the fulcrum and the bear

When the Shadow comes to call …

The “shadow,” in Jungian psychology, is everything repressed and refused by consciousness. That which we feel, think, desire and believe which is unacceptable to us personally, or to our families, or to our culture is buried deep. The problem with the shadow is that is doesn’t vanish … in fact the fiercer the repression, the more powerful the shadow becomes. The shadow breaks out of its prison in any way that it can. The primary way is through “projection.” Rather than facing their own shadow, the individual (or country) projects these rejected qualities outward, onto others.

The perceived weakness a man has within himself he represses and projects onto women. The greed a woman feels she represses and projects onto Jews. The violent urges a white man has he projects onto black men. The murderous zealotry a Christian has she projects onto Muslims.

What we don’t want to see and own becomes our personal shadow, and in the same way in the formation of a collective national culture, what we don’t want to see and own becomes our national shadow.

The fury, shock, fear, and hatred bursting out from all sides following the Trump election seems to me to be a sign that the Shadow has come to call on a national scale. On the one hand racists and xenophobes have felt empowered to act out their shadow in violent ways since the election. On the other side democrats and progressives express shock, despair, and scramble to explain how Trump could possibly have been elected. One thing that I noticed was that various groups have adopted different narratives of the how and why of Trumps electoral college win – and they are defending those versions with a furor that, itself, seems to be evidence of the shadow at play. Skip from news outlet to news outlet, Facebook to Twitter and the reasons range from Racism, to Sexism, to the Media, to Facebook, to the economy and dire state of the working and middle classes, to Bernie Sanders, to the failure of the Democratic establishment to comprehend the true tenor of the political moment in their campaign strategy, to election rigging, to third party candidates syphoning off voters, to a nihilistic desire to see America’s system of government burn.

I wholeheartedly agree with the importance of sussing out the reasons behind Trump’s win (including if it is Russian hackers). What has stunned me is that rather than taking all of the information in and weighing it together – there is a terrible desperation to defend one’s particular version, to the exclusion of all others.

Personally, I tend to agree with the far left, more economic-based perspective that many of the voters for Trump did so because of their desperation and despair over their economic position in America and a frustration with the Democrats who were supposed to be the champions of the working class. To illustrate, a quote from Noam Chomsky in an excellent interview from November 14^th on Truth-out. As Chomsky says:

The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the 50’s and 60’s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.

Despite the advent of the Affordable Care Act, many people haven’t received truly affordable health insurance. Even with government subsidies, rates are high enough to cause most of the people who qualify for those subsidies, real grief. I can personally attest to that.

So I agree that economic and social despair contributed largely to the election. But I would also argue that these voters, even if not actively racist, were able to overlook Trump’s blatant racism to vote for him. And even if that’s not the same as being a card-carrying neo-nazi, it is a tacit acceptance of the racism that runs so deep in America.

The same goes for sexism. Even if all those Trump voters (many of them women) aren’t actively misogynist … this vote marks a tacit acceptance of an underlying malignant sexism within the country and within our psyches.

And what about Climate Change? Perhaps the biggest loser of this baffling election cycle is, well, the planet. Despite the fact that according to 2 different polls (A Monmouth poll in 2015 and a Gallup poll in 2016) between 64-70% of Americans believe in and are concerned about climate change – those Trump voters were able to put that concern aside when they voted for Trump. They were okay with a candidate who claimed that Climate Change was a hoax made up by China, and whose main concern about it apparently was that he wasn’t able to use the aerosol hairspray he used to like.

Prior to the election – in October, there came the news that the world may lose a full 2/3 of its wild animals by 2020. And on November 8^th the World Meteorological Organization delivered a report that confirmed that climate change is speeding along to devastating effect. See (this, this, and this again.)

But here is the thing, I think that this urge to pigeonhole the reasons behind the vote – to passionately make it about only one or another issue – comes from the same “letting it slide” urge that Trump voters had when they filled in the circle next to his name.

Its just too painful to hold it all in our heads and hearts … to face that America is not only failing the majority of its people economically, but also that it has failed to live up to its promise as a place of equality and justice, and the knowledge that our way of life has disproportionately contributed to the dawn of the Anthropocene era—with its mass extinctions, drowning coastlines, droughts, and mega-storms. With only 5% of the world’s population, America has, for decades, used roughly 25% of the world’s natural resources. (Here.) That is another large piece of the shadow that we have been carrying around.

There are so many reasons to cling to ignorance, to ignore the shadow. Shame, guilt. Grief. The loss of a sense of solidity, the inability to rely on others to run our lives for us or give us the answers. In Jungian terms, the period when the shadow comes to call is the beginning of the dark night of the soul. It is the harrowing decent into darkness that heralds the beginning of the process of individuation. Basically facing the shadow is a requirement for growing up. The “persona” – the shiny narrative of our selves, and of our country, which is accepted as reality – must be broken down. We have to see the dark side, personally and nationally. Now that decent into chaos poses huge risks – it is a time when, since everything we thought was solid is found to be fluid, we run the risk of over-identifying with the shadow, of becoming the darkness.

Balance comes with the acceptance of responsibility, the ability to heal while maintaining a conscious awareness of the shadow, a responsibility toward it, without merging with it. Despite its terrors, as with the psychological process within an individual, this dark night is an opportunity for us, collectively, to truly see ourselves, our country, our history, as it is. It is only through this process of clear-sighted awareness that we have any hope of changing the course of our nation, of making the radical shifts necessary to generate real change.