The problem with the left right now — no, I know they have many, but hear me out — is that they don’t acknowledge their shadow. In this sense, they’re not fully adults, and they do the most bizarre things because they think of themselves as “the good people” as though being good were bestowed by assignment at birth. In fact you could say all their other problems come from being unable to acknowledge their shadow.
What I mean by shadow is… well, it’s not like Peter Pan when he lost his shadow.
I do not know if it’s a term of art, or just something that I picked up somewhere and liked. It’s entirely possible it’s Jungian, since I read a lot of Jung as a young (eh) woman.
But it’s like this: All of us have the virtues of our vices. And vice versa. If you’re a naturally loud, expansive extrovert, it’s likely you sometimes run over people with talk or whatever you’re doing without even noticing. Also, you might be prone to run over other people’s concerns and thoughts, and know it, but think something like “Well, if it were important to them, they should say something.” And if you’re someone who is passionate about defending the powerless, this can overspill into chasing down people you think are unrighteous, to prevent them doing harm to the powerless, whether or not they ever even thought about doing anything. A love for the truth can and often does become corrupted into not wanting to listen to anyone else, or wanting our opponents to shut up because “they lie.”
This is in fact the shadow self, by which good becomes corrupted.
Heinlein, in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress said that adulthood was defined by knowing you’d one day die. This was never as difficult for me as for most people, for the simple reason that I was a very sickly child and every year I survived was a minor miracle of sorts. As such, I had picked up I might be gone at any time, and often while going to cemetery on All Saints Days and lighting candles on the grave of the little cousin just about my age who died when I was almost three and she was three, I looked at it like other kids might look around a business that is within their “When I grow up.” I just knew it was likely as not to be my permanent residence in the short term. This wasn’t difficult to accept, because it was the way it was. (That I’ve had a long and wonderful run is just something to be grateful for, always.)
To me, though, at some point, the idea that accepting that you — yes, you — are capable of most of the evils and atrocities of mankind became my “bar” to adulthood.
Look, being good is not something you’re given. It’s not in your DNA. You can’t say “He’s blond, blue eyed and good” or “she’s dark skinned, has black hair and is good” from the minute a baby is born. They don’t stamp “archvillain” in your birth certificate. (Though a story is trying to land, and I’d like it to go away, as I’m already full up.)
Grandmother used to say “you don’t paint yourself” meaning that we are born with certain innate characteristics. And she was right. I’m never going to be a graceful dancer. And at some point when I was twelve I realized I was never going to be tall and willowy. Psychological tendencies are there too. I’m never going to be calm in the fact of trouble — though I’m calmer now than even ten years ago. I’m never going to enjoy social functions. I’m never going to have the sort of concentration that doesn’t get squirreled by everything and anything.
BUT to an extent you do make yourself. I worked hard and no longer fall over both my feet while standing still. (Okay fine. I RARELY fall over both my feet.) I no longer spaz at the slightest thing. I’ve moved to the next level of spazing bait. And I no longer squirrel so much nothing gets done. (I defeated those with mind-tricks when I was 14.)
And despite the fact I can get very angry, and I am a very emphatic person, I have never tried to kill anyone in cold blood. And I certainly don’t run around advocating anyone kill anyone else, unless in self defense.
But I know what I am. I know what I’m capable of. I know that given just a little more weakness in front of temptation, I’d already have taken to the hills with a Kalashnikov. Which would be bad, and not only because I’m no longer of an age and was never of a sex for such adventures but also because if it got to that point I’d not exactly be discriminating as to who is a target. And that’s bad, because other people are people too, not just mental constructs I can dispose of as I please.
So I watch myself all the time, and I actively work on being good. Not NICE. Nice isn’t necessarily good, and in fact you can fool yourself that you’re so nice, you must also be good.
The left does not know they can be bad. No, seriously, they have no clue. They became leftists partly because they thought that made them good, on the side of the “good” people and inevitably winning the arrow of history stuff.
I’m not talking out my behind. Studies have been done. People who vote “progressive” are more likely to commit minor acts of dishonesty, be nasty to someone, or behave in ways that are detrimental to others.
Because, you see, they think they’re the good people by the way they vote. No other work required.
But humans are humans. All of us have the potential to be very evil indeed. The incentives vary and what would get us there, but all of us are evil.
It is the fact that the left denies their shadow that doesn’t allow them to realize that being concerned over over-population should NEVER cross over to wanting to kill everything and everyone living. Being concerned over children being mistreated shouldn’t bleed over into abortion is better than not being perfectly loved at every moment. Thinking the other guy governs stupidly should never bleed over into wanting to kill everyone who votes the way you don’t like.
In fact, if you look above the left falls into murdery desires a lot, because they don’t admit the shadow.
The shadow likes death. After all, death is so clean and permanent.
And those who deny the existence of the shadow leave the door wide open to falling into its mode of thought.
Forever.
How do we fix it? Pointing out that no one is good by fiat is a good beginning. If you’re a writer, show your characters struggling with their shadow selves.
And keep pointing out when the left crosses over to just wanting everyone dead. Which is a lot. Really a lot.
Keep pointing out the evil inherent in wanting everything and everyone you think opposes you dead.
And keep doing it.
Will it work? For the future maybe. For the present? I don’t know.
All we can do is hold up the mirror. And hope they catch a glimpse.
According To Hoyt 
Of course, a perfect person like me doesn’t have an “evil side”. [Very Big Grin]
I hope people realize that I don’t really believe the above statement is true.
Any sane person knows that there’s evil inside of themselves but the Left aren’t sane.
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The problem is not recognizing the capacity for evil exists. The struggle is keeping that side locked down and contained.
So far so good.
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On Darkness: If you can’t be yourself, be Batman. If you can’t be Batman, be Sam Vimes – make SURE that the Guarding Dark is standing behind you, watching you, making you refuse to give into the darkness.
From elsewhere in the post: Emphasis on being “nice” instead of “good” is one of the things wrong with many modern churches :(. Or perhaps it’s the inability to understand that they aren’t synonyms. That Jesus didn’t just point out sin and hypocrisy once, or twice, but frequently! In harsh terms! And yet, broke bread with, and made a disciple of, a man who hired out to the Romans as a tax collector (a job that at the time was even more shady than it is now)
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Heck, he healed the centurion’s servant.
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For some people it really is that they can’t recognize evil. We had a guy locally that was “Not Guilty” on Child Sexual Abuse because one of the jurors wouldn’t believe that anyone would do such heinous acts to a baby. Our detectives that investigated it had to take a couple of days off.
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I know a guy who is a detective for a local child endangerment investigation department. He has a PTSD dog. He also simultaneously does not want a death penalty and wants fast executions for the people his work convicts. (Which he acknowledges is completely contradictory. It is also very understandable.)
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The State, effing everything else up, is a questionable choice to mete out death.
For some effers, I will happily buy the State hammer, timber, and nails.
Understand him completely.
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There’s never a down side or negative aspect to the Left’s great ideas. Their emotional investment in The Good Thing blinds them to any problems their Good Thing might lead to. Then, when the Bad Stuff comes from the Good Thing, either they deny it, or blame someone else, or demand that money/resources/people be thrown at the new problem in order to salvage the Good Thing.
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I think this is the big thing.
There is never a trade-off– all goods have no cost, not even opportunity costs.
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That is a very childish, or at most adolescent mindset. That everything has such fundamental meaning. That solutions are simple, straightforward, and uncomplicated. That the only reason such plans should ever fail is evil. Evil done by other men.
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They deny the existence of existence. They are unable to process the concept of an objective reality that operates on immutable principles of cause and effect which don’t give a rat’s ass about their feelings. Anything they do with Good Intentions will automagically turn out the way they want. If something goes wrong it’s all the fault of those dastardly Wreckers and Kulaks.
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“But, why not?”
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Having lost control of myself a couple of times when I was young, I try very hard to not do that again. Bad things tend to happen when I lose control of myself. I’m very aware of just how dark I can be. When I don’t get enough regular exercise my dreams turn violent. Like would make de Sade blush and tell me to reign it back a bit. So many on the progressive left don’t seem to have that warning indicator, or maybe have just gotten really good at ignoring it, that they openly profess wanting to do things that would create a nasty backlash from people trying to keep themselves under control.
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This is something I believe very, very common in men of a certain bent. When you do not know the limits of your strength, anger, or passion… Well. Perhaps those limits stray into grounds once should not lightly tread, shall we say.
For those of us, neither saint nor black hearted villain, we must master ourselves as and how we can. The knowledge that thou or I are who and what we are not only via our own actions and decisions, but somehow by grace to simple fortune? That’s a harrowing thing to face.
And yet, we can affect things as we are. Make choices that avoid some of the darker futures. Choose to support those around us that, in turn, keep us on the right path. To be an adult is to recognize what we could be… If the situation allowed/required/demanded it of us.
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Anime protagonist!
…I am stupidly addicted to the “I was reincarnated as the villain” stories.
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Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy has a protagonist fighting against the “prophesied to be the greatest villain ever” issue.
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random thought– isn’t Wheel of Time kind of that? The Dragon is supposed to be the biggest villain ever?
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IIRC in the Wheel Of Time series, the Prophecy about the Dragon has an “either or” aspect.
IE The Dragon may Save The World or the Dragon may Destroy The World.
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By the way, while there’s the aspect of Dragon Saving or Destroying the World, there’s also the aspect of Him being needed to fight the Dark One.
IE The Dragon is to be Reborn just as the Dark One is escaping “His” prison.
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“I’m not a -villain-! I just see practical applications of methods some people find … distasteful. “
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Indeed – and it all comes down to the confession of sins, and accepting it personally. In the Lutheran traditional service, there is this: “We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.”
The meaning is, as I have always understood it – is that we honestly acknowledge that we are capable of horrible evils, of doing grievous wrong to others either deliberately or inadvertently through inaction, of being cruel – to acknowledge that possibility within ourselves, and knowing that we must always guard against the temptation to do such, to be led into doing evil.
There are immature people who tell themselves “Oh, I could never do something wicked, I’m a good person and I know it, so nothing I could ever do can be that bad.” These childlike people are telling themselves a lie; yes, they could do evil and justify themselves while doing so. “I’m a good person, and they are bad so they deserve it!”
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In Catholic, too….
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Well, Martin Luther started as an extremely devout Catholic, who thought the late Renaissance-era Church needed a bit of reforming …
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I remember hearing somewhere that the cheapest, most effective and most lasting solution to any problem was to kill the people causing it (btw the speaker was emphatically not in favor of this solution).
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Of course not. If you solve the problem, then there’s no need for studies and consultants and grifts moaning over it. Heck, the SPLC is a prime example; they’ll generate more of the problem so they can profit off its’ continuance.
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Another RAH writing, from Glory Road. Her Wisdom (Star) points to one delegation member, and says ‘Take that one out and shoot him’ and the rest of the delegates do that.
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When you kill the intruder/murder/rapist/etc you save yourself, and all of your neighbors, further loss in the future. So, a single dark incident now can indeed be the better choice overall.
Spare the rod, spoil the child type of thing. Just make sure the @$$h)le doesn’t have a bunch of like-minded friends/family following after him. It’s the reason we have our current Western concept of law enforcement, so that mob justice and blood feuds don’t take hold. Problem is that certain current officers of the justice system have other ideas on how it should work, even though it doesn’t work well that way.
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I remember reading an opinion years ago by Ayn Rand that the purpose of the justice system wasn’t so much to dispense justice but rather to prevent feuds by being an impartial arbitrator.
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Consider the “unhoused problem” (as it was termed out here the last time I looked, though likely it’s “purple gerbil unicorn enhancement” in the latest edition of the Formerly Golden State NewSpeak Manual) – i.e. bums living on the street/under the overpasses/camping on the sidewalks/shooting up in public doorways (all of which I have seen with my own eyes in the City and County of San Francisco within about a block from City Hall).
One the one hand, which I hereby declare is objectively evil, one could euthanize (Hello, Canadian readers!) the mentally ill and addicts, for their own quality of life, thus removing them more permanently than the sweep SF did when the CCP was inspecting their vassals. But on the other end, which I also declare is objectively evil, one could coddle and fund and build vast self sustaining bureaucracies around keeping these poor folks in their horrible situations in aeternum, so that the vast bureaucracies employees get a continuing forever paycheck and can afford a mortgage and a Tesla.
Both are “solutions” but both are evil. The solution is Something Else.
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Yes, “shadow-self” is Jungian.
And this accords with Jordan Peterson’s trips to Washington DC. He met with politicians of both parties, and asked each “when does your side go too far? Can you give me one example?”
And not one politician on the left could define “too far” for the left, nor give an example. Not. One.
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“Good” vs “nice” is like “justice” vs “fairness.”
They’re training wheels.
The simple, easy stuff– fair and nice are the right option. It’s the though stuff where “good” and “just” are different, and HARD.
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Tough.
Tough stuff.
Not though.
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Asking the though-provoking questions, like “Am I though enough?”
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I am more than though enough. I am although.
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Better than I. I am through with certain persons, though I cannot stress enough that I just do it for the dough.
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A few days ago I was listening to a podcast and the host mentioned layered justification.
The chain goes something like this (just an example):
So one justification leads to another, until they approve of evil acts and don’t even realize how they got there.
It does help to explain how previously ethical people can do an aboutface and start supporting insanity.
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As the train goes off the rails at point number two, achieves Earth Orbit at 3, and is well out of the solar system by 4. The redshift is too great to locate at point 5.
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The “shadow” is indeed Jungian; in fact it does, may, seems to trace to a specific dream he relates in his autobiography. And it often does contain many, many rather nasty ego-disowned things, on the lines of “no, I could never…”
(Yes, you could. Maybe you never would, but assuredly you could. Or did I, hypothetical counter debater, miss the part where you already said you’re not really human, after all?)
But the defining characteristic is that “ego-disowned” part — there’s another Jung quote where he says something like “sometimes the shadow is up to 90% pure gold” (or was it 99%, maybe?). By which is meant, some people disown their better or higher elements too. Sheer laziness is one leading reason (“I’m not a Boy Scout, I just want to get along” and so forth. Or “If I admit I’m really good at math then I have to take all sorts of hard classes, or else feel like a lazy jerk.”) But being able to indulge (the word is precise) in all sort of petty scams and daily dishonesties also fits.
And of course leftist theology not only discourages self-examination, it forbids it or very nearly so. Their “thought leaders” (cough!) tell you what to think, and then you should. Knowing yourself, as ancient as that advice is, simply isn’t politically correct (except by the Stopped Clock Principle).
It’s a designed blind spot big enough to hide… all their assorted evils we know, and more.
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Not recognizing your shadow… This dovetails perfectly with something I observed 25 years ago, when I was in grad school, and helps explain it.
English, ethnic/women’s/American studies, and sociology were fever swamps back then, chock-full of SJWs and wokery before there were pop-culture words for it; the students in my general cohort were a major infection vector spreading that sickness into the body politic.
Everybody was talking about eradicating hate, as leftists do, and (keep in mind that I considered myself a liberal, basically center-left, back then) it got to a point where I printed up a sign in big, block letters and posted it on the door of my tiny little office: “Everybody has hate. What are you doing with yours?” It had no effect, other than drawing the occasional puzzled look, because to all the progressive leftists in those halls, hate was something OTHER people had. Bad people. Who needed to be stopped.
Well, it turns out that what they’re doing with the hate in their souls is being run over roughshod by it. Dominated and ruled by it. Because they don’t recognize it. They hear it loud and clear…it can’t be ignored…but they think it’s something else; a virtue, because they are virtuous. So they end up giving free rein to one of humanity’s deadliest emotions. (Is there one that’s worse? Jealousy might compete…) Violence goes the same way. Nothing they do could possibly be violent, because violence is Bad and they are Good.
And I don’t actually think hate, as an emotion, is inherently a bad thing. All of our emotions exist for good and necessary reasons, and hate is what you feel when something vital to you has been violated. Unlike anger, it’s durable and sustainable; it’s defensive; it’s what anger turns into when a threat doesn’t fully go away. In that sense, hatred is very useful. Too much of it will poison you, but properly tempered and restrained, it’s a big part of what defines the moral lines that you won’t cross. If there’s a hill you’re willing to die on…or make someone else die on…then hatred of something that’s anathema to you is in the soil where you’ve planted your feet.
But you have to KNOW that’s what you’re doing and why. And the left just doesn’t.
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“They don’t stamp “archvillain” in your birth certificate.”
Challenge accepted!
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But sometimes you get a lighting bolt scar early on. :)
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Yep Sarah, I believe the shadow in the sense you use it originated with Jung, at least by that name and metaphor. The idea is ancient as is easily confirmed by psalm 51.
Saying, “I would never…,” is arrogance, and one of the big reasons the First Commandment is the greatest and Love your neighbors comes second. If we never learn humility, all else is vain.
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I’m only 67; but when I grow up… after I finish “the last 15 books”…
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Those on the Left have as a pseudo-religious belief that man is perfectible. They think this a very original view but it is really a variant of the Pelagian heresy. On top of that they have the hubris (or perhaps just good old unmitigated gall) to believe that THEY have perfected themselves according to their system. Thus, they can not be wrong in their view. This is what makes them so dangerous. A person who believes they are right (and righteous) can do absolutely horrid things in the cause of ending something they believe to be evil. I sometimes wonder if this is why the Left and Islam get along so well. Both Leftism and Islam view the traditionalJudeo-Christian west as a massive evil (for different reasons of course). The Left welcomes Islam because they are from “Oppressed” peoples, and when they become more enlightened they will most certainly come to the true Leftist faith once the West stops oppressing them. And Islam is nothing if not pragmatic, they are willing to work with the Left against the West, knowing the the West is a far more dangerous opponent than the degenerate Left. I do not think the Left realizes how quickly that blade will be shoved in their back if the West should fall.
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This exactly. Their atheism is at the bottom of it all. I was talking to the wife about this just this morning as Jacob Rees-Mogg had pointed out that British PM Starmer’s inability to admit a mistake came down to his atheism and not understanding that all we humans are imperfect. They don’t believe in God, they believe that they are god with all that entails, but sin, and Satan’s sin was pride, is the great breaker of dreams of perfectability.
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“Though a story is trying to land, and I’d like it to go away, as I’m already full up.”
Same. The writing is being sticky, too.
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This sounds rather as if you were talking about Terry Pratchett’s Auditors.
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The left is turning into them, I think. First slowly…. Seriously, I’ve heard things in recent years that make me go “uh”
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i knew someone who was a good, God-fearing man.
Until he has a near-death experience.
He says he saw heaven.
And it broke him.
Last I saw him, he was no longer a good man, and he feared nothing.
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Talk about misinterpreting a message….. wow.
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Weird. Maybe it wasn’t heaven?
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