Enemy-making

Posted on by kay

 

“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

Posted on by kay

 

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.

Apocalypse by Clicking

Posted on by kay

 

“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

Posted on by kay
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.

Let’s Keep Unscrupulous Psychopaths from Ruling the World

Posted on by kay

 

Donald Trump likes to say he’s the “greatest.”

This is what Swiss analytical psychologist Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig had to say about “great” men 20 years ago. It is more true, and more chilling, than ever.

“Contrary to popular belief, there are certain advantages to being a psychopath or compensated psychopath. Many of them have a relatively easy time adapting to society, unencumbered as they are by moral or neurotic scruples. They replace the lack of love or of true relationship with a love of power, something they can achieve without too much difficulty owing to the absence of moral or Eros-related restraints…

It is little wonder that psychopaths occupy so many of the top positions in society and rather astonishing that there are not more in such positions. Let me put it somewhat differently. One of the major problems of any society, of any political or large organization in general, is that of preventing unscrupulous, socially adapted psychopaths from gradually taking over the helm. 

There are many countries in which the problem is a long way from being solved. There are even certain countries whose political organization encourages psychopaths to rise to positions of power, where only psychopaths can achieve such positions. It is not difficult to imagine in what spirit such nations are ruled. Nazi Germany is  good example.

All dictorial forms of government, be they left-wing or right-wing regimes, are certainly to some extent dominated by psychopaths. Stalin was probably a psychopath, with a pronounced shadow and a decided power drive. Trotsky, originally his friend, was more of an idealist, but observe: Stalin died of natural causes at a ripe old age; Trotsky was murdered. There seems to be some truth to the expression, “the good die young.”

One is inclined to ask how, in a democratic country, we may prevent psychopaths from inveigling their way to the top. The power of the highest administrative positions is so strictly curtailed in Switzerland, for example, that it hardly tempts psychopaths. It seems to me even more important that the people be able to see through a psychopath, to see through their own psychopathic side. In most democracies, this ability is well enough developed so that a dangerous psychopath is usually detected when he appears on the scene.

I am convinced that a democracy whose citizens are incapable of discerning a psychopath will be destroyed by power-hungry demagogues. In Switzerland the resistance towards “great men” and the preference for mediocre political figures would seem to result from an instinctual desire to prevent psychopaths from coming to power.

Although there is certainly such a thing as a “great man,” many such figures are probably nothing more than unrecognized psychopaths. Think of personages such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, William II of Germany and many, many other more or less esteemed leaders of the past and present. These “great” criminals–and one must include Hitler and Stalin among them–destroyed the lives of millions. Themselves “erotically” stunted, they succeeded in obtaining recognition and power over  societies in which they, themselves, felt shut out, power which was necessary to maintain the illusion that they actually belonged.

Happy the nation which gives such “great” men (and women) short shrift.”

Excerpted from Eros on Crutches, in Meeting the Shadow, edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams. [Bold type of certain phrases added.]

Three Cheers for Roland Paris

Posted on by kay

 

I am cheered to see an apt psychological summation of the human shadow emerge from the world of politics.

When US President Donald Trump re-acted with a characteristically mean personal attack after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said something Trump didn’t like about trade between their two countries — which was simply the truth, had been said before, and should have been no surprise at all to Trump — Roland Paris, a former advisor to Trudeau and a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa had this to say on twitter about Trump:

“Big tough guy once he’s back on his airplane. Can’t do it in person, and knows it, which makes him feel [weak]. So he projects these feelings onto Trudeau and then lashes out at him. You don’t need to be Freud. He’s a pathetic little man-child.”

Thank you, Roland. For stating exactly how the deadly cycle of denial, projection, and blame is manifesting yet again in the current president of the United States.

Thanks also to other political analysts, who pointed out: since Trump was on his way to a meeting with another famously cruel dictator, he thought a personal trouncing of someone who dared to disagree with him would make him look tough in the eyes of the other dictator.

How low we have sunk.

The problem with them or us

Posted on by kay

 

The problem with rigid dualistic thinking — us or them, black or white, good or bad, my way or the highway — is that it leaves out everything except one’s own narrow point of view.

Like the blind men and the elephant, you think it’s like a snake, he thinks it’s like a tree, and she thinks it’s like a house. Without better sight, without actually taking in the entire creature, the blind men are never going to be able to agree about the elephant.

Unless today’s rampant partisanship is the last gasp of rigidly dualistic nationalism, we are in severe danger of being squashed by the elephant.

Remember how lovely the earth looked in those pictures taken from the moon? It wasn’t fractured into a million pieces. It was one thing, one whole thing.

Taking rigid nationalism this far into the 21st century puts that one whole thing at risk.

 

 

 

 

The Devils Within

Posted on by kay

 

If we use the simple definition “your shadow is the part of yourself you don’t want to admit,” what’s going on in our country – well, hell… what’s going on around the world —begins to make more sense.

It’s easy to think that others are more violent. That others are causing problems.

It’s hard to own up to the violence and the problems within.

“The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts. That is where the battle should be fought.” –Mahatma Gandhi

Transmog-6-color

 

What I’ve been saying…

Posted on by kay

eagle-at-podium

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

mushroom-cloud

 

This is TOO obvious

Posted on by kay

You’d think Donald Trump would be the perfect topic for a blog that tries to explain the human shadow. You’d think I’d be perfectly happy. But in truth, writing about the Donald gets incredibly boring. The shadow side of his administration is so out in the open and so distinctly obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning, psychologically speaking. But… as long as he’s in power, I gotta keep doing it.

What do you call it when someone says things over and over which are known to be false? Doublethink. There weren’t “the most people ever” at Trump’s inauguration, and saying there “were too” over and over again will not make it so. There was no “crookedness” in Hillary’s campaign, or reality to the “birther” and “wiretap” controversies about Obama, and there never will be. Nor did Trump get the “most votes ever.” (Any kid in elementary school would call this sort of behavior lying, but I defer to Mr. Orwell’s elegant term.)

What do we call it when someone uses euphemistically vague language with strong emotional overtones to promote a particular political agenda? Newspeak. Are Americans really the greatest? How so? Are we born with better circulatory systems or larger brains?

Why would someone who regularly calls his former opponent “crooked” without a shred of evidence, someone who actually called this opponent a “devil” in a nationally televised debate, be so shocked at the viciousness  in Washington?

Why do we need to make others look bad in order to make ourselves feel good?

Denial. Projection. Blame.

We all do it. This is the pot calling the kettle black; the best defense being a good offense, et cetera. But Donald Trump is extreme.

George Will wrote recently that he thinks Trump has a dangerous disability. I agree. This is not just a man who has been known to lie on occasion. This is a man who doesn’t even know when he’s lying. He simply says whatever he feels like he needs to say to get himself out of whatever predicament he’s gotten himself into. Merely to make himself feel better at the moment. This is a man who protects his ego at the expense of any and all — truth be damned, country be damned.

And this man leads a large political party full of men who apparently don’t care if he lies, as long as they get to stay in power.

Not good.

caveman