Possession in politics

There were bomb explosions in New Jersey and Chelsea over the weekend but they caught the bomber (or so they're saying). Besides the fact that this whole situation is suspiciously convenient for the republicans, my mind immediately went to the increase in hate crimes against Muslims that will probably result from this. Putting aside all the political issues there's a very real danger of possession, and a very contagious one at that.

The same demon that possesses a terrorist - whips up his rage and in his mind robs his targets of humanity - this same demon also infects Americans who are open to such possession. It robs them in turn of their humanity. It steals their ability to think clearly and rationally but, more importantly, it destroys one's ability to connect; to empathize, to feel with, to understand another being with the heart.

The main broken latch that lets the demon in so he can create havoc is having an unconscious shadow. Marie Louise von Franz spoke to this vulnerability in an interview:

In practical life the personal and the collective shadows merge but the personal shadow is the personal shortcomings of things which every human being could be conscious of, which is not archetypal, and therefore not a mystery. For instance such things as greed for money, or jealousy, jealousy is one of the aspects of the shadow, or laziness, sloppiness, unrelatedness, sentimentality, and whatnot. Inferiorities which everybody has but prefers not to know about. We generally strive through education and environment to be a bit better than we actually are, or we have our own ideals (“I oughten to be jealous” “I oughten to have a power complex”). The inferior shadow is not really bad, it’s just human all too human, and something one could know about. If one is jealous, or one is suddenly possessed by wanting money, one could know about it if one was honest with oneself.

The collective shadow has to do with the dark side of the archetype of the Self. That means it’s the shadow of the God image. In the Christian tradition it would be the devil, and that has always been personified and felt as something which has not to do directly with the human being. If somebody is possessed by the devil he’s much worse than just… He’s not human. It’s demonic. On the other hand, generally that merges; first you have this area, a dim, dark side, and behind it lurks the other.

I’ve seen that when Germany went to the devil in Nazism, people fell into it through their personal shadow. For instance, they didn’t want to lose their job because they were clinging to money. That was a personal shadow. Then they joined in with the Nazi movement for that reason, and did much worse things than they would have done normally, under normal social conditions. So you can say the personal shadow is the bridge to the collective shadow, or the open door to the collective shadow.

The collective shadow comes up in those terrible mass psychoses. That’s why it’s so amazingly important, because then you don’t fall into the collective shadow. There’s not that open door. It’s like you have a room and there’s one door in it that the devil can come in. If you know your personal shadow you can shut all the doors. Then you don’t join into massacres and holocausts and such. You catch yourself and you realize… and you can keep out of it and keep reasonable, keep your head. While the average person who doesn’t know about her personal shadow will get swept away by the collective in you.

- “Remembering Jung series talk with Marie-Louise von Franz” (29:40)

The person whose shadow is a Dorian Grey-like horror is a person who has no knowledge of their shadow let alone a relationship with it. This creates a wide open back door into the personality; unconscious shadow contents are reflexively projected onto a convenient target and all the hate, rage, and disgust they feel at their own orphan parts is conveniently given over to a scapegoat to carry. Instead of doing the hard work of reclaiming your own lost parts you try to cheat, you lie to yourself and pretend like you're clean when you're really not.

The sewer runs in all of us. The question is; what do you do about it? Do you protect your ego at the expense of everything else, sacrifice every other part of yourself and even others to keep your narcissism intact and unwounded? Or do you face your own ugliness, stew in your own juices, and undergo the painful and humiliating process of transforming your own personal lead into gold.