Anne Baring's Website

The question now before the human species is whether life or death will prevail on the earth…No generation before ours has held the life and death of its species in its hands…In our present-day world, in the councils where the decisions are made, there is no one to speak for man and for the earth, although both are threatened with annihilation.

— Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

The divine and the demonic are very close together; only a thin line separates them. We who are indeed capable of divinity are also capable of the demonic. And the deepest of all demonic activity is the use our divine imaginations to invent destruction.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau began his book The Social Contract (1762) with the words, “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Today, as we witness the shocking violence in many parts of the world, the continued use of weapons that wreak atrocious suffering, and our rapacity in relation to the earth’s resources, it is obvious that we are still in chains, still in bondage to certain primordial instincts or habits that drive our political, economic and religious agendas.
          This chapter is about the dark aspect of our instincts: our apparently inexhaustible propensity for violence, cruelty and evil. It is one of the most difficult chapters to write since people don't like to be reminded of this aspect of our nature yet, throwing the light of consciousness onto the opaque region of these instinctive patters of behaviour may contribute to bringing together the conscious and unconscious aspects of our soul, so helping us to become more whole. This is difficult work because it is far easier to detect these patterns in other people than to recognise them in our own behaviour towards our partners, children, or colleagues or to observe how easily we can drawn into the collective demonising of other groups and into ways of behaving that inflict suffering on others. Yet making these various forms and shades of darkness conscious is perhaps the most challenging task facing us in this new millennium: if we fail to engage in it, we may inflict irreparable harm on ourselves and the planet.
          As suggested in Chapter Four, for all our extraordinary intellectual and technological achievements, we are still, as a species, in a relatively unconscious or pre-conscious state, still liable to be taken over by a part of our nature that we know very little about. It may be difficult to grasp the fact that when survival instincts are aroused they can make us behave in ways that contradict the civilised image we hold of ourselves. We justify our actions, saying that they are necessary for our personal or national survival, yet we do not see how they may, in the long-term, militate against our best interests, engender evil and bring horrendous suffering into being.
          One recent example of this is the war in Iraq which was embarked on in 2003 by America and Britain ostensibly to eliminate the threat of WMD offered by the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein. This war has led to the death of over a hundred thousand Iraqis as well as thousands of Allied soldiers and destroyed the lives of millions of Iraqis, including the lives of women widowed by the conflict and the children who have witnessed and suffered unimaginable horror. It has also left behind a shattered economy and a weak and divided state. As the compulsion to embark on a war to eliminate the “axis of evil” has shown, we are in no sense the free, rationally directed creatures we believe ourselves to be. Two leaders who were under the spell of their own unconscious illusions were able to embark on a course of action that was highly suspect and organised with no consideration given to the aftermath of the invasion. It has led to exactly the opposite result to what was originally envisaged, arousing the enmity of the whole Islamic world.
          So many of our grandiose plans for a better future rest on the foundation of the separate self (or conscious ego) and its alienation from the ground of the soul—a separation which ensures that we blindly repeat the patterns of the past. Plans for peace and economic growth leading to improved standards of living for greater numbers of people will founder unless we develop more insight into the power of the unconscious habits of our primordial instincts. Long ago Einstein warned us that with the splitting of the atom we have changed everything save our way of thinking and that we cannot solve a problem from the level of consciousness that created it. Yet, it has not yet dawned on the world that moving to a new level of consciousness is not an optional extra but an imperative if we are to bequeath a viable environment for our children and future generations to enjoy.

The Dragon as an Image of the Dangerous Aspect of Instinct
          I remember a dream I had just after I had decided to publish The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time against the advice of a close friend. She was frightened that I might incur a fatwah for daring to use a revered Islamic text to create a modern story for children. I told her that I had taken the decision to go ahead with publication. That night I dreamt that an enormous dinosaur was ravaging the countryside, devouring hundreds of people every day. The ground was flat and treeless. There was no-where to hide, no protection from its devouring jaws. The fear I experienced in the dream was greater than that engendered by any other life experience. I realised that this dragon-dinosaur was an image of primordial fear carried in my psyche, a graphic image of everything that has aroused fear in human beings since the beginning of our evolution as humans on this planet. The root of this fear is the experience of death at the hands of a creature or event of overwhelming power. Since this is something we, as a species, have experienced, both in relation to animal and human predators as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, it is hardly surprising that fear and the response to it is so deeply imprinted on our cellular memory and so overwhelmingly powerful.
          Like the Minotaur or the Gorgon of Greek legend, the dragon of mythology symbolizes not only our primordial fear but the immense power of our instincts and the habits of behaviour that reflect them. The dragon is not evil in itself. It represents the huge power of the cosmic energy pouring into manifestation through the life forms of this physical dimension of reality. It is the planetary energy which regenerates the earth each spring; the energy of the fiery magma that flows from erupting volcanoes; the terrifying wave of a tsunami triggered by the shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates; the hurricane, tornado, typhoon or landslide that can transform a community into a wasteland in seconds. At the human level this incredible power of nature—since we are part of nature—can be expressed in ways that can foster life or destroy it. It can bring into being great good but also great evil. Since we have developed some measure of consciousness, we have a limited ability to choose in specific instances whether to protect or destroy life. Potentially we have access to the priceless treasure the dragon traditionally guards — the possibility of freeing ourselves from the unconscious programming of countless millions of years and gaining access to the huge energy and innate wisdom of the instinct. Awareness of this fact could give us a greater degree of choice and a greater measure of freedom so that Rousseau’s famous sentence need no longer apply.

The Origin of Evil
          I think that, in relation to the harm we are capable of doing to other human beings, evil may be defined as the act of inflicting terror, suffering, humiliation, deprivation, torture or death on an individual or group of individuals as well as the intention which leads to these acts. This definition can be extended to our treatment of animals. One of the most difficult things for us to recognise is that each one of us carries the propensity to act in a hateful, cruel or evil way. Often these traits emerge when we are stressed or frightened or when our identification with a national, racial or religious group or cause leads us to act in ways that, in the context of our individual lives, we would find unacceptable. There are countless examples of this but one of the most recent and the most horrific was the picture taken in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad of Lynndie England dragging an Iraqi prisoner across the floor by a lead.
          Throughout the solar age the myth of the battle between hero and dragon was framed in terms of the battle of good against evil, light against darkness, and the belief, enshrined in the Book of Revelation, that good would ultimately triumph over evil. Within the psyche, darkness was unconsciously identified with the fear of slipping back into the “state of nature”. In the sphere of religion and politics, the word ‘evil’ was identified with any group which threatened the hegemony or the survival of another group and the beliefs of that group. God was co-opted to serve the survival and supremacy needs of that group as these needs were defined by its religious or political leaders.
          Now, with the psychological insight available to us, we can perhaps realise that the battle is not so much with enemies without as those within our own nature—the primordial habits that lead us to repeat the behaviour of the past and therefore to regress into unconsciousness. The real focus of the battle is the immense effort of consciousness required to become aware of the quality of our own behaviour, to see whether it brings good or evil into being. The image of the fight with the dragon can be re-examined in relation to this inner dragon rather than to any threat we face in the outer world. This is because the archaic programming of our instincts and our ignorance of how powerful they are - relative to the conscious ego - is the primary cause of the many problems we currently face as well as the origin of much that we name as evil.
          Our moral values lag far behind our scientific and technological achievements. Weapons that were unimaginable a hundred years ago can now obliterate the lives of millions of helpless civilians and devastate vast swathes of the earth's surface, effectively sending survivors back to the Stone Age. To give only one example from my own country’s defence system: Each of three Trident submarines carries three nuclear weapons in each of its 16 missiles, making 48 warheads in all. Each warhead has about 7 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. The submarine is designed to be able to discharge all its weapons within ten minutes and this could result in the death of 40 million people – more than 40 times the number of people killed in Hiroshima.
          Before we had weapons of mass destruction that could wreak devastation with a single bomb and contaminate the earth for generations, the drive for supremacy between tribal groups and nations did not perhaps matter as much, although it caused untold anguish. But now it is becoming more and more evident that we have to change our ways. However, nothing will change in the collective life of society unless the attitude of the individual, of millions of individuals, changes. “The world hangs on a single thread,” wrote Jung, “and that thread is the psyche of the individual.”

The Instincts and the Primordial Soul
          Our instincts function at a deeply unconscious level and programme us to behave in a herd-like manner. We watch the great herds of caribou moving from their winter to summer grazing grounds in Greenland or the herds of wildebeast thundering across vast territories in Africa but it is not so easy to see that we also, when we are identified with a group, can follow immemorial patterns of behaviour in response to certain situations and challenges. Jung called the instincts our primordial soul, the soul that closely reflects the instinctive behaviour of animal species. (1)
          How we relate to this immense power of the life energy within us depends on our ability to guard against our propensity for evil, to develop ways of behaving which protect life and abandon others because we can see that they result in great evil. Law and order have come into being to contain and restrain the dangerous aspect of instinct within civilised society. But war demolishes this restraint; we justify actions in a collective situation which in a personal one we would recognise and condemn as evil.
          In our own species certain immensely powerful instincts are carried through into the field of human relations from our mammalian and reptilian brain system: survival instincts, territorial instincts, sexual instincts and the millions-of-years-old programming of predator and prey. Because these archaic instincts function at a deeply unconscious level we, who see ourselves as the summit of creation, are nevertheless influenced, even controlled by habits formed during pre-human or early human phases of evolution. It is helpful to imagine humanity as one gigantic autonomic nervous system which has been imprinted with certain instinctive responses to threat and danger.
          We bring these instinctive habits with us when we are born, as part of our psycho-physical DNA. They are activated and reinforced in each generation by our experience of family, school and our encounter with the wider world as well as by the values, beliefs and modes of behaviour we absorb from our parents and the society in which we find ourselves. For example, in certain Islamic communities today, including Islamic communities in the UK, tribal custom still dictates the abhorrent practice of “honour killings”. If a woman marries against her family’s choice of a husband, she is deemed to have disgraced her family and must be put to death by a male relative. In a recent case in the UK (2009) a father (Mehmet Goran) was convicted of murdering his fifteen year old daughter because she had left home to live with a man of her choice. In his eyes, she was a “worthless commodity” and therefore dispensable because she could no longer be married off for a £5000 dowry. Terrifyingly, paternal affection was sacrificed to upholding family honour within the community.
          People’s behaviour used to be controlled to some extent by the moral codes derived from religions, and by the laws that society slowly and painfully evolved to protect society from the worst aspects of our predatory behaviour. However, in the West, as the control exercised by the moral code of Christianity has weakened, and as the absence of values in a secular culture has grown more evident and there are no longer any moral parameters to restrain people, there has been a general regression at every level of society to more predatory and unconscious modes of behaviour. This shows up in the disruptive and bullying behaviour of children in schools, in the inability of parents to establish boundaries, in the inability of teachers to exercise authority and control, in the relaxation of moral codes in relation to marriage and sexuality, in the general dishonesty of corporate bodies such as banks, in the “spin” or lies of governments which disguise policies which may make them unpopular and therefore unelectable. In religious fundamentalism, whether Christian or Islamist, predatory patterns may override the highest proclaimed ideals and the supposed service of God.
          Where war, tribal conflicts and totalitarian regimes are concerned, these predatory instincts and their emotional manifestations can easily rupture the fragile container of civilisation we have so painstakingly constructed and run amok, destroying all in their path, much as the dragon in my dream did. This pattern is not a modern phenomenon; it can be traced through some four millennia — throughout the solar era — masked but not fundamentally changed by different religious traditions, without our gaining much insight into what happens when instincts take us over, or of being able to anticipate and prevent this happening.

The Predator/prey Pattern of Behavior
          The more recently developed frontal lobes of the neo-cortical brain rest on the instinctive programming of the far older mammalian and reptilian brain matrix. Together these form an extraordinarily complex neurological organism. It is extremely difficult to see that the archaic habits of the older brain may be controlling us when we are most convinced that we are acting ‘rationally’ when following the dictates of tribal custom or religious belief.
          Observations about the biological relationship between human beings and animals are unpopular because they seem to conflict with idea of free-will and self-determination. There has been even more resistance to accepting the idea that we may still be controlled by instincts that belong to our primate ancestors and even to the dinosaurs. It seems obvious that the predator/prey pattern is a genetic behavioural habit laid down over hundreds of millions of years in ourselves as well as in animals. We carry this habit in our own biological inheritance and are deeply conditioned to act and react as predator (attacker) and to take avoiding action lest we become the prey (victim) of someone else.
          In our species memory are imprinted the archetypal behaviour patterns of all creatures who were predators and all creatures who were prey or food for them. Our own species has been prey to certain animals and predator to many others and it is the imprinting of our species-memory with this age-old experience that is our greatest problem. As long as we are unaware of how this pattern of behaviour can take us over when we feel threatened or when ethical and moral values that could set parameters for our behaviour are insufficiently developed or have collapsed, we are in danger of succumbing to their power. One of the most perplexing aspects of our unconsciousness is the fact that religions, which should have upheld these values, have often betrayed them because they believed that the extension of their power was intended and willed by God.
          The evolutionary development of our ability to reflect on our actions separated us from nature as well as from our instincts, putting a space, so to speak, between the immediate instinctive reaction to a perceived threat and the reflexive action that, in animal species, follows on from it. The sparrow-hawk does not pause to reflect before it falls on its smaller prey, nor does the lion hesitate to attack another lion that is invading its territory. We, however, have the space to reflect when we are confronted with a threat and the ability to decide how to respond.
          The primary aim of the instinct is survival when confronted with danger. Only survival matters. Gradually, being powerful in relation to others (or killing others and seizing their territory or their possessions) became a way of eliminating the anxiety arising from a fear of future threats and even from the threat of death itself. As described in Chapter Six, during the solar age, the desire for power, even omnipotent power, became a habit, something to be achieved through conquest, territorial expansion and extending control over resources such as gold, oil, minerals — and slaves. In the modern world, we can see the most powerful nations - America, China, India and Russia - competing in Africa and elsewhere for control of resources. It is this archaic habit that is one of our greatest problems.
          The male, being physically stronger and programmed to focus on the hunt has, for millennia, acted as protector of the group and the territory marked out as belonging to the group. But, at the same time, he has been programmed to act as predator towards any group or individual perceived as a threat; these became, perforce, his legitimate prey. Throughout the solar era, young men have been trained to be warriors and this pattern is deeply imprinted in the male psyche. In a situation of danger, the instinctive impulse of the male is to protect the group to which he belongs by attacking the threat, whatever it may be, by defensive or offensive means—even to the extent of anticipating a danger that might happen in the future. This behavioural pattern is carried through to the Bush Doctrine that America has the right to launch a pre-emptive strike. Demonising the enemy is an intrinsic aspect of this response, thereby preparing the ground for justifying the attack.
          Superimposed on this primordial imprinting is the instinctive fear in the male of losing face, of backing down from confrontation, of being shamed and humiliated in the eyes of other males and there is also the sense of honour involved in a nation being more powerful than others and ensuring victory rather than suffering the dishonour of defeat. The ‘primal’ male or chosen leader in any given group is watched obsessively by other males for any sign of weakness or incompetence, any flaw which might reveal him to be an undesirable leader in time of war. Any such weakness or flaw is vigorously exposed and attacked, for the strength and power of the leader is unconsciously identified with the potential survival-power of the group. Even in peace time, this obsessive focus on the strength and authority of the leader is maintained.
          War gives us permission to release the atavistic aspect of our nature and to justify acts of the utmost barbarity as long as they are inflicted on the enemy. However, the ‘enemy’ without may reflect our own unrecognised capacity for aggression that we project onto our opponents.

Three Experiments
          In the twentieth century three revealing experiments raised the question of the origin of evil in human beings: The Asch Conformity Experiment (1951), the Milgram Experiment (1963) and the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971). The first showed that people could deny the evidence of their own eyes by their unconscious desire to conform to the expectations and will of the group. The Milgram Experiment, which invited students to inflict incremental electrical pain on people in another room by remote control, revealed that people could subject others to potentially lethal electric shocks, going against their own instinctive revulsion when authority figures told them to proceed with the experiment. Obeying orders without thinking, they lost their own ability to know when to stop inflicting pain. They went on increasing the intensity of the shocks until told to stop by the person supervising the experiment.
          The third experiment (Stanford Prison) showed that ordinary well-meaning people could be transformed into either cruel tyrants or cowering victims in response to the situations in which they found themselves. Student volunteers were divided into two groups: prisoners and guards. Very quickly the guards became ever more vicious abusers and the prisoners cowering helpless wrecks. The fact that they all knew the situation was entirely artificial did not stop the descent into barbarity.
          All three experiments are highly relevant to understanding how people can be drawn into acceptance of a situation of institutionalised evil, such as the horror of the Holocaust or Stalin’s mass exterminations, the behaviour of the Japanese military in the prison camps, the reign of the Red Guards in China or the wholesale execution of millions of civilians in Cambodia. In the experiments mentioned above, none of the participants who acted out the cruel behaviour demanded of them by their ‘superiors’ was intrinsically evil but all became capable of evil behaviour when the ‘system’ demanded and apparently approved of it. It is not a question of “a few bad apples” but the rottenness of the whole barrel or institutionalised system that encourages members of a group to regard those of another group as sub-human and therefore expendable. In all three of the above experiments, some individuals did resist the opportunity for evil. Some did protest, horrified. One such observer (Christina Maslach) even brought the Stanford Prison Experiment to an early close, insisting that it be reduced from the planned two weeks to six days.
          Philip Zimbardo, who later married Christina Maslach and who originally masterminded this experiment, has recently written a book called The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil. He cites examples, including the above experiments, to show that we are not morally autonomous beings, but can easily be corrupted by situations where we are encouraged to demonise others or treat them as our prey, causing us to behave in predatory and barbarous ways. The treatment of prisoners in the Guantamano Bay detention camp is a recent example of this as is the practice of “Extraordinary Rendition”.
          William Golding's book, Lord of the Flies, suggests that teen-age males can regress into savagery towards each other in less than a month. Peter Brook, when he made the film of the book, disagreed with Golding, saying that it only took a week for boys to lose their humanity.
          In situations where people are told to inflict torture or suffering on others by a higher authority, they can easily become desensitized and even immune to others’symptoms of suffering. This pattern of behaviour can be related to what might be called the “Eichmann Syndrome” where people can be brainwashed into abysmally barbaric behaviour by being trained to obey orders without question. It is also reflected in the pattern of sadistic bullying that is increasingly found in schools and the workplace. But it can also be applied to an understanding of how governments behave in war and how whole nations can be brainwashed into accepting a situation that is morally indefensible because a political leader declares that national defence requires it. Evil does not necessarily arise from ‘evil’ people: any one of us can be inducted into cruel behaviour if we are part of a system or a control group which imposes, justifies or rewards behaviour that demeans or injures others.
          Documentaries have shown how surviving guards and commandants who supervised the gulags in the former Soviet Union or the extermination camps in Cambodia showed no remorse for what they had done. Obeying the orders of superior males, blindly serving an ideology, they were totally unconscious of the moral evil of what they were doing. There is no consideration in these situations where orders are obeyed out of fear, or out of respect for a regime, for the suffering inflicted on innocent civilians, whose homes and lives are destroyed. If an ideological goal demands it, countless lives will be sacrificed without guilt.
          Do these examples reflect the activation of primordial predator/prey pattern and the neutralisation the higher neo-cortical attainments? Or do they suggest the creation of an unbalanced relationship between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, giving the left, with its tendency to seek goals and follow orders, undue predominance and control, cutting off access to the more empathic qualities of the right hemisphere? It might be that some individuals, such as Hitler and Stalin, can initiate a reign of terror simply by installing a regime which exalts an ideology which institutionalises evil, drawing people into it who have already been programmed by their beliefs, to obey orders and that this has the effect both of encouraging the predator/prey pattern and closing access to the empathic capacity of the right hemisphere. To resist such a regime takes enormous courage and heroism, as many books describing the individuals who embodied these virtues, testify. Tzvetan Todorov, in his moving book, Hope and Memory, Reflections on the Twentieth Century explores the roots of totalitarianism in the twentieth century and records the profiles of individuals who at great personal cost, resisted the Nazi and Communist regimes. He quotes this passage from one such individual, “Whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good…the blood of old people and children is always shed.”(2)
          Primo Levi, one of the few survivors of Auschwitz who later committed suicide, urges us in his book, The Damned and the Saved, not to forget the horrors man has inflicted on defenceless people: “It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.”(3) Knowing the human tendency to blank out the past and to look to the future, and to project evil onto others, he asks us to bear our capacity for evil constantly in mind because the opportunity for it to take hold is always a latent possibility in any society.

The Shadow
          Jung used the word “shadow” to describe instinctive patterns of behaviour, as well as personal complexes and experiences of which we are not normally aware and which exist below the threshold of consciousness. Over our lifetime, we identify ourselves with our conscious mind and with a specific image we hold of ourselves. We are not taught to be aware of this shadow aspect of ourselves nor of how to relate to it. Through the shadow we are connected to the still deeper levels of the collective unconscious where the behaviour patterns of our species are stored in a kind of memory data-base, ready to be activated when they are called forth by events. Many elements go to make up this shadow aspect of ourselves: parental and educational influence, religious beliefs, patriotic idealism, long forgotten traumas experienced in childhood or the past of our nation, various complexes of which we are not aware. Any of these aspects of our shadow can be projected onto people and events in the world, entangling us in situations that, with more insight, we could have avoided or could have responded to them with greater “emotional intelligence”.
          Jung developed his ideas about the danger of the archetypal power of the shadow overwhelming civilization in his essays on events in Germany (Collected Works, vol. 10) and in a book called The Undiscovered Self. One of his most important realizations was that when we project evil onto others, particularly when we feel under attack, we may lose the possibility of insight and the ability to deal with evil, becoming drawn into it ourselves. Too easily we forget Nietzsche’s warning: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”(4)
          I was reminded of this in 2002 by a dream sent to me from a colleague in America, who received it from one of her clients who had the dream shortly after 9/11:

          If only we could take the message of this dream to heart, something might begin to shift in our understanding of what we are doing when we engage in war. When we are shocked by some predatory act we often say, “he/she acted like an animal,” yet we do not apply this condemnation to our actions in war or to the sale of arms, which may lead to war and the suffering and death of others. On the contrary, we take pride in the defeat of our enemies and try to increase the sale of arms because we are told that the manufacture of arms provides employment for thousands of people and increases the GNP of our particular country. In fact, if other industries were subsidised to the same extent as the arms industry, twice as many jobs could be provided. (Oxford Research Group 1994)
          Kavita Ramdas, President of the Global Fund for Women writes on the Open Democracy Website on May 8th, 2009 that “Militarism is a system that prioritizes investments in military forces, weapons and activity over any other kind of investment. In 2007, nation states invested a staggering $1,339 billion worldwide in military budgets: nearly US $4 billion per day… Africa, which has the world’s highest HIV rates with one in eight afflicted, spent $7.7 billion on the military. In contrast, Costa Rica, which abolished its army in 1949, spends one fourth of its budget on education.” Imagine the difference that could be made to the suffering and hungry people of the world if these colossal sums were spent on the distribution of food and access to education.
          The conviction that it is justifiable to murder others in defence of one's own group or territory (with God co-opted to serve that group) has evolved out of the belief systems and territorial tribal habits that we have been imprinted with in the past. The efforts of the greatest spiritual teachers have attempted to free us from our enslavement to these primordial habits. But their fundamental message - that life is sacred and, at the deepest level, one and indivisible - has consistently been ignored. They would view the invention of our weapons of destruction in the interests of self-defence or maintaining the “balance of power” and our proposed use of them to destroy hundreds of thousands of innocent people in order to save our own lives or our nation as morally inconceivable. Believing that the sacrifice of a single life is pleasing to God would be unimaginable. That is why the revered Vietnamese monk, Thich Nat Hanh, speaking from this unfamiliar spiritual perspective, urges us not to kill, not to let others kill and to find whatever means possible to protect life and to prevent war.
          Leaders of nations may be unaware of the shadow projections they are casting onto their opponents, naming them as evil or malevolent. Propaganda and demonising the enemy can exaggerate the threat. We imagine that if only ‘they’ can be eliminated the world will be a better and safer place, yet when that particularly hydra head is cut off, two more appear in its place so the problem of evil is an ongoing one. No-where has this been more vividly demonstrated than in the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
          Jung’s comment here is helpful, “Since it is universally believed that man is merely what his consciousness knows of itself, he regards himself as harmless and so adds stupidity to iniquity. He does not deny that terrible things have happened and still go on happening, but it is always “the others” who do them. (5)
          Without awareness of our shadow, we may simply react blindly to events, repeating the pattern lived by previous generations. The human tendency to forget the events of the past and to look towards the future, together with the fact that very few people in government have a profound knowledge of history and access to the insights of psychology, means that the lessons of the past are not learnt. Because we do not learn, we are condemned to repeat.
          What is truly astonishing is that so little attention has been directed towards making this shadow aspect of ourselves more conscious. Television offers a supreme opportunity to do this yet I can think of only a handful of programmes which have addressed it. There have been brilliant programmes about past and present conflicts but very few address the psychological causes of conflict, including the projection of the shadow and the hubris of leaders. It is as if, once the events have passed, we want to forget what has happened and focus on the present. While greater alertness of the dangers of projection has happened in relation to the Holocaust, it has not yet happened in relation to answering the question: “Why do we do these terrible things to others? Why do we continue to follow leaders who take us into war and glorify victory? Why do we accept or worse, condone atrocities inflicted on ‘the enemy’ — human beings like ourselves? The Holocaust should have opened our eyes to our tendency to justify evil in the name of the enhancement of the power of our own tribal group but we may still find it difficult to recognise when we are becoming complicit in the perpetration of evil.

The Addiction to War
          During the four thousand years of the solar era, war has been glorified as the noblest activity for man, victory and the spoils of war the coveted treasure to be won in battle, courage in the face of death the supreme virtue. Yet now, this warrior ethos is being called into question as many individuals realize that, because of its devastating effect on the fabric of civilization, the sacrificial rituals of war can no longer be an option for us. We have to find another way to settle our disputes and another channel of expression for the Martian or warrior archetype in the male psyche that welcomes conflict as an opportunity for men to develop courage in the face of death, as well as to sacrifice their lives in defence of their nation. War excites, ennobles, fascinates but it can also degrade and corrupt us. Like sleepwalkers, we enter into it, unaware that we are in thrall to an unconscious pattern of behaviour that has the power to draw us into the web of its archetypal spell. Yet, one positive sign today is that people are becoming disillusioned with the rhetoric of war and resistant to their governments’ efforts to encourage them to support it. Government rhetoric sounds increasingly hollow in the light of the anguish of bereaved parents and the horrific injuries, both physical and emotional, that the survivors of combat will carry for the rest of their lives.
          The twentieth century was one of monstrous slaughter, “without question, as the historian Niall Ferguson writes, “the bloodiest century in history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era. Significantly larger percentages of the world’s population were killed in the two world wars that dominated the century than had been killed in any previous conflict of comparable geopolitical magnitude.” (6) Countless millions were traumatized by loss, bereavement, terror and suffering. Nations rarely acknowledge guilt for what they have inflicted and are prepared to inflict on others: Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and the bombing of Baghdad, the Lebanon, Chechnya and, more recently, Gaza, are not yet fully acknowledged as crimes against humanity because, like war itself, they were and still are believed by many to have been justified in the interests of national self-defence or revenge for attack.
          Governments continue to contemplate the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, stockpiling weapons that are demonic in their conception and demonic in their effects. The military branch of governments employs scientists and armaments experts to develop them, thinking only of the use they will be in future conflicts. Governments continue to sell armaments and expertise to each other. They may be thoroughly nice human beings in their personal lives but they have no apparent awareness of the evil nature of what they are engaged in—evil because these weapons are designed to inflict terror, torture and death on other people, whether on soldiers or civilians, adults or children.
          Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was assassinated outside her home in Moscow in 2006 for speaking out against the atrocities she witnessed in Chechnya, quotes this passage from an early book written by Tolstoy at the beginning of her book, A Small Corner of Hell, Dispatches from Chechnya:

The Effects of War
There are not many books on the effects of war on the soul. One of the most interesting and profound has been written by the Jungian analyst, Edward Tick, who has devoted his life to treating traumatized veterans of war, in particular the Vietnam War. In his book, War and the Soul, Healing our Nation's Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, he writes that veterans can be haunted for years by reliving in nightmares the original terrifying experiences they underwent: “They may see themselves killing again, or friends and enemies dying again. They may have waking visions of dead friends, enemies, or both. They may also, in retrospect, feel moral anguish that the people they killed did not deserve to die.”(8) They may have to endure living their young lives without the limbs that have had to be amputated, without sight if they have been blinded, without the capacity to develop into the full potential of what they might have been. All this gives rise to intolerable anguish and suffering for both veterans and their families which can endure for years.

As he explores the effects of war on the soul and why post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is so prevalent and so difficult to treat. He writes, “…the traumatic impact of war and violence inflicts wounds so deep we need to address them with extraordinary attention, resources and methods. Conventional methods of medical and psychological functioning and therapeutics are not adequate to explain or treat such wounds. Veterans and their afflictions try to tell us so.”(10)

          Tick concludes that as long as we remain unconscious of the archetypal elements that drive us, we will not be able to escape from their spell. We will continue to be possessed by the archetypal force of war until we become conscious of how it can take us over and develop strategies to contain and direct it so that it can no longer destroy our soul.

Demonising the Enemy: the Manipulation of Shadow Projections
          Wherever there is a strong polarization of opposites, there is a situation which attracts shadow projections and the demonising of others. The scapegoat or demonised individual or enemy group — often named as dogs, pigs or vermin — carries shadow projections coming from millions of others and relieves us of the responsibility of looking at our own shadow to see where we may have contributed to creating this enemy. Demonising an enemy, as encouraged by politicians and the media, can lead to the situation where the collective mind is flooded with shadow projections. It is to the credit of people all over the world that they were able to protest against the invasion of Iraq (2003) even though they were unable to prevent it taking place. Details are now coming to light (2009-10) of how the people of America and Britain were manipulated, duped and lied to by politicians, and nations committed to an illegal war on inadequate Intelligence. But at least we can be encouraged by the fact that these shadow motives are being brought to light because there are now a growing number of people in many countries able to challenge their governments’ policies even if they cannot yet prevent them being implemented. There are now many organizations such as Liberty (in the UK), Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that are devoted to shedding light on situations constellated by shadow behaviour in governments. There are others such as Peace Direct, devoted to conflict resolution.
          Sam Keen in his book, Faces of the Enemy, gives a brilliant analysis of the way propaganda works and how collective shadow projections are manipulated by governments. Healing begins, he says, “when we cease playing the blame game, when we stop assigning responsibility for war to some mysterious external agency and dare to become conscious of our violent ways.” (12) He also puts his finger on one of our greatest problems, one that has been highlighted by recent events:

Political leaders carry and unconsciously act out the collective shadow of the past, perpetuating it in the present. Millions collude with their projections because they look to a leader for security when they are told they are in danger and survival instincts are aroused. Government propaganda compounds both the fear and the illusion of safety. To withdraw these projections and see clearly what the shadow is doing counteracts its power, freeing us from being possessed by it. We have enough consciousness to make this choice, shed light on our own darkness, confront our own dragon. This involves dissociating ourselves as individuals from collective patriotic or religious beliefs that, far from eliminating evil, cause evil to proliferate. Patriotism and religious conformity have long been promoted as the supreme virtue but now we are being asked to look beyond these to a higher morality which includes awareness of the suffering we may bring into being in our quest for supremacy, hegemony and victory. In Jung’s highly significant words: “The immunity of the nation depends entirely upon the existence of a leading minority immune to the evil and capable of combating the powerful suggestive effect of seemingly possible wish-fulfilments. If the leader is not absolutely immune, he will inevitably fall a victim to his own will-to-power.” (14)
Mark Gerzon, in his brilliantly argued book, Leading Through Conflict, shows that the demonising of the “other” is one of the main roots of evil:

Wherever negative projections of fear, hatred and the demonising of others are encouraged by leaders, the archetypal power of solar myth can become active, take possession of millions of individuals and justify unspeakable acts of barbarism. When under the archetypal spell of this mythology, leaders will call for the sacrifice of life on a colossal scale because, to them, the end justifies the means if that end brings victory. Leaders have long known that deflecting people’s attention from domestic problems onto an outside threat can work wonders for strengthening their power or supporting their decision to embark on a war. The mass of the people, when roused to survival mode by its leader/s, will accept and even call for a belligerent attack. Goering was well aware of this when he cynically observed:

          As long ago as 1948 General Omar Bradley summed up the moral immaturity of the Christian West: “We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

The Shadow in Religion
          Apart from the addiction to war, there are three main areas involving shadow projections which could invite our attention: religion, politics and science. The shadow in religion can be recognized in the desire of a religious leader or institution to draw vast sections, if not the whole of humanity into one belief system named as superior and the sole purveyor of the truth. Religious institutions do not acknowledge their archaic shadow, reflected in their need for power and control over those who belong to their particular faith and their repudiation of the value of other faiths. The power-driven shadow may, for example, be reflected in the insistence that certain passages of Scripture must be obeyed to the letter because these passages (written down millennia ago) are believed to reflect the will of God and must never be altered or modified. All this has nothing to do with spirituality; indeed it is the very antithesis of spirituality.
          Two modern examples of shadow projections in religion are the strongly held belief of Evangelical Christianity that homosexuality is a sin because “God” decreed it was in the Old Testament or, in Islam, the condemning of an adulterous woman to death because Sharia Law decrees this punishment. The Ugandan government is currently debating (2009) whether homosexuals should be condemned to death. This is how archaic tribal custom and prejudice can lurk beneath the cloak of religious teaching, particularly in relation to solar age attitudes towards women and homosexuals. If we look only at the shadow side of Christianity, we can see the suffering caused by holy wars, religious crusades, witch-hunts, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, attempts to convert ‘heathen’ people and to stamp out animism and pagan religions. Together with the practices the Inquisition developed to hunt down heresy, and the “conquest of territory for Christ” that led to the massacre and suffering of thousands of helpless indigenous peoples, many of whom were looked upon as sub-human, these constitute the still unacknowledged shadow of Christian civilisation.
          The call to attack and kill others, promulgated by the priesthood of any religion still ratifies the murder and persecution of others. We see today how unspeakable atrocities are perpetrated by people who claim that the elimination of an enemy is a religious duty. Faith can be used as a tool of oppression because people have for centuries been programmed to accept the conquest of territory and the elimination of enemies in the name of Yahweh, God, Christ or Allah and have been trained unthinkingly to obey the dictates of their spiritual leaders.
          We have, for example, the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1983, on the anniversary of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, “War is a blessing for the world and for all nations. It is God who incites men to fight and to kill…The wars the Prophet led against the infidels were a blessing for all humanity…A religion without war is an incomplete religion.” (17) This is not the conscious mind speaking but a mind that has been possessed by the primordial instinct of the predator. Because he was the spiritual leader of Iran, his words could activate shadow projections in millions of his followers, inciting the collective will to attack and kill anyone who opposed his promulgations. We can see the same pattern repeated today (2009) in the brutal oppression and persecutions perpetrated by the current regime in Iran on those courageous citizens who would challenge its power.
          The Old Testament and the Koran are full of passages which have been and still are used to justify cruelty and oppression. When one religion is pitted against another, or even one group within the same religion against another, as Protestants and Catholics are in Northern Ireland and Sunni and Sh’ia groups within Islam, predatory instincts may be aroused as people are exhorted to kill their “brothers” with a barbarity too sickening to detail.
          Jung’s comment on the shadow of the solar age, is clear and uncompromising:

The Shadow in Politics
The shadow in the political sphere is revealed in the drive for power, even omnipotent power, and is most easily observed in the demonising of individuals and nations who are named as a threat and in the justification given for embarking on war and conquest. Armed with this insight, we might well feel a shiver of apprehension when we hear words like the declaration of George W. Bush, “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
The shadow drive for power and control contaminates all those utopian ideologies that claim to bring lasting benefits to humanity regardless of the violent and repressive means used to attain them. John Gray has shown in his book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia how the utopian secular ideologies that caused such massive suffering in the last century, were deeply tied in to Christian millennial beliefs - derived from the Book of Revelation - of an anticipated new world order that would be ushered in by cataclysmic destruction. He also shows how George Bush’s concept of defeating the “axis of evil” belongs to the same millennial mythology. (19) In pursuit of an utopian ideal, violence is tacitly accepted and justified in order to overthrow an old order and establish a new one. We have the Christian evangelical belief in “The Rapture” as a current example of millennial beliefs.

The Danger of Corporate Thinking
          One of the most difficult things to see is how allegiance to a corporate body, whether religious or scientific, or to a political institution, banking conglomerate or corporate industry, tends to draw the individual’s allegiance to that body as the primary moral directive. This may lead to situations where loyalty to that corporate body overrides the capacity for relationship, ethical behaviour, compassion and respect for the individual as well as for people in general. The Canadian philosopher, John Ralston Saul, in his book The Unconscious Civilization, describes the dangers of this way of thinking which is rooted in the behaviour of religious institutions as well as in the instinctive habit of group bonding but has spread from here throughout modern society into many of our institutions including, in the United Kingdom, Parliament and the current Labour government. Loyalty to the Party can all too easily override ethical behaviour and responsibility to the people. (20) It is also hidden in the drive to extend control over markets and resources, exacerbated by rivalry between the most powerful nations. In a different context, it may be found in the corporate allegiance of any public body, such as the police, social workers, health and safety executives etc. Any such corporate body may lapse into authoritarian or bureaucratic behaviour, exhibiting a lack of empathy with the unfortunate people who happen to fall under its control. Many people in the UK today have commented on the tendency of both the police and the law to support the aggressor rather than the victim. George Orwell brilliantly anticipated and described the helplessness of citizens when confronted with the power of the corporate state and its insidious methods of surveillance.
          One of the most interesting and revealing examples of the corporate mentality was described by Carol Cohn, a woman teacher who, with 47 other teachers, spent the summer months of 1984 in an enclosed environment with a group of “defense intellectuals”. (21) Because it is so significant and relevant to this chapter, I have extracted the main features of her article at some length.
          The remit of this group was to teach a course on nuclear weapons, nuclear strategic doctrine and arms control and to explain and defend the strategy which justifies nuclear weapons as a deterrant. There is no clearer example than this paper of unbalanced left-hemispheric thinking, the kind of thinking that has been brilliantly explored and described by the psychiatrist Iain McGilchcrist in his book The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World whose thesis was explored in Chapter Four. (22) What most shocked Carol Cohn as she listened to men passionately discussing nuclear war and weaponry, was the abstraction from reality of their thinking, the arcane language, the total absence of any sense of horror or moral outrage in the scenarios they were contemplating and discussing. She was also struck by the euphemistic language used by these experts, for example their referring to the deaths that would result from the use of nuclear weapons as “collateral damage” - a term frequently used by Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq War. Other terms used were “escalation dominance”, “preemptive strikes”, “subholocaust engagements”. Equally, the sexual imagery used in the descriptions of the effects of these weapons was striking and shocking, yet the men themselves seemed unaware of the implications of the language they used: deep penetration, holes, craters, the orgasmic effect of an explosion, a country “losing its virginity” when it developed the bomb.           As she listened and learned their language until she too felt herself to be an “insider”, she saw that the whole nuclear bomb project had become associated with the male power to give birth. Like Oppenheimer's original bomb, all future bombs were the nuclear scientists’ and atomic strategists’“babies”. The conclusion she drew was that language and imagery that domesticates and describes these weapons in human terms distances those speaking about them from emotional affect and makes it possible for them to ignore their horrific power to destroy human lives, shatter human bodies. As she writes, “The entire history of the bomb project seems permeated with imagery that confounds man's overwelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to create - imagery that inverts men's destruction and asserts in its place the power to create new life and a new world.” Even the first atomic bomb test was called Trinity — the unity of the triune male forces of Creation. And the progenitors of this atrocity were a new priesthood, a new Brotherhood of technological mastery. The language they used precluded the intrusion of values, of empathic concern, even of the word “peace”. Carol Cohn found herself indoctrinated into the language and way of thinking of this priesthood, becoming inured to the effects of the weapons they were discussing. Like them, she too became removed from reality, coming to think that only the pre-eminence of the weapons and the “strategy” mattered — intent like them on achieving the technological and political goal. And she ends her paper with the suggestion that the “dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality will need to be delegitimated before other voices can be heard” and another concept of rationality can be developed. There is no more devastating critique of the dangers of corporate thinking than her paper.

The Hubris Syndrome
          This phrase, borrowed from a book of that title published in England in 2007 by David Owen, a doctor, then politician, who became Foreign Secretary under a former Labour Government, is a character trait that is often found in leaders, particularly leaders involved in military ventures or who have sudden access to immense power. Most people are aware of the grandiosity of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Louis XIV and Napoleon as well as the example of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or the current regime in North Korea or Iran, but it may be more difficult to discern this trait in our own leaders or in bankers or directors of corporate bodies because we are not trained to recognise its symptoms.
          Apart from David Owen’s book, I don’t think there is as yet a clear definition of the pathology of leaders who display traits of grandiosity and psychic inflation — a hubris or god-almightiness — nor is there any general awareness of how easily leaders of nations can persuade individuals as well as whole peoples to perpetrate and accept as ‘normal’ and ‘patriotic’ acts of unimaginable barbarism. A given situation where a threat is perceived or imagined can activate those archaic reflexes. With so little awareness of their power, we have few defences against falling prey to them. Governments have become adept at manipulating public opinion to generate fear of a threat. People have absolutely no idea what the governments they have elected are planning until decisions are taken that make it impossible to retreat or change direction nor are our democratic institutions such as Parliament a protection against this risk. In the post Cold War world, the governments of powerful nations have sought to establish a position of greater power in relation to others, ostensibly in the interests of self-defence, but often simply for the extension of their power. The European Union and the attempt by a small un-elected political elite to establish a new centralized state controlling vast numbers of people, is a recent and worrying example of this tendency.
          The biggest danger in the sphere of both politics or religion comes from the mythic inflation of leaders—their unconscious identification with the archetypal role of the hero or saviour or, in the case of someone with a strong religious belief, the role of being the vehicle of God. Leaders may invoke the help of God or Allah in the moral task of getting rid of a perceived opponent whom they name as evil. They unconsciously fall into grandiosity and omnipotence and their speeches take on a demagogic, even a messianic tone. In the view of David Owen, both Tony Blair and George W. Bush began to show symptoms of hubris after 2001, as if they had been chosen to fulfil a certain divinely ordained historical role in the confrontation with evil. Blair disregarded the warnings of senior military and civil service advisors and began to exhibit symptoms of inflation—overconfidence, a tendency to simplify and a defensive, messianic tone. Owen writes, “Blair, with no Parliamentary scrutiny, was to change the whole basis of Cabinet government as it related to foreign and defence matters…This was not modernisation but hubristic vandalism, for which, as Prime Minister, Blair alone bears responsibility.” (23) In the United States, as recent books have shown, George W. Bush and his advisers enormously increased the power of office of President as Commander-in-Chief as well as the Executive branch of government, suspending many of the constitutional rights of the American people and reducing complex issues to the single phrase “Those who are not with us are against us”. Neither gave detailed consideration to the consequences of their decision to invade Iraq or, for that matter, Afghanistan. David Owen concludes his book with the words, “It may be that hubristic syndrome never has a medical cure or even a proven medical causation, but it is becoming ever clearer that, as much as or even more than conventional illness, it is a great menace to the quality of leadership and the proper government of our world.”(24)
          Wherever the words good and evil are mentioned in the context of preparations for war, we should be instantly alert for shadow projections, alert for the beginnings of a religious or political crusade and the call to eradicate evil. Tzvetan Todorov, in his book Hope and Memory, Reflections on the Twentieth Century, reminds us that “Projects aiming to eradicate evil so as to usher in a reign of universal good are best left alone.” (25)

The Shadow in Science
          The shadow in the sphere of science can be seen in a Promethean tendency to omnipotence and the belief that the aim of science has become not so much the understanding of how nature works but the “conquest of nature”. Science, in essence, is a methodology. But it can easily fall under the control of the power drive of the shadow and morph itself into an ideology. Like other political ideologies, it may demand a free hand to do whatever it wants in the name of scientific progress; nothing and no-one must be allowed to impede that progress. It may exclude many subjective aspects of human experience and human aspiration as irrelevant or illusory. It may proclaim with simplistic and dogmatic certainty that it is the sole purveyor of the truth. It may attack as heretical any hypothesis, therapeutic approach to healing or belief that it chooses to reject or disempower — such as the practise of homeopathy or acupuncture, thereby imposing a kind of rational “Final Solution” which eliminates whatever it designates as non-rational or inferior. However, it can also develop a code of ethics which sets parameters to these hubristic tendencies.
          The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project which developed the atom bomb, observed, “It is my judgment in these things that when you see something technically sweet you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only when you have had your technical success. That’s the way it was with the atomic bomb.”(26) And that is a perfect illustration of the unconscious power-seeking drive of the shadow speaking. When the scientist’s shadow drive for technical success is drawn into the wake of the power-seeking shadow of governments, events are set in motion which may culminate in catastrophe, as with the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the hydrogen bombs detonated over islands in the Pacific. Weapons have to be tried out to see if they work—just in case they will be needed.
          Harnessing science to serve a government’s agenda of self-defence is considered praiseworthy and legitimate. Many scientists work for governments. But science that is co-opted to serve the military aims of government can become demonic when it develops weapons that have become a danger to ourselves as well as capable of devastating vast areas of the planet. We need to challenge the meta-narrative of scientific progress and observe where it is in thrall to the power-driven shadow and where, in relation to what was explored in the last chapter, it acts against the sacredness and oneness of life.

Recognizing the Shadow
          In today's world, the shadow is becoming more easy to see, not only in the behaviour of our enemies but in our own. Things are being brought to light about the conduct of government that people had no idea of such as the dubious justification for the war with Iraq, lying and corruption in high places and the general tendency to obfuscation, manipulation and “spin” of government ministers and other corporate bodies. People can see that through the development and sale of weapons to unstable or even persecutory regimes, governments foster the conditions that invite and promote war. People can observe the increasing tendency to lie on the part of government ministers as well as business leaders. Financial scandals such as the Enron fiasco and the lack of responsibility of major banks in their corporate pursuit of wealth have been revealed. The sexual abuse of children by the Catholic clergy (the Murphy Report in Ireland 2009) as well as deeply held prejudices against women and homosexuals in Christianity and Islam are coming to light. The uncovering of the shadow aspect of religious, political and scientific agendas is highly encouraging if it can promote debate that can help to free us from bondage to unconscious habits of behaviour that lead to the persecution of others. But there is a massive amount still to do if we are to become more aware of how easily we can still be manipulated by the shadow behaviour of governments, religions and science. If we are to become capable of resisting the drive for omnipotence in any of these fields, we have to be aware of our own shadow and where it may lead us into compliance with or acceptance of shadow tendencies in all three domains. It is only this that can give us the power to deal with evil.

Malignant Aggression
          In his Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, the psychologist Eric Fromm uses the term malignant aggression or necrophilia (the fascination with death) to describe the tendency to sadism and cruelty in some deeply traumatised individuals. Fromm defines sadism as the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being, whether animal, child, man, or woman. To force someone to endure pain or humiliation without being able to defend himself is one of the manifestations of absolute control. The sadistic act, Fromm says, “is the transformation of impotence into omnipotence.”(27) I would add: the transformation of the impotence of the child into the omnipotence of the adult. The original situation where the child was forced through fear to obey a parent implicitly, to endure the pain and terror inflicted on him or her by an adult or to witness the torture or murder of a beloved parent or of other individual may be inflicted in reverse on a future victim. There are many examples of this in the cruelty, sexual abuse and even murder inflicted on small children by sadistic adults. Sadism is the ultimate expression of an imagination rendered malignant by trauma and bonded to a nervous system perpetually on high alert against attack.
          I would ask you to think of all the people on this planet who are engaged in inventing and creating weapons of torture and destruction, and in trying to control, humiliate, attack or destroy people, beliefs, or ideas perceived as threatening to themselves as well as in creating and marketing films and videos which display the most horrific sadistic acts, the torture, murder and terror of people who fall victim to the power of others. These constant images of violence have a brutalising and desensitising influence on the fragile psyche of children as well as on that of adults. By the time an American child is eighteen, it will have seen two hundred thousand acts of violence and forty thousand murders on television. There is no doubt that watching scenes of violence over many years conditions individuals and society as a whole to view violence as acceptable, even heroic. Constant exposure to scenes of violence or participating in violent computer games weakens the capacity for empathy so that when children encounter cruelty or bullying in their environment, they don’t respond empathically to the victim. The sadistic cruelty of children texting images of the violence they have inflicted on some unfortunate victim is the natural outcome of this conditioning. It is hardly surprising that we are faced with terrorists in the social and political sphere if this pattern is imprinted on our psyche.
          What does all this violence reveal about the childhoods of the people engaged in promoting these toxic images, the activation of primordial instincts and the buried pain and fear they are projecting into sadistic scenes reconstituted from their shadow? Quentin Tarantino, described as Hollywood’s Shakespeare of violence, has opened the gates to images of malignant aggression in the flood of torture and violence porn now incorporated into many videos and films. He and his cohorts, Robert Rodriguez and Eli Roth justify the creation and sale of these videos and films in the name of freedom of expression, no doubt also enjoying the accruing of vast wealth to themselves. “I want nudity,” proclaims Roth. “I want sex and violence mixed together. What's wrong with that? We're in a really violent wave, and I hope it never ends.” (28) But what these men are really doing is creating vicarious visual terrorism, presenting images which fuse extreme violence and sexual excitement and eroding social taboos which might inhibit attacks on women, children and defenceless victims. They are promoting the idea that revolting scenes of torture, savagery and murder can give rise to an orgiastic experience. They are really asking the people who push up the ratings of their films and video, including millions of children, to become complicit in acts of horrific violence, thereby reducing their ability to resist being drawn into sadistic acts when seeking peer approval (gangs) or obeying orders given them to people to whom they have granted authority, abnegating their own humanity in the process. It is hardly surprising that the murder of their classmates by psychopathic individuals drawn into the net of malignant aggression by the viewing of these scenes of violence is becoming a regular feature of life in America or that some two million young offenders are in prison..
          There is now a large body of evidence indicating that these films and videos have harmful effects on young people. “A heavy diet of media violence has a tendency to increase chronic levels of hostility and to lead people to interpret the world around them as a more hostile and dangerous place,” remarks Joanne Cantor of the University of Wisconson-Madison, an internationally recognised expert on children and the mass media. (29) If children have a deficient or toxic family life and are imprinted with images of violence, they will develop violent responses to life and other people, either in self-defense or in an unconscious impulse to avenge the atrocious suffering they themselves have experienced. In unconsciously avoiding becoming the prey of others, they may be drawn into situations where they enact the role of the predator towards someone else - perhaps a child - as victim. We should not forget the three experiments mentioned above which showed how quickly people can regress into both predator and victim. Recent cases of shocking cruelty meted out to children by other children, some as young as eight or nine, bear this out. During the trial of these children, the fact has repeatedly emerged that, in the toxic atmosphere of their homes, they were fed a diet of violent videos,

The Totalitarian Regime
          Political or religious regimes whose aim is to extend their totalitarian power draw individuals into positions where they are given carte blanche to be as sadistic as they like because they are the servants of a regime which eliminates anyone who challenges its legitimacy or anyone who is designated expendable for ideological or political reasons. The main characteristic of the individuals who assist such a regime to maintain its power is their incapacity to feel any empathy for their victim; on the contrary, to take pleasure in “final solutions” and the evidence of their victim's terror and pain. The archaic pattern of the predator takes control of the psyche. Men regress into boasting of their prowess in torture and murder, in their power of coercion. One current example of this is the persecutory regime in Iran which, by means of control by the Revolutionary Guards, is attempting to hold down the rebellion against its tyrannical power.
          Yet beneath the persona of the predator may be the deeply traumatized childhood victim of an earlier situation. Tyrannies are created by individuals who suddenly find themselves in possession of the power they never had as children, in a position to act out their need for revenge on groups or individuals named as enemies and to gather similarly traumatized individuals around them.
          Studies of the childhoods and rise to absolute power of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Ceaucescu and Milosevic (and his wife) support this conclusion. Alice Miller’s books, particularly Thou Shalt not be Aware, Society's Betrayal of the Child, have shown how brutal or tragic childhood experiences may create brutal adults, particularly in a state system that encourages cruelty and brutality as a method of establishing absolute power and control over its citizens. (30) In the psyche of the tyrant or the man or woman taken over by the shadow drive for power, there is no mediator between the conscious will and the unconscious instinctive drive harnessed to serving it. Power is experienced as essential to survival because the surrender of power means being vulnerable once again to pain and terror—the equivalent of death.
          But while the trigger may lie in the rousing words of a psychopathic individual, the causes of violence also lie in belief systems or ideologies which condone and justify violence in order to achieve absolute power presented to millions as necessary and desirable—even approved of by God.
          When enough people with similar shadow projections draw together under a charismatic leader or demagogue, there may be the beginning of a collective shadow situation which can erupt in some kind of conflict or aggressive act in the outer world. This can happen as much in our own “territory” as in that of others. Jung warned us about this:

This is what happened in Germany, in the Soviet Union, in China and Cambodia as well as, more recently, in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo and in Darfur and Zimbabwe. It is happening in the Islamist cohorts recruited by Osama bin Laden for Al Qaeda. Dictators and demagogues can always find supporters who will carry out their orders and will not shrink from brutality. In Africa, as in the genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Darfur, we can see how easily tribal animosities can be aroused by leaders and how the call to murder or rape is the unreflecting instinctive response of young males, still the slaves of their warrior imprinting and their unthinking obedience to leaders. One of the highest human achievements is our capacity to become aware of this shadow behaviour and gradually disentangle ourselves from its power to control us.

Redeeming the Shadow of the Solar Era
Sir Martin (now Lord) Rees, the Astronomer-Royal, says in a book called Our Final Century, published in 2003, that we have a 50-50 chance of surviving this current century. “Our choices and actions could ensure the perpetual future of life (not just on Earth, but perhaps far beyond it, too). Or in contrast, through malign intent, or through misadventure, twenty-first century technology could jeopardise life's potential, foreclosing its human and posthuman future. What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.” (32) The principle dangers he cites are terrorism, the impact of climate change, the mis-use of nano-technology, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as those presented by Nature — the catastrophic devastation caused by asteroid impact and the eruption of calderas.
Many of these threats arise from our survival instincts as well as our addiction to patterns of violence and persecution. This new century asks us to take on the mammoth task of becoming capable of recognizing the habits of behaviour that have been justified for millennia as necessary and right from the perspective of achieving national, territorial or religious aims. We have the innate intelligence and capacity to change but at the end of one of his most prescient books, The Undiscovered Self, Jung warned us that we do not have much time in which to accomplish this momentous transformation of consciousness:

A mood of world destruction and world renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially and philosophically... Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. As at the beginning of the Christian Era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the moral backwardness of our species which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social developments. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man. Is he capable of resisting the temptation to use his power for the purpose of staging a world conflagration? Is he conscious of the path he is treading and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present world situation and his own psychic situation? Does he know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man which Christianity has treasured up for him? Does he realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him? Is he even capable at all of realizing that this would be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that he is the make-weight that tips the scales? (33)

The paramount moral challenge of the nineteenth century was slavery. (34) In the twentieth century, it was totalitarianism and the holocausts of people sacrificed by dictators. In this century, it is the helpless suffering of people all over the world — the 17,000 children who die every day of hunger and disease, the continued oppression of women, the rapes, trafficking and domestic violence against women. It is also the need to eliminate our demonic weapons as well as the suffering inflicted on helpless civilians by our intolerable aggression in acts of war.
Jung’s insight into the nature of the shadow is one of his supreme gifts to our culture. But, as he wryly commented, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Making the darkness conscious involves the sacrifice of the mind-set that would continue in the same tracks as before, ignoring the evil that our unconsciousness brings into being. Our survival as a species may depend on our ability to accomplish this Herculean task.

Notes:

1. C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Aldus Books, London, 1964
2. Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory, Reflections on the Twentieth Century, Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 71
3. Primo Levi, The Damned and the Saved
4. Frederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 146.
5. Jung, The Undiscovered Self CW 10. par. 572, p. 296
6. Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, Allen Lane, 2006.
7. Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell, Dispatches from Chechnya, University of Chicago Press, 2003
8. Edward Tick, War and the Soul, Healing Our Nation's Veterans from Post-Traumatic Disorder, p. 138, Quest Books, Wheaton, Ill., 2005
9. ibid, p. 1
10. ibid, p. 2
11. ibid, p. 16
12. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1986, p. 91
13. ibid, p. 30
14. C. G. Jung, Collected Works 18, par. 1400
15. Mark Gerzon, Leading Through Conflict, p. 23
16. G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, New York: Signet, 1961, 255-6
17. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy, p. 30
18. C.G. Jung, CW 10, The Undiscovered Self, par. 572
19. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Penguin Books, London, 2007
20. John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, House of Anansi Press, Canada, 1995 and Penguin Books, London, 1998
21. Carol Cohn, Sex and death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, University of Chicago Press, 1987
22. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2009
23. David Owen, The Hubris Syndrome, p. 31, Methuen Publiishing Ltd., London, 2007
24. ibid, p. 134
25. Todorov, p. 71
26. ibid, p. 234, quoted from J. Glover, Humanity, Jonathan Cape, London, 1999
27. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, p.
28. quoted in an article on ultraviolent sadism by Christopher Goodwin, Are You Sitting Comfortably?, Sunday Times Magazine, 2009
29. ibid
30. Alice Miller, Thou Shalt not be Aware, Society's Betrayal of the Child, Pluto Press, London, 1985
31. C. G. Jung, CW 18, The Symbolic Life, par. 1374
32. Sir Martin Rees, Our Final Century, William Heinemann, London, 2003
33.C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1958, p. 110-112
34. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains, Macmillan, London, 2009