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.

Voting from our wounds ...

Voting from our wounds …

This morning mist rose from the mountains east of the apartment. Yesterday, there was a double rainbow across the valley. The pear tree, leaves a perfect slick red, is still holding on to handfuls of its leaves. These are comforting physical facts. Reminders of beauty in what has been feeling lately like a world without hope.

There is such fury, fear, and invective on all sides in this election – whether it is the mainstream democrats toward progressives voting for Jill Stein, or Bernie supporters heart-broken and enraged by the stealing of their candidate’s votes in the primary, to the fear-and-despair-driven invective of Trump supporters. We see a politics of conflagration arising out of the demise of the American dream, and a lack of confidence in the very concept of democracy as a form of government. (According to an article in The Economist, 25% of Americans born after 1980 think democracy is a “bad” form of government.)

No one is happy about this election, its candidates, or its potential outcomes, except perhaps the corporations which have made this state-of-affairs inevitable. With no one left to speak for the poor, the working class, and even the bleeding-at-the-seams middle class, the right-wing Democrats (who would be considered conservatives in any European nation) have pushed the Republican party right into the territory of the Tea Party and the wild-west reality-tv hucksterism of Trump.

On a day when I read about how Trump plans to eliminate all funding for alternative energy research if he wins the presidency (And seriously at this point I think that those in positions of power who act on their climate change denial should be considered criminals against the planet) I thought I would share some Noam Chomsky wisdom. Needless to say he is an idol of mine. Chomsky is a person of deep insight and keen intellect.

In an insightful article from progressive news outlet AlterNet, authors Jeff Cohen and Normon Solomon discuss “3 Dangerous Myths about Trump that Some Progressives Cling To”. The first is that Trump can’t win – and of course if you’re following the polls right now as obsessively as I am, you’ll see this isn’t necessarily true. The second and third myths both generally have to do with Trump not be able or “allowed” to enact his frightening social policies – but with episodes of armed Trump voters already harassing voters (and plans for mass turnout on election day to suppress the Black vote) the rhetoric is already being made reality. And if you think the Democratic machine or the Republicans currently against Trump are going to obstruct him – just take a look at history and notice that what these politicians mostly, ultimately, want is power (a main reason we’re in this situation). They ended with Chomsky’s advice on voting in a Clinton-Trump match-off: “in a swing state, a state where it’s going to matter which way you vote, I would vote against Trump, and by elementary arithmetic, that means you hold your nose and you vote Democrat.” 

But unlike so many of the voices I read out there, although he feels that if Trump wins, “the human species is in very deep trouble,” Chomsky also believes that Trump supporters have been failed by the system. As he says: “They give the impression of being hard-working serious people who think they’ve been doing everything right. They’ve been doing what they’re ‘supposed’ to do … What are they doing wrong and how come their lives are so crummy?” He goes on to say: “They’re not getting answers. The answers they are getting are not only crazy, but extremely dangerous, so the right response is to ask ourselves, why are we failing to organize these people?”

From my own limited perspective of this election, it feels like we are all the walking wounded. Each side elides negatives about “our” candidate and focuses with fury on the faults of the other. We are voting with our wounds. It isn’t something that I think is very new. I think in the past our “wounds” have made the majority of us vote for whichever candidate we felt would take over and then we could just forget about it, and go back into sleep mode for another four years. By and large we have voted for a “parent” to fix the problems, keep dinner on the table, and tell us how to feel about the issues. This in and of itself reflects a wounding of our ability to take responsibility for our own lives. 

And this year I think those wounds are particularly raw, deeper, scarier, more personal. It might be a woman voting for Trump who can’t admit the pain of having a father who denigrated and objectified her as a girl. Or a Stein voter who, as a progressive activist all his life, has shouldered the shadow-burden of America’s horrors and can’t bear to “take another one for the team.” It is all of us who have had faith in the massive edifice of our government, unable to square that faith with the daily reality of racism, gun violence, environmental disaster, poverty, misogyny, and perpetual war.

The thing about our wounds – the personal or the social – is that the scariest thing is to turn around a face them. But until we do there will always be fear, lashing out, and blind spots. The blind spot could be a professed liberal not seeing the corruption of the corporate-owned Democratic machine. It could be the inability of a Trump supporter to discern that despite his words, Trump, as a representative of the corporate model, will only ever look out for his own bottom line.

Without looking at the wound we will continue to blame each other for the problems of this world, rather than beginning to look rationally and with hope at reality. The thing about the United States is that it is us. And that can be harrowing, having to turn around and face the guilt and shame of our shared history. But it is also remarkable—because it means we can change it.