Transformation in the Shadow of Violence

By Ralph Metzner

	Passages herein are excerpted by permission from The Roots of War and Domination, Vol. 2 of The Ecology of Consciousness Series published by Green Earth Foundation and Regent Press. Copyright © 2008 by Ralph Metzner.

At the most basic level of individual development, most people would agree that violence and domination, like all other forms of behavior, are learned by imitation. It is widely accepted from psychological studies of violent criminals that violence is learned behavior. Adults who abuse others, including their own children, are likely to have been abused themselves, and/or witnessed abuse in childhood. The cause of violence, in other words, is prior violence. Furthermore, ample research demonstrates that physical punishment only amplifies the disposition to further violence....

The contagion is magnified in society by entertainment media saturated with images and stories that glamorize violence as heroic, and that desensitize the individual to the terrible human costs and consequences of violence, normalizing it and blunting our capacity for empathy. In the heavily militarized societies of modern times, conditions favor the spread of violence from the military to the civilian sectors: statistical studies have shown that the rate of violent crime in a society goes up in war time....

One of the most provocative of C.G. Jung's many contributions to psychology in the 20th century is his concept of the shadow—a complex of unacceptable thoughts, feelings and images that seem to work against our own better interests, countering our higher values, a kind of "enemy within." This shadow complex may appear symbolically in a dream of a monster; or it may be projected outward on our fellow humans, whom we then regard as "enemy," or "evil"....

The defense of projection, in which some other is blamed and seen as the enemy, or the "evil-doer," or the "bad guy," is much trickier to work with, since it requires the withdrawing of the blame-judgment projections, and accepting one's own negativity.... As long as the processes of shadow projection keep us externally focused, it is all too easy for intra-psychic conflict to erupt into interpersonal or inter-group enmity and conflict. In either case the processes of healing and reconciliation require skillful analytic detective work as well as empathy, both for others and for oneself.

The shadow metaphor also applies at the level of collective consciousness, where we are dealing with mass-mind images. These are complexes of unconscious personal material combined with the consciously propagated enemy images or memes of religion and politics. The Christian devil, it could be said, is such a symbolic mass-mind enemy image that acquired a certain autonomy and power over human beings, due to its being invested with belief over many centuries by many millions of the Christian faithful. Fanatical and unscrupulous group leaders activate mass-mind shadow images of self-hate and shame, originating in infancy or childhood. When a dualistic hate-shame complex is activated, it is projected outward and a splitting occurs: the leader of the party or the Volk, or the nation is said to be "good," and the designated external enemy or internal scapegoat is designated "bad" or "evil." The chosen scapegoated individuals (which could be Jews, terrorists, Muslims, women, blacks) are then beaten down and humiliated, the way the child-self was beaten down and humiliated....

A moment's reflection will show that "shadows" and "enemies" don't actually exist. We may say they have a kind of virtual reality, the power to affect our behavior in a world through shaping our beliefs and perceptions....

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