Confronting the Shadow III: Does Evil Exist?
And if so, how do we recognise it?
In the last article on the series, Why the West doesn’t want to meet its shadow self, I brought up the sticky conundrum of how we evaluate what, or who, is “good” and “bad”.
I felt it was important to locate the cultural context of the topic, developing what I mean by “the shadow” and how I, living between Europe and the UK, locate myself within it.
As a person of Irish Catholic origin, how do I understand good and evil?
What, from the perspective of my non-religious, but culturally Catholic family, is considered morally right?
How has this also been affected by growing up in a secular society which perceives consumerism and capitalism as the only viable, liveable solution?
This has stumped me for years.
Around ten years ago I was intoxicated on a night out and I asked a homeless man his story. It was brutal, and beyond the comprehension of what I could understand as right, or even having a place in the landscape of my reality. His story belonged in true crime books and newspapers. Societal mores would have me consign him to an immoral cohort of society. If I had read his story in the newspaper, it would have been easy to say: This man is evil. But he was very real, and terribly vulnerable, standing in front of me that night. He felt deep remorse for his actions. In his face was a world of pain.
I hugged him but didn’t know what to say. I had not fully confronted my own darkness, so felt that I couldn’t understand him. I went home and phoned all the people I knew who were likely to pick up my call at 4am to talk about evil. I had no way of approaching it. Only this shadow voice saying to me: “push away”; “wrong”; “don’t confront”.
What is “evil” anyway? Does it exist?
John A. Sanford, an American Jungian analyst, talks about the danger of denying that evil exists, and at the same time, presuming that all murderers are made by unfortunate childhoods and parental abuse. He references, “an archetypal agency of evil”, citing examples such as the Holocaust, and Stalin’s Pogroms. Today, we could also cite examples such as the genocide in Palestine, and the destruction of indigenous life in the Amazon rainforest by mining companies, amongst many other examples.
Sanford’s argument that evil is an “archetype” locates it as a known force created by the collective. The world has witnessed genocides and unjust wars throughout history, and although some prefer to remain in denial about it, “evil” is an accurate adjective for these events. It is difficult to comprehend how mass evil arises in a populace, and how people perform unmentionable acts whilst deluding themselves that the cause justifies them. It is simplistic to think that the people of Nazi Germany were fully conscious of the actions they undertook at the time. This is not to diminish the severity of the horrific actions carried out, nor neutralise the quality of evil that imbued them, but to avoid the trap of pinpointing an individual, or a particular type of person to blame.
The shorthand of evil is symbolised in figures such as Hitler, and Stalin. They are the Voldemorts and the Darth Vaders, the “look what you made me do” figures. The hard truth is that these were two, skin and bone men. Truthfully, they couldn’t have created all that evil alone. In fact, it takes a nation of people; and often a broken-down, ineffective system of loose values to permit evil to flourish.
Hannah Arendt said,
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1978), "Thinking"
Indeed, Arendt wrote a whole book on “the banality of evil”. The premise being that evil flourishes through a societal inertia, an inability to take a stand, or to listen to the internal voice that says what you are participating in is unjust, or to question whether some arbitrary moral crusade justifies a genocide.
If you’re still with me, we can agree then that evil does exist, but it exists as an archetypal collective, rather than in the hands of a lone individual. We could agree that it is fuelled by a collective inertia, rather than by a collective force; one that does not have the unity, or strength to quash the frenetic hatred driven forward by a small group of zealots.
Ten years after my personal anecdote, and my subsequent forays into the problem of evil, I am still perplexed by the issue. Recent investigations led me to stumble on this quote by Jung:
“The sad truth is that man’s* (sic) real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites–day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain.”
Though not religious, as any other non-practising, culturally Catholic person will tell you, the concepts of hell, guilt, and punishment are inherited through the family lineage. Whilst hell might not hang over one’s head as a valid punishment, this sense of being sent to “the bad place” remains as a tangible threat. Guilt and shame adorn your being like unchallenged, dusty heirlooms.
Therefore, I find Jung’s proposition of how we can understand evil rather compelling. It is a call to accept the reality of its being, rather than suppress, or deny its existence. We can observe its presence in ourselves even, without freaking out. If we are also to understand evil as a banal idea, and one that takes hold within apathetic thinking, or an avoidance of problems; then it extinguishes the allure of the devil.
Put another way, it challenges the idea that evil arises when we follow our “shameful” desires, or morally-unapproved passions. Therefore, as night exists because day exists, evil exists when there is good. We accept it, and don’t deny its existence, or ascribe it to be an arbitrary quirk rearing its ugly head in the figure of a fascist general.
When do we first become aware of evil?
Connie Zweig, in the introduction to her book, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, proffers:
“Children typically are introduced to shadow issues by listening to fairy tales that portray the war between good and evil forces, fairy godmothers and horrific demons. They too, vicariously suffer the trials of their heroes and heroines, thereby learning the universal patterns of human fate.”
I have been meditating on contemporary popular myths in “The West”, counting amongst them, The Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. The contemporary myth, or fable, is consumed nowadays as a high-grossing movie, or best-selling book. Within them we witness exaggerated forms of “good versus evil”. It appears that what is recognisable is portrayed as “good”, and that which is wildly different and monstrous, is “bad”. Luke Skywalker is a bit strange, but he presents as the Euro-centric ideal: a handsome, blonde lad. Darth Vader is a very freaky-looking individual, who communicates his terror between deadly, spine-curdling breaths.
Admittedly, this narrative has changed in recent years, with the zeitgeist tendency to tell the baddies’ backstory. The modern psychotherapy-literate audience now understands “why” they turned out bad. JK Rowling does so in the Harry Potter series by providing us with the origin story of Voldemort. Tom Riddle is a young, neglected “half-blood” wizard who becomes evil to seek revenge, also gaining protection and power by aligning himself with “pure blood” wizards. His story is mirrored by Harry Potter's; also orphaned, and neglected, yet emboldened by the posthumous love of his parents, knowing that they sacrificed their lives to save his.
Harry overrides his misfortune and becomes the hero, and in doing so the nemesis of Voldemort, AKA, Tom Riddle. Harry is the archetypal goodie: brave, noble, and stubbornly principled. We have all that seems bright and hopeful in Harry, as opposed to the darkness, evil and physical ghastliness of Voldemort. The assumption in the Harry Potter series, as it seems to be in so many of these franchises, is that evil will be extinguished with the destruction of its sole perpetrator—in this case, Voldemort.
The series begins with the perfect revenge motif.
We are under the impression, with Harry and the rest of the wizarding world, that Voldemort has already been destroyed. It becomes apparent that Voldemort has not been killed, only swept into the shadows. These shadows become a breeding ground for Voldemort’s resentment and hatred; his dark purpose escalating to a level of vengeance more terrible than ever.
This is the perfect analogy for the psychoanalytic shadow self, of which I speak more about in my first essay on Confronting the Shadow Self.
Voldemort is the ghastly, snakelike apparition of past wounds opened again despite attempts to conceal them. The finale of the Harry Potter series begs the question, has evil truly been vanquished, or will it return? Furthermore, in a strange twist of art imitating life, the writer, JK Rowling is now seen as a he-who-not-must-be-named figure by the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. Those who found solace in the hero Rowling created—a “half-blood” orphan shunned by the mainstream, or “purebloods”—have felt betrayed by articles and statements the writer has published comparing trans people to rapists and perverts.
I am perplexed by the fact that Rowling, now a supposed spokesperson for feminists, continues publishing books under a male pen name. It transcends logic that presenting as a different gender through writing is not problematic for her, but she deems it to be so for those who present so in daily life.
But also, I think it is a fascinating example of shadow; how the polarities and evil we are so keen to point out in others, or in fantasy fiction, come back to haunt us. Unfortunately condemning people that we don’t understand, or vanquishing the Voldemorts, do not rid us of the shadows that relentlessly pursue us.
The Collective Shadow
It is fascinating when these shadows are experienced collectively, often unconsciously. Jung referred to this as the “collective unconscious”. The beauty of existence is knowing that we are all wired differently, expressing ourselves and perceiving the world in varying ways, yet we share many common physical necessities. What about psychic necessities? Are we so very different? Do we not all dream, cry, laugh, and desire?
Jung expounded on the collective unconscious as being a shared way of understanding the great themes in life, that went beyond and beneath the surface of everyday customs and cultural differences. Writing at a time where Europe, and indeed the world, was overcome by war and divisions, it was a revelatory and transgressive theory. He wrote:
“And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.”
Jung, "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (November 1929)
Through his extensive research into mythology across the globe, Jung brought our attention to communally shared stories and themes that continuously arose in myth across the cultures, and how these appeared to be embedded collectively with the human psyche:
“The unconscious processes of the most widely separated peoples and races show a quite remarkable correspondence, which displays itself, amongst other things, in the extraordinary but well-authenticated analogies between the forms and motifs of autochthonous myths.”
Jung spoke about “archetypes” which persisted in folktales around the world. These archetypes could appear as The Wise Old Man, The Great Mother, The Tree of Life, amongst many others. If one thinks carefully about the stories heard in one’s childhood, or even the types of books, films, and TV series one is drawn to, personally and as a collective, we realise that without actively seeking it out, certain ideas and motifs repeat.
On the flipside of research into Jungian symbolism and archetypes, it is important to note the tendency to obsess about symbols and repetitive images. On the other hand, pushing ideas and symbology back into shadowland has its dangers. If we’ve survived this far as a species passing down stories and anecdotes, it is judicious to query why that might be. These stories have served as an archive to understanding history, a method to investigate why people and things exist, or to understand the ways of people, and even as precautionary tales warning against danger.
In non-fiction bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass, an ecological treatise condemning overproduction and a clarion call to preserve nature, Native American and ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer utilises indigenous mythology to illustrate the message. She talks about the Native American monster, the “Wendigo” (or “Windigo”), a terrifying cannibal monster that is heard howling on cold, winter nights, relentlessly hungry and in pursuit of humans to eat. It was said that greedy humans could turn into a Wendigo. It has been speculated that it was created by the North American Algonquian-speaking tribes to prevent people from becoming greedy and taking too much during the winter when food was scarce.
Kimmerer said:
“The old teachings recognised that Windigo nature is in each of us, so the monster was created in stories, that we might learn why we might recoil from the greedy part of ourselves. This is why Anishinaabe elders like Stewart King remind us to always acknowledge the two faces–the light and the dark side of life–in order to understand ourselves. See the dark, recognise its power, but do not feed it.”
Like the tale of Voldemort, and the ring of Sauron, the tale warns against the corrupting forces of greed, yet within the tale is our complicity with the monster. We can hear its howl and smell its rotting flesh smell from a mile off. Like us, it may be starving, but we confront the monster, and decide not to become it. The objective then is not to vanquish the monster, but to recognise where it resides within us.
It strikes me as counterintuitive to dismiss myth, fantasy and story as belonging to a surreal, namby-pamby hinterland that only artists and writers are permitted to indulge in. Why watch a fantasy series on Netflix and turn it off to think that the only reality is the bed that will hold your body that evening, work tomorrow, and porridge for breakfast? The likelihood is that the series you have just watched tells a tale as old as time, passed down orally before the writing of words became a tool available to more than a chosen few.
Whilst meditating on and researching these topics, I am keen to remain wired into the present, and the contemporary public imagination. Yet myths, stories, fables, and ghostly tales are, in my opinion, a gage to understanding the temperature of the time, looking at how monsters and evil are manifested in the public psyche.
What could be today’s version of the Wendigo?
More of this in my next piece…
P.s. To fuel this, buy me a coffee?