Self vs. Self

Rethinking the Impossible War

#1: Drawn to the Flame of Self-Knowledge

In Lunatics vs. Lunatics, I reflected on Carl Jung’s description of world wars as symptoms of shadow projection. We turn to war, says Jung, to “discover what beasts we are”. Terrified to make this discovery through psychoanalysis, we subconsciously embrace globe-spanning tribalist conflict as our path to self-knowledge. With or without violence, we move toward this horizon like a moth drawn to a flame.

Consciously or subconsciously, we carry the memory of the ancestral promise that the knowledge of self opens a portal to the knowledge of the universe and all its gods. Unable to imagine a higher calling, we orient our Hero’s Journey, accordingly, to this pre-determined end. Entranced by a destination we can’t even define, we assert our control over the choice of means: violent vs. non-violent.

But, even when we resort to violence — whether physical, economic or psychological — we still refuse to know ourselves, even by our own deeds. Like schoolyard bullies, we glide effortlessly from deed to denial. Even as this pattern becomes self-evident, we remain rutted in self-defeating cycles of violence and denial.

In the past, we hoped to be forgiven for such blindness by messiahs who atoned for our sins. They knew that we know not what we do, and they spared us the sublime pain of awakening to this reality.

#2: Seeing Through Subversions

Today, we no longer seek forgiveness. Instead, we anoint false messiahs who celebrate and exploit our blindness. Instead of forgiveness, we seek justification, which we receive in exchange for enabling pathocracy. Once it gains enough power with our help, pathocracy removes the mask of messianic hope and embraces open tyranny.

Here, some percentage of readers will nod in agreement and point to the pathocracy inaugurated in November 2016. Its enablers, however, may agree with equal enthusiasm and point to other legitimations of falsehood, excluding the one they choose to deny. This clash of shadow projections supports the subconscious agendas of both sides.

The lionization of iconic false messiahs helps us ignore the banality of falsehood in the culture we co-create and consecrate. So we circle the drain that pulls us into a future we shudder to imagine. We shudder because, deep down, we know that we are living not only through a subversion of our Hero’s Journey, but also an inversion.

Unable to integrate our shadow, we turn the dial of our orienting myths by a 180 degrees. Not only do we deplete the energy for our Hero’s Journey, we also invest our energy in the Tyrant’s quest for power. Whether or not we consciously consented to this sabotage, we are stuck in this downward spiral.

This sabotage works not only because we project our shadow, but also because we disown our light. Just as we associate our falsehoods with the designated “others”, we invest our yearning for enlightenment in messiahs, gurus, leaders, experts, religions, ideologies and abstractions. We deny our complicity in the ruin of our world, and we outsource the labor of our redemption.

We can’t overcome this subversion unless we learn to look behind the masks of malevolence, not only in others but also in ourselves.

#3: Normalizing the Radical Frontier

Shadow and light represent only one of countless dualities Jung invites us to transcend. He proposes something far more radical than to pair the knowledge of our inner monster with the knowledge of our inner messiah. Like a cartographer trudging through a terra incognita, he charts a course to healing from all duality. Rather than treat the symptoms of a corrupted source code permeating a pathogenic culture, Jung stands on the shoulders of giants who dared to imagine crossing the parted sea so as to reach the Promised Land of radical wholeness.

This lineage of radical thinkers doesn’t often appear on lists of trending topics in “social media”. But I don’t think we marginalize these thinkers because their radical message clashes with the more temperate sensibilities of our culture. In fact, individually and collectively, we are living through an rapidly accelerating increase in our comfort with the radical frontier.

What’s more radical than the pandemic of alienation deadening the relational neural networks of human communities? What’s more radical than an atomized society bereft of trust? How about a culture that destroys meaning?

We are hopeless in the impossible battle of Self vs. Self if we continue to invest our hope in the transformative potential of tepid ideas. Once pathocracy gains power, we can only be realistic if we demand the impossible.

With our radical imagination co-opted, we achieve the impossible not by liberating ourselves but by learning to love the intolerable: the zombification of our world. In fact, we will gladly “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend and oppose any foe” to turn away from the horizon of self-knowledge. With all due respect to the intuitions of our ancestors, we run the other way.

It’s not that we lack courage or information, but pathocracy commandeers all our strengths and resources and presses them into the service of the unholy.

#4: Minding Our Metaphors

Solzhenitsyn wrote about the line bisecting every human heart, separating good from evil. But well-crafted metaphors, including this one, only move us closer to truth by unmooring themselves from any empirical coordinate system. Metaphors may pack a rhetorical punch, and they may produce moments of aesthetic arrest, but in the final analysis, we turn our attention back to the horizon we refuse to approach.

Most of us simply run the other way. Some of us start mixing metaphors and abstractions (e.g., taking the red pill, entering the cave, healing the soul, embracing Jesus, improving mental health or cleansing our chakras). Whether we run from the horizon or bloviate about the meanings of metaphors, we remain a self divided against itself. In this confrontation, no one wins, and no metaphor can soothe the pain of self-alienation.

Still, Solzhenitsyn’s statement about the ineffable schism of the psyche evokes an essential truth: the more energy we invest in moving toward the horizon of self-knowledge, the faster we heal the line splitting every human heart.

This is the moment the moth reaches the flame. Metaphorically, the moth transcends itself. Physically, the moth dies. Something amazing happens when the metaphor fulfills itself before physical death. (I’ll discuss that sequence of events in another essay.)