Me And My Shadow

Breaking away from a Black and White world

Complexity is hard. Juggling multiple variables, weighing and measuring different options, trying to sort out the less right from the less wrong options — it’s enough to give you a headache. Our cranial capacity notwithstanding, we weren’t built for complicated choices and nuanced decisions. If our Paleolithic ancestors stopped to think about the philosophical ramifications of their actions, they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to be our ancestors.

Simplicity is much more comforting. In a small clan, “good” is your tribe and “bad” is everybody else. “Good” is the vegetation and prey animals you can eat or use, and bad is the berries and beasts that will kill you. If you forget those boundaries you may find yourself wandering in enemy territory, mauled by a Sabertooth, or poisoned by what looked like a tasty snack. H. sapiens has been around for a few hundred thousand years. We’ve only been civilized for a few millennia and we’ve only had an Internet for a couple decades. We’re in uncharted territory, and it’s not surprising that we long for the good old days before Adam and Eve ate that damned apple and made life so difficult for their descendants.

We live in the midst of a high-complexity age. Amidst all those blinking lights and whirling gears, it’s not surprising that we seek a simpler world. We want heroes and villains. And because the Internet lives and dies on clicks and eyeballs, publishers and influencers small and large are happy to give the people what they want in exchange for their money and attention.

We’re territorial pack primates. The friend/foe distinction is hardwired into our coding. Loving our friends and hating our enemies comes naturally. Jesus demanded a radical break with our inborn instincts when he proclaimed on the Mount:

But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. (Matthew 3:44-45)

Many reject this statement outright, while others mouth it as a truism. But this great paradox opened a way for us to acknowledge the world in all its complexity and to recognize our shared humanity. In doing so, we better understand our enemies and can work to find ways by which to reconcile our differences. Church scholars like St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas went on to formulate a Just War theory and introduce the idea that there were moral and immoral wars. Other clerics helped create rules of engagement for mounted warriors that blossomed into Chivalry.

You could argue that these ideals have been honored more in the breach than the observance. You could note that leaders have found all sorts of justifications for their unjust Just Wars. You would, of course, be correct. But those assertions prove both the difficulty and the necessity of rising above our animal natures.

Note that rising above does not mean rejecting or overcoming. We’re animals, and we can’t understand ourselves or our fellow humans if we don’t recognize how that affects our lives. But there are times when giving into your animal nature will get you into a great deal of trouble.

The desire for sexual union is an animal trait. If we reject sex as bestial, we’re likely to fall into many pitfalls, not the least of which being the termination of our genetic line and ultimately our species. If we rely on abortion and contraception to avoid the animal activity of whelping and raising cubs, we find ourselves at the same impasse.

For animals, everything is either friend, foe, or food. The fox chases the rabbit by instinct, and the rabbit runs away by instinct. The fox does not concern himself with the rabbit’s inalienable rights, nor does the rabbit wonder about whether the fox might be redeemed. The fox is hungry and the rabbit is edible; the rabbit wishes to live and the fox wants to kill and eat him. That is all that matters in their relationship.

As we have grown more civilized and urbanized, we’ve distanced ourselves from the foxes and rabbits. We have created rules, regulations, and social morés to distance ourselves from nature red in tooth and claw. But you can’t kill the beast, you can only train it. And if you don’t do that, you can be sure it will make itself known one way or another. If you don’t control the beast consciously, it will control you subconsciously.

Jung called the beast the Shadow. The Shadow is not a monster; it is the parts of our self that we keep hidden because they conflict with our self-image. But try though we may, we can’t run away from our Shadow. If we engage with our beast, it becomes a wellspring of creativity and we become an integrated self. If we refuse to acknowledge it, it chews through its chains and breaks free.

It’s telling that those who scream most loudly against racism, elitism, and anything that might divide us are the first to cast out and attack those who say things that challenge their worldview. They treat their targets exactly the way they imagine racists treat Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, LGBTQ+ and other people who don’t measure up to racist standards. They don’t hate racists because they are dangerous. They hate them because they they’re a projection of their Shadow. And in seeing that Shadow, they judge it so they will not have to judge themselves.

They’ll work desperately to deny or justify that guilt. They’ll own their privilege, talk about their colonist heritage, put signs on their lawn, and grovel before People of Color who happily take their flattery and money. They fight racists who only exist in their heads to protect an identity that only exists in their heads. Whether they grovel or scream, they never escape what C.S. Lewis called “the prison of the self.” They bang their heads against imaginary walls and try desperately to absolve themselves of imaginary sins.

Those who play their game from the other side are equally trapped in Shadow. Posters like Niggerwhipper9000 and Dinduslayer post misspelled screeds about how Black folks are violent, subliterate thugs. The Jew-obsessed whine endlessly about how Jews never stop whining. Like the rabid anti-racists, they justify their worst aspects by projecting them on somebody else. It’s like Plato’s cave, only they’re the ones casting finger puppet shadows on the wall.

These are the most extreme examples, but the Shadow has more subtle forms of escape. If you haven’t integrated your Shadow, if you haven’t acknowledged the less savory sides of your personality and recognized both their use and their misuse, you’re going to keep reacting when you should be acting and vice versa.

So how do we learn to live with our Shadow?

By accepting ambiguity.

Rejecting complexity for simplicity is understandable and in many cases unavoidable. You can use a word processing app without knowing the code that makes it function; you can react to an immediate threat without ruminating about its motivations or sympathizing with its upbringing. But if you’re going to be an expert you’re going to have to learn some scripting and if you’re going to neutralize potential threats you’re going to have to understand them before you react.

The untrained Shadow sees the world in black and white. The integrated Shadow can accept complexity and factor it into its desires and actions. It gives you the strength to make hard but necessary decisions, but it can also acknowledge that your opponents may have valid reasons for their actions. Listening to the Shadow and letting it run free when necessary gives you the freedom to do the right thing at the right time, even when that may involve distasteful methods. Recognizing yourself as an animal is your first step toward becoming truly human.

We all have opponents and enemies. Some of them deserve to be hated. Others simply stand in the way of what you need to accomplish. You can reason with some and come to mutually beneficial agreement. Others may be implacable foes. Learning to distinguish between the two is an important step in integrating your Shadow.

How do you get somebody to recognize their Shadow? Most of the time, you can’t. When you build your identity around being a Good Person who only behaves like Good People do, accepting your Shadow means breaking yourself down and starting from scratch. Most aren’t up to that task, and will treat anybody who suggests it as an ontologically evil enemy.

Fortunately, most of those people are annoying but harmless. They’re more interested in propping up their image than in actual accomplishments. They’ll scream slogans and call you rude names. Some will go so far as to dox you in the hopes someone else will take care of the problem. But if you ignore them, or acknowledge your beliefs without apologizing for them, most will move on to other targets. Accepting that someone else might accept their Shadow without shame would threaten their worldview. It’s easier to pay you no mind, and they generally take the easiest rather than the most effective course.

What’s important is making sure that your allies recognize and are working toward integrating their Shadow. (It’s an ongoing process, and one that never fully succeeds). Allies who haven’t will do your cause more harm than good. They’ll make embarrassing and obnoxious statements, then label you an “optics cuck” when you call them out. Smarter allies recognize that neither piteous groveling nor profane grunts of rage are likely to win you worthwhile followers.

Taken to its extreme, an unintegrated Shadow can lead to pointless acts of violence and vandalism. Painting swastikas on synagogues only benefits the ADL and other groups who earn their daily bread by highlighting anti-Semitism. Vandalizing Teslas only serves to make your cause look like a bunch of immature, unstable buffoons. Ultimately both are the acts of weak people who simultaneously loathe and crave their enemy’s strength.

Affiliating yourself with people who espouse these acts will only drag your organization down. In the worst case, you find yourselves tied to a mass shooter’s deadly temper tantrum. Stating hard facts honestly might not win you a mass audience. But it will win you the attention of the people who matter — those who are willing to think independently. It’s up to you to accept those people and reject those who simply see you as a means to get back at that which they hate in themselves.

So how do you integrate your Shadow and learn to work with it instead of against it?

Pay careful attention to the people who inspire strong feelings of attraction or loathing. Make an honest assessment of how much of that positive or negative attraction reflects upon your self-image. You will likely find that many of the people you dislike have many of the traits you dislike most about yourself, and that those who attract you represent what you hope to be. Then make sure your sympathy and antipathy are rooted in reality and not in projections of your inner desire and turmoil.

This will be uncomfortable. Nobody likes to admit that they admire bravery because they’re prone to cowardice, or that they hate delusion because they fear they might be deluded. But if you don’t acknowledge your shortcomings, you’ll never take steps toward becoming stronger. Painful reflection is just weakness leaving the psyche.

When you acknowledge what you’ve been hiding, you’re in a better place to understand it. Many who fear that they are cowards have unreasonable visions of bravery. Bravery isn’t fearlessness, it’s doing something even though are afraid. Once you grasp that, you’re in a better place to make hard decisions and accept the possible consequences. When you know that you fear abandonment, you’re less likely to drive away those who are close to you before they can leave you in the lurch.

When you see somebody as an idealized reflection of your self-image, you put them on pedestals. But it’s only a matter of time before those pedestals fail. And the harder you suppress your Shadow, the more you see the world in black/white and good/evil dichotomies. Those who accept their heroes warts and all can sympathize with their failings without feeling the need to justify them or reject the good along with the bad.

Idealization and demonization lead organizations to purity spirals. Ultimately they become an echo chamber where everybody praises their colleagues while simultaneously looking for wrongthink to punish. This leads ultimately to a tiny cadre complaining about how the rest of the world is too stupid and cowardly to accept their unvarnished truths. It makes them all feel superior, but gives them no chance of gaining real superiority.

You can also gain a better understanding of those you hate. If you know what they fear, you know their weak points. A little bit of force applied to a fault can do more damage than blundering blows applied at a carefully built psychic edifice. When your opponents are defending their self-image, they’re not engaging in carefully-planned attacks. That makes them less dangerous to those who have built proper defenses.

An ambiguous world is complicated. It requires more cognition than a world where all the bad guys wear black hats to show their irredeemable nastiness. But since the world is a complicated place and you have to accept it as it is. Only then do you have the power to change it.