One of the central insights of the world’s wisdom traditions, a core psychotherapeutic insight, and the deepest insight of great art and literature, is that human beings are powerfully drawn to see good within and evil without AND that human beings are at their most terrifying, capable of perpetrating the greatest atrocities, and maximally self destructive when they become possessed of this worldview and act it out.
The insight extends further—to the radical conclusion that the salvation of the individual and the hope of humanity depends on each of us integrating the light and the dark within—on integrating the shadow, in Jungian terms.
It is surely no coincidence that the worst atrocities in human history have consistently been committed by people—their individuality dissolved into the collective—possessed of absolute conviction about the righteousness of their cause. This is both deeply disturbing and deeply hopeful: deeply disturbing because it means that the potential for descent into the abyss, aided and abetted by our full individual participation, is ever present; deeply hopeful because it means that you and I are individually empowered to prevent such a descent from ever recurring.
This reality is beautifully captured in two strikingly similar images, the 11th century Taijito, and M. C. Escher’s 1960 woodcut, Circle Limit IV (Heaven and Hell).
Few literary figures learned the lessons of this reality more directly or represented them more forcefully than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his epic Gulag Archipelago:
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart… even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an uprooted small corner of evil. Thanks to ideology the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing calculated on a scale in the millions. Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. Yet, I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to go through it personally.”
So, let us begin with ourselves. Let’s stop projecting our shadows. Let’s ponder our resentments. Let’s examine the sources of our limbic hijack. Let’s surface the lies of omission that sing the dark counterpoint to the light story we tell ourselves. Let’s turn and face our own darkness, bring it into the light, and work to integrate it into complete, complex personality.
The next time the group becomes possessed by the shadow of the collective unconscious, will you have sufficiently integrated your shadow so as not to be swept into the void?
Deliberative Dad 