You’re creating the image. The image is being produced inside your head, but the other person is the only place where you can actually see that image. Projection.

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!!*#%* —Kay Plumb, Shadow in the USA

“Projection of shadow material causes most of the misery, injustice and warfare in the world.”—Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow

“The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter.”

–from Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk

Worldwide, 4% of the population — that’s 4 out of every 100, or 1 in every 25 people — has no conscience, which is the clinical definition of a sociopath.

Stop and think about those numbers for a minute. 1 in every 25 people… And while that statistic sounds ridiculously high the first time you hear it, after you think about it for a minute — the ever present crime, the hard drug cartels, the ubiquitous school bullies, the completely unnecessary wars which happen all over the world almost all of the time, torture, rape — that statistic starts to make sense. (See The Sociopath Next Door, The Ruthless versus the Rest of Us–Marcia Stout, PhD)

Such folks can do anything –absolutely anything– without feeling guilty. They do not have empathy for others. It’s a brain wiring issue. And these typically high energy, charismatic people wreck a great deal of damage in the world because the rest of us let them. Since the rest of us can’t imagine hurting others without feeling guilt or shame, we completely miss what the sociopaths among us are up to. While we feel bad about eating the last piece of cake, a sociopath enjoys getting more than their fair share. A sociopath lives for getting more than their fair share. They’re driven by power, not ethics.

In some cultures, say Switzerland or Japan, where overt narcissism or bullying is frowned upon, it’s difficult for sociopaths to make much headway. But in cultures like ours, where bad boys are celebrated and outlaws become famous, a clever sociopath can take an express elevator right to the top.

Unless we want the USA to be completely ruled by sociopaths from here on out, we need to stop letting them get away with things. We need rules. We need laws. And we need to enforce those rules and laws or those who do not play fair are going to come out on top, every time, from here on out.

Everyone knows Trump didn’t win the last Presidential election. Everyone knows the ‘Big Lie’ is exactly that. But we’re still letting Trump hold our entire country hostage. Everyone knows there is no reason for Russia to annex Ukraine, but Putin is still getting away with waging an unnecessary, bloody and horribly damaging war on a neighboring country.

Sure, Donald’s useful if your aim is to pack the Supreme Court with conservative judges or block all legislation proposed by the opposing party. But, in the long run, are such goals really worth sabotaging free election results? Do we really want to establish the precedent of whatever it takes to win? That’s not democracy, folks. That’s a sure slide into chaos. That’s Putin’s Russia. The boss says it, we do it…

Let’s get beyond the childishly naive idea that ‘everyone’s gonna play nice,’ because the sociopaths among us are not ever going to play nice. Let’s make lying to the public for personal political gain HURT. Let’s make tampering with election results HURT. Let’s make attempted political bribery HURT. Let’s make evading taxes and profiting from the Presidency HURT. Let’s make refusing to testify or pleading “The Fifth” over and over again in one of our courts HURT.

Let’s stop pretending that the sociopaths among us are ever going to play fair, and start holding them accountable when they don’t.

History teaches us over and over that the people who were the most vehemently sure they had all the right answers, and who caused the most damage to others accordingly, were actually dead wrong. (witch hunting priests, Imperialists, slave traders, Fascists, Klan members, etc.)

Pictures of right-wing politicians’ faces today are becoming increasingly disturbing… the yelling mouths wide open, the derision for anyone else’s ideas dripping from their fangs… they’re starting to look more like crowd members at a witch burning than representatives of high offices.

If only more of us could get comfortable with NOT knowing it all…

There’s a wonderful new (2019) graphic novel out about race in America: Good Talk, A Memoir in Conversations, by Mira Jacob.

The author is an East Indian woman married to a white Jewish man, and the conversations started when their five year old son began to ask questions about growing up brown in America while Trump’s star was ascending. What DO you say to that beautiful little brown face looking up to you for guidance and protection?

This book will make you laugh, and it will make you cry.

That chattering monkey in our minds makes it hard to see what’s going on.

We’re born knowing how to react.

We have to learn how to act.

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Harcourt, Inc.

This is a fascinating and terrifying book. In it, two distinguished social psychologists use data and real world examples to illustrate how self-justification and its powerful engine, cognitive dissonance –what happens when two of our beliefs cannot possibly both be true– push us further and further from truth and reality.

It was published in 2007, so their examples use the administration of George Bush, Jr. rather than the administration of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, but it’s not hard to apply its principles to today.

Self-justification, the tendency to cling even more tightly to beliefs once they’re shown to be false, prejudice, blind spots, distortions in memory, bad science for money, bogus theories rapidly circulated on the internet, closed minds in law enforcement and the judiciary… step right up, folks! We’ve got it all.

But we do have brains. We could improve. Here’s a passage from near the end of the book:

“The moral of our story is easy to say, and difficult to execute. When you screw up, try saying this: “I made a mistake. I need to understand what went wrong. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.” Dweck’s research is heartening because it suggests that at all ages, people can learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.

Our national pastime of baseball differs from the society that spawned it in one crucial way:  The box score of every baseball game, from the Little League to the Major League, consists of three tallies: runs, hits and errors. Errors are not desirable, of course, but everyone understands that they are unavoidable. Errors are inherent in baseball, as they are in medicine, business, science, law, love, and life. In the final analysis, the test of a nation’s character, and of an individual’s integrity, does not depend on being error free. It depends on what we do after making the error.”