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Health & Fitness

The Dark Side

We have met the enemy, and he is us

Repercussions from the murders in Norway committed by Anders Behring Breivik on July 21 continue to reverberate in the news and throughout the internet. I know very little of Breivik, beyond the few accounts I’ve read about him; apparently he is a right-wing extremist who dislikes Muslims and liberals, among other groups; wants the government of Norway to resign; and believes that the purity of the white race in Europe is being sullied by brown-skinned immigrants. He even had plastic surgery to make himself more Aryan looking. Reportedly, he feels little remorse over what he has done, saying, essentially, that it was unfortunate but necessary.

No sane person could commit the crimes that Breivik has, but I’ll leave his diagnosis to those who actually speak to him and have access to more facts about him than I ever will. What I find fascinating is that he represents the ultimate extreme of the all-too-human tendency to dehumanize and demonize “the other” – that is, anyone or anything you disagree with, don’t understand, or find threatening. Indeed, it’s a sad irony that many people immediately assumed that the slaughter was the work of Muslim terrorists until Breivik’s role in it became clear.

“Everywhere in the West,” wrote the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, “there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.” Jung was writing in 1957, so he had witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust, followed by the stranglehold of Communism across much of Eastern Europe, forming the infamous Iron Curtain that divided the continent for decades. He felt that man’s readiness to believe the worst about other people stemmed from an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge the dark side that resides in all of us. Instead, we project these unwanted traits onto others, whose exotic looks or unusual customs make them convenient targets of suspicion.

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Jung also believed that most of these ideas lurk well outside our conscious awareness. Thus, the person who says, “I’m not a racist” or “Some of my best friends are gay” may consciously think that they harbor no prejudice. But their failure to recognize the extent to which subconscious factors drive their behavior can leave them at the mercy of those very forces.

Admittedly, I am vastly oversimplifying Jung’s ideas. He also wrote that the state robbed people of their ability to think for themselves, setting the stage for tyranny and mass hysteria. He saw science, with its emphasis on logic and providing for an “average” person who existed only in statisticians’ calculations, as a significant culprit in this development. The antidote lay in religion, for only through a relationship with a power higher than himself could man maintain his integrity. “The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world,” he wrote in his book, The Undiscovered Self.

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Jung was working at a time when the horrors of Nazism and Communism were still fresh in the collective eye of the world, and many of these statements should be viewed from that perspective. I believe his basic message remains valid: we ignore our darker nature at our peril. Only by exploring the deeper portions of our psyche, and increasing our awareness of what’s buried in those subconscious vaults, can we hope to understand, and control, their influence on our actions. 

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