https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rXk4Ku1XKV4
Jung had this idea that people’s shadows reach all the way down to hell, which is actually a very frightening concept. And what he meant by that is that if you take a look at the impulses that drive you that are actually malevolent, if you can admit to such impulses that if you basically follow those all the way down to their origin, you find some very nasty things. And what you find down there basically is what allies you with people who’ve done terrible things. And that’s not a very pleasant experience, I would say, although one thing that’s worth thinking about is that it is something that can protect you against being very, very badly hurt. Because one of the things that characterizes people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder is that they’re often naive. And then they encounter something that’s really not within their framework of thinking, and it’s usually something bad. And because there isn’t anything in their philosophy, their way of looking at the world that has prepared them for that, they end up fragmented and devastated. And so it’s actually protective to you if you can figure out what your full range of capabilities is, because that can help you understand other people a lot better and to be wiser and more careful in your actions. It’s also useful, I think, if you want to convince yourself to act properly, because if you regard yourself as harmless, which is a big mistake, then nothing you can do is really that bad, right? Because you’re harmless after all. But if you understand that you’re seriously not harmless, then that can make you a lot more careful with yourself. And I would say that that’s especially true maybe when you’re dealing, when you have kids and you start dealing with your kids. Because if you know what you’re capable of because you’re human, then that can motivate you to be much more careful with what you say and do. And I don’t mean cautious. I don’t mean timid. I don’t mean any of that. I just mean that you want to keep things pristine between you and your children, let’s say, because that way they’re on your good side. And you want them on your good side, because children who get on their parents’ bad side suffer very badly for it. And sometimes it’s because they’re literally abused. But more often it’s because they get, well, they get abused, let’s say, or neglected in much more subtle ways. And you’re definitely capable of that. I mean, all you have to do is think about the way that you’ve interacted with someone that you’ve decided to not like, or maybe someone you genuinely don’t like, you know. And that can range from just not paying any attention to them, especially if they’re doing something good, to really pursuing them and making their life miserable. You can certainly do that with your family members, and you can do that with your intimate partners, and you can do that with your friends, and you can do it with yourself. And so it’s really worth knowing that. So, well, the fox thinks he’s a royal rule breaker, but he’s really just a two-bit thug, and this is where he learns that. So, sorry, I have a new phone, and I’m kind of stupid with it still. So… Well, hypothetically that’ll work, but it probably won’t. Anyways, the coachman’s got these guys in his grasp now, regardless, and partly because they’re already down this road, and they can’t back off, and partly because he also offers them more money than they’ve seen before, and so, as bad as they are, they’re going to get worse. Many of you, I presume, have seen Breaking Bad, and that’s a really good example of the incorporation, at least in part, or maybe the possession by the shadow from the Jungian perspective, right? Because you have this ordinary high school teacher who really thinks that he’s an axe, and his family as well. You know, like your typical persona, roughly speaking. He’s just a normal guy. But part of the reason that he’s a normal guy is because he actually hasn’t been put in abnormal circumstances, and then all of a sudden he is, and he has a genuine moral conundrum, right? He’s going to die of lung cancer, and he has a son who’s got a lot of health problems, and he’s terrified that he’s going to leave his wife and his child behind with nothing. And then, of course, as the story, and so he decides to do something that, temporarily, that he regards as, what he would normally regard as reprehensible, and of course he just gets tangled up in that. But then, as the story unfolds, you see that it’s more complicated, because it’s not that he was just an innocent good guy, and he decided to turn bad, he’s also very resentful and angry. And it’s partly because he’s a bit of a pushover at the beginning, or maybe more than a bit of a pushover, and also that he didn’t really fulfill his own potential, and that, you know, he had friends who walked down the entrepreneurial path, and maybe they weren’t quite fair to him, but whatever, he ends up not very successful as a high school teacher, and so he’s really angry about that. And so, there’s more motivation for him opening up the door to the terrible elements of his personality than just the fact that he’s got good motivations to do so, and that unfolds, you know, and so you see the warps and twists in his resentful character increasingly manifest themselves as he walks down this road to really total brutality. And it’s quite good. There’s a book called Ordinary Men that’s a lot like that. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that to you before, but Ordinary Men is a book about, it’s the best book of its type, maybe it’s the only book of its type. It’s possible. But it’s plotted much like Breaking Bad in some sense. It’s a story about these German policemen in early stages of World War II, and they were guys who were old enough to be raised in Germany really before the Hitlerian propaganda came out in full force. You know, if you were a teenager, say, in the 1930s, you were going to be pulled right into the propaganda machine, and maybe you were part of the Hitler youth, and like you were raised in that, you know. But if you were older, then you were raised before that, and you’re not as amenable to propaganda once you’re older than about, well, I would say about 22 or something like that. It’s pretty young, actually. If you’re going to make a soldier, you have to get a soldier young, because once people are in their early 20s, say, they’re kind of, they already have their personality developed. Anyways, these policemen were sent into Poland after the Germans marched through, and you know, it was wartime, and there was this hypothesis in Germany that the Jews in particular were operating as a fifth column and undermining the German war effort, because of course, the Germans blamed the Jews and a variety of other people for actually setting up the conditions that made the war necessary. And so when the police were sent into Poland, they were also required to make peace, roughly speaking, and so they started out by rounding up all the Jewish men between 18 and 65, and gathering them in stadiums, and then shipping them off on the trains, but that isn’t where they ended. They ended in a very, very dark place. I mean, these guys were going out in the field with naked pregnant women and shooting them in the back of the head by the end of their training, and what’s really interesting about that is that their commander told them that they could go home at any time. So this is not one of those examples of people following orders, and the reason they didn’t, roughly speaking, there’s many reasons, but one of the reasons they didn’t is because they didn’t think it was comradely, so to speak, to leave the guys they were working with to do all the dirty work and run off. And that’s really an interesting fact, because in different circumstances you wouldn’t think about that as reprehensible, you’d think, well, that’s part of teamwork under rough circumstances, and that’s at least in part how they viewed it. And they were also made physically ill multiple times, physically and psychologically ill by the things that they had to do, but they kept doing them anyways. So it’s one step at a time, and that’s the thing, is that you end up in very bad places one step at a time, so you’ve got to watch those steps.