“Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent. Psychology is an empirical science and deals with realities.”
Carl Gustav Jung

Two recent articles came in this week. One from the blog Thomas Paine’s corner on the subject of ‘Omnicidal Elitists: Their Killers, Their Science, Their Plan’ and the other from Paul Levy‘s mailing list, entitled The War on Consciousness. Both heavily critical of the behaviour of the present US administration. (For those astrologically inclined: no surprise that both appeared within the shadow of both Pluto and Jupiter stationing retrograde.)

The former veers too far off the scale of plausible rationale for me, though the underlying patterns it highlights are valid enough. Paul Levy’s essay is much more on target, and more so because it acknowledges the complicity and involvement of all citizens in the actions of their governments. The complicity he acknowledges is that of a gullible populace all too willing to swallow everything the Triad of government/corporate/media feed them. His solution to the situation is to wake up and smell the rot, and to say “no!” to what our governments are doing in our name. He continues …

“The solution to winning the war on consciousness is for us to RECOGNIZE the nature of the war we are in, which can only happen through the agency of our consciousness. Realizing that the true war we are in is an assault on our own minds is the expansion of consciousness which is itself simultaneously the solution. From a deeper, more expansive perspective, the war on consciousness is itself the very catalyst and instrument for consciousness to awaken to itself. 

“It is our turn to come together so as to render powerless these sick criminals who have been terrorizing us. We can help each other to access our intrinsic heart-centered power and collectively turn the light of truth upon them so that they have no where to hide from their lies and corruption. For “truth”, to quote the infamous Nazi Hermann Goering, is “the greatest enemy of the state.” Bush and the private interests who keep him in power and profit richly from his actions are absolutely terrified of one thing – the truth. As the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.” Like pouring water on the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz”, when the true light of awareness is shed on what Bush and the real powers behind him are doing, their illegitimate power over us is dis-spelled as the illusion it always was.”

But do we get away quite so lightly? We are more complicit here than we know, and no matter how extreme and insane things are becoming, there is a huge danger in distancing ourselves in any way from the behaviour of our governments at this point in time. We always get the governments we deserve. The populace throws up leaders that are reflective of the state of the collective psyche at any one point in time. It is impossible for us to do anything else: we constitute the body politic. The very reason leaders become candidates for leadership in the first place is by virtue of their personal resonance with the particular archetypes constellating out of the collective, and votes are really neither here nor there. It’s not conscious reasoned choice (or even widespread vote rigging) that decides an election so much as the currents in the collective unconscious, just the same as it’s an individual’s unconscious shadow dynamics that drive their behaviour for much of the time. Our leaders are our representatives in a very real sense, far more so than through the lip service paid to their outward role of representing their constituents’ will.

The more Blair and Bush & Co act out their own shadow dynamics, the more cunning spin they put on their actions to gloss over their fundamental immorality, the more resources they put into the hands of the corporations, the more croneyism they exhibit, the more convinced they become that they alone are ‘right’, the more they seem determined to have things their own way, the more they reflect the very things that the majority of us are doing on our own small scales. Take any ‘average’ individual, magnify and inflate them up onto the world stage with all the power that comes with it, and you’ll get something very similar, even if not so fittingly representative of the entire collective as those who got there by virtue of the perfection of their sympathetic resonance. As above, so below. As below, so above.

So as we continue to add extensions to our houses, or fell another block of woodland to build yet another McMansion, trade in the old saloon for one – no, make it two – of an ever-growing range of ever-larger gas-guzzling 4x4s, continue to subscribe to the idea that permanent economic growth, collectively and individually, is the only measure of success, believe that our viewpoint is the only ‘true’ one, limit our circle of interest and compassion to those of our ‘tribe’ however we might define it (and the rest can go hang), increase our employer’s ‘shrinkage’ budget by helping ourselves to the odd ‘perk’, feel that we’re somehow ‘justified’ in making the odd fraudulent insurance claim, attempt to save face by putting an interesting spin on our actions or otherwise lie to our friends and families and ourselves, throw out perfectly good household items because we want the newer, better model … should we be in the least surprised that we get the leaders we do?

If there’s immorality, or at best amorality, in government, corporations and media, then that’s only because the same exists in the general population. Egotistical self-inflation at individual level can only find it’s reflection in egotistical self-inflation at the top of the heap. And not just in our egos: in our bodies, our houses, our cars, our corporations (for more on this theme, see the article Time for a Change of Heart?). We’re fooling ourselves if we think that we’re all right and “they” are the “sick criminals”. We’re hypocrites if it’s only the scale of what our leaders are doing that separates them from us. That’s where the secret government really resides. Not in the endless conspiracies projected onto the rich and powerful (though there’s undoubtedly no smoke without flames), but in the unconscious dynamics that support and maintain them in their positions of power – the Jungian shadow in all of us – the evil that we’re busy denying, acting out and attempting to spin out of existence both individually and through the lens that is our leadership.

There is enormous difficulty in identifying ourselves with the worst excesses of our governments’ behaviours. There is an instinctive rejection of the suggestion that such ‘evil’ resides within each of us, and in many senses that instinct is sound. ‘Evil’ is an abstract concept that stands in stark opposition to ‘good’ and we cannot associate our everyday and mostly well-meaning behaviour with such a polarised horror. Such dualistic judgement isn’t helpful here. But look again. The difference between what we and those around us are doing and what our governments are doing is mostly just a matter of degree. The small badnesses we accept as part and parcel of daily life are easy to overlook and live with, which is what we generally do. It’s only when they’re scaled up to huge proportions that they become plainly ‘evil’ to us. Yet the small and the large are the same thing in essence, and this is what we need to see in the behaviour of our governments. This is the mirror they hold up for us to look in.

‘Evil’ is only ‘live’ back to front, which neatly represents the recipe for its neutralisation. It’s the energy of the disowned part of ourselves that comes back to us warped and twisted through the mirror of life. Attraction OR repulsion signals its existence as a personal shadow issue. Accept it simply for what it is; own it directly, consciously, and its reflection loses its power to make us act out. We are then free to consciously choose. THAT is how to truly dsempower it, because only when it’s no longer representative of a shadow dynamic within the collective psyche does it cease to have power, and only when we each individually have faced our own shadow issues will we cease to throw up leaders who represent them and magnify them for us.

There’s no ‘them’ and ‘us’ here. ‘Them’ and ‘us’ is part of the problem. We’re all in it together.

The last word goes to the great man himself, C G Jung. (Or at least it did until the wonderful video recording of him talking about man as the origin of all coming evil was removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim by Pennsylvania State University. Here is a brief snippet instead.)

“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force … We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Max Planck