Cassandra Voices

Tag: Carl Jung

  • Sport in the Neoliberal Zeitgeist

    Despite all the controversies in the run-up, and as with the last World Cup in Russia, most people are now looking beyond the politics, and enjoying the feast of football.

    For many of those attending sporting fixtures, this is akin to performing a religious duty in a secular age. The rest of us generally slouch in front of TV sets and even squint into smartphones to satisfy compulsive appetites. In Ireland we have a particular grá for team sports as participants but mostly viewers, or even as virtual participants, with the advent of video games.

    The rewards for sportsmen, in particular, are staggering, but many are left on the scrap heap at an early age, while others count the cost in later life with psychological and physical trauma.

    In History

    The popularity of sports entertainment stretches far back into European history. The gathering of crowds for sporting occasions was a feature of Classical antiquity, when these spectacles were explicitly connected to religious worship. Held in honour of Zeus, the king of the gods, the Panhellenic Olympics of Ancient Greece ran from 776BC until 393AD, and attracted participants from across the Hellenic world.

    Later, Romans were fanatically devoted to circus, which featured gladiatorial duals to the death. A note of caution was sounded, however, by the poet Juvenela c. AD100, who witheringly identified panem et circus (bread and circus) as the primary concern of the people:

    iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses.

    [… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.]

    Sport remained an important feature of life in medieval Europe, where knights tested their valour and prowess in vainglorious jousts. Hunting was also popular among the aristocracy at the apex of the feudal pyramid. Pursuit of animals, referred to as ‘game’, was generally not motivated by their value as food: consumption conferred status beyond gastronomic pleasure.

    Pre-modern sports bore a close resemblance to warfare, and, the conditioning of a participant overlapped to a large extent with a warrior’s training, as one sees in ancient epic, such as with the funeral games of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad. Tests of physical prowess, advantageous on the battlefield are evident, as well as skills such as archery and javelin, which are clearly a preparation for warfare itself.

    The Funerals of Patrocle, oil on canvas. Jacques-Louis David, 1778.

    Fight or Flight?

    At a sporting event, an audience could experience the thrill of battle without risking dismemberment, although the qualities esteemed in the heroic athlete may have whetted a thirst for blood.

    This may lead to an assumption that sport fosters a destructive, competitive instinct. George Orwell was of the view that: ‘sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will’. But denial of the amusement seems curmudgeonly. Sport can bring us together rather than tear us apart. Perhaps it depends on the underlying psychology of the crowd.

    The nineteenth century incubated most of the sports that are now prevalent in our culture, including the GAA. It was in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began in earnest, however, that mass attendance of sporting events by a new working class originates, as stadiums accommodating tens of thousands of people sprang up in a newly urbanised society. Here we find the codification of now global sports such as Association Football, Cricket, Rugby (Union and League), tennis and field hockey all of which now have a global reach. Others, such as golf and motor racing emerging in more rarefied environments.

    Interesting, it is in the anglo-sphere that alternative sports emerged to confront the British invasion; in the United States, basketball, American Football and baseball; in Ireland the GAA developed our distinctive sports; even Australia and Canada developed or adapted their own codes. This demonstrates the importance of sport as a source of identity in the English-speaking world where other cultural markers such as food seem to have been of less importance.

    The popular sports in our time depart from Classical and medieval precedent – notwithstanding the revival of the Olympics in 1896 – in the skills demanded of the participants. Although most contemporary sports still demand serious athleticism, their skills sets would be of no particular use to a soldier, especially one engaged in modern, technological warfare; although the skills of the gamer might prove very useful indeed.

    Nonetheless, modern sports are still animated by martial fervour, accessing, and perhaps controlling, that primal instinct to compete and, for men especially, to discuss the competition. Orwell opines that: ‘At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare’, but at that time most men, unlike today, had trained to be soldiers.

    Harry Hampton scores one of his two goals in the 1905 FA Cup Final, when Aston Villa defeated Newcastle United.

    Judgment

    The demonic ‘Judge’ Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s no-holds-barred novel Blood Meridan (1985) describes war as ‘the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence’.

    He argues that:

    Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

    The ‘Judge’ is right insofar as the higher the stakes the more gripping a sporting fixture becomes for an audience that puts aside its daily trials to vent their passions.

    The worth of the participant is defined by their success or failure at crucial moments. But ‘the Judge’ is mistaken to assume that defeat is always a humiliation, as any crowd may honour a team or individual who loses with good grace, and sport is not only about winning; ‘greatness’ is also measured by how a loser conducts himself in defeat. Thus Harry Kane is above criticism despite missing a (second) penalty, while the Argentinian team are roundly condemned for rubbing defeat in their opponents’ faces.

    Instinctive Selves

    It is striking that Swiss psychologist Carl Jung regarded games as being of the utmost importance for the wellbeing of societies. He said that ‘civilisations at their most complete moments … always brought out in man his instinct to play and made it more inventive’. Sport, he proffered, connects us to our ‘instinctive selves’.

    Sporting success can really raise the morale of a nation, such as the Irish after World Cup Italia 1990. The connection to a team or individual should not be dismissed lightly. Even in defeat, fans can summon a spirit of togetherness that is not necessarily oppositional.

    The popularity of sports may be connected to the decline of religious worship, but the religious origins of sport have not faded entirely – fans often pay homage to virtues of self-sacrifice and togetherness associated with spiritual traditions.

    Moreover, with lives increasingly sedentary and indoor, sport returns us to the idea of a challenge that melds innate athleticism and skill. This is both a natural gift, and the product of training.

    The audience also enjoys the mental side of the game, considering how a team or individual will triumph or fail in advance of a contest, and assessing why a particular outcome has occurred in the aftermath. It can be the springboard for discussion between complete strangers, generally leading to camaraderie rather than conflict.

    Sport has also become one of the last redoubts for mythology at a time when this generally operates on the margins, or in childhood fantasies. Commentators are given licence to rhapsodise about the divine characteristics of participants. We bow before sporting gods, satisfying a latent desire for non-rational explanations, and a taste for supernatural interference, deus ex machina: ‘the hand of God.’

    Sports journalism, unencumbered by constraints imposed on ‘serious’ journalists, vents superstitions and often casually averts to curses; ‘legends’ abound in sporting parlance.

    Titanic Battles

    All this serves to enhance the appeal of ‘titanic’ battles, but sadly we are, increasingly, lured by the theatre away from examination of the vexed political questions of our time.

    The assessment of Bill Shankly the former manager of Liverpool FC is worth revisiting: ‘some people say that football is a matter of life and death. I assure you it’s much more serious than that’.

    It was therefore fitting then that when Jose Mourinho arrived in British football as manager of Chelsea FC in 2004 he chose to present himself as the ‘Special One’. For a time he carried all before him, with a little help from Russian billionaire Roman Abromovich.

    Sporting occasions also offer a Dionysian alternative to lives that are increasingly constrained by social conventions. In what other arena of life can a grown adult scream and shout with unrestrained fervour, orr even streak naked across a pitch?

    Sport imports a communal sense of belonging, evident in the crowd at a huge stadium and in the often transnational ‘imagined community’ of fans of a particular franchise. Support for national teams affirm a sense of belonging to the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.

    The medium is the message. First television, and now increasingly the Internet, allows individuals, living thousands of mile away to support teams, often comprised of players from around the world.

    Mythological themes are played out in real time. The truly great teams, it is said, are those that learn from defeat, just as the heroes of epic returns from the trial of Hades the wiser. We also encounter the tragedy of the flawed hero whose indiscretions are captured by the ravenous paparazzi, and attributed to the wider failings of youth.

    English football fans at the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

    Too Much of a Good Thing?

    Yet we can have too much of a good thing. Attention to sports has reached pathological intensity. Slick marketing has moved an instinctive pleasure into a compulsive and easily-satisfied desire, activating demand in a manner that is almost pornographic.

    In particular, the multi-billion euro football industry uses every available opportunity to lure child and adult alike into compulsive purchasing of television channels and merchandise that is gaudily flaunted. More troublingly still is the expansion of online gambling.

    Young men are now paid unconscionable fortunes for playing games, which many would happily participate in for far less, or no financial reward at all. Televised sport used to inspire kids to imitate their heroes, now with gaming technology they don’t have to leave their couches, and the obesity pandemic carries all before it.

    Rupert Murdoch recognised that sports would act as a ‘battering ram’ for his pay TV, an example most newspapers have followed. Sports coverage underpins a neoliberal zeitgeist by providing an alternative, apolitical, space with elements of tragedy and farce; villains and saviours; loyalty and betrayal.

    Grandeur is evoked through metaphors such as the ‘trench warfare’ of a tight contest or the ‘phoney war’ of a friendly fixture; ‘citadels’ are ‘stormed’, and ‘no quarter is given’, along with specifically supernatural ideas such as ‘demons’ being ‘exorcised’. Stress is laid on the grandeur and importance of the events unfolding: thus we regularly learn that ‘history is being made.’ Too much of our lives, my own included, are absorbed by the spectacle.

    With the degree of psychic energy devoted to the affairs of circus, it is hardly surprising that political involvement is increasingly the province of the paid-up professional; that the percentage voting has declined precipitously; that elections are explained by analogy with sporting fixtures; and that often warfare itself is relegated to the periphery. The widespread obsession is barely questioned by a media that feeds the fervour, and certainly not by politicians that display their colours to appear like regular guys.

  • On the Nature of Evil

    I met Vladimir Putin once. 

    Or, at least, I was in the same room as him, no more than thirty or forty  feet away, for several hours. Not much further than Macron recently in Moscow.

    In August and September 2000, the last time Ireland was lobbying for a seat at the UN Security Council, I was an intern of the Irish diplomatic corps at the United Nations in New York.

    My job was to record the speeches of the Heads of State. I was present for the speeches of the heads of state and government at the Security Council and General Assembly, including Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro.

    I felt, even then, that Putin’s energy was very dark – a psychopath perhaps, devoid of empathy.

    There is no doubt in my mind that this war is morally unjustifiable and wrong, despite the questionable wisdom of expansionist Western foreign policy (from a Russian perspective).

    At the same UN summit in 2000, Tony Blair gave the most incredible speech. I was taken in, hook, line and sinker, by his incredible rhetoric and passion. His forked tongue only became apparent later. How could we be so manipulated?

    A false representative of the light you could say. That which appears to be of the light, but is deceiving.

    Whether by intent, or design, is another question, but nonetheless he is a man with the blood of many on his hands. Of course, he can still argue that the war in Iraq was justified.

    That’s what they alway say, these power-hungry men, as the blood of innocents flows. For the victors, that is how history is written.

    Putin and his long-time confidant Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

    Evil in the World

    There is no doubt in my mind that evil exists. The light exists, the dark exists, and the false light exists. The false light is that which masquerades and deceives: a complex Luciferian archetype.

    We like to believe that we are on the side of good, and the ‘other’ side is evil. The truth is much more complex, and permeable. In a world where we like to define things as black or white, there are many shades of grey.

    Good people can do unspeakable acts of evil, while even evil acts can have positive consequences.

    Anger is sometimes a necessary and appropriate emotion when our boundaries are violated, on a personal or national level. Sometimes, in the face of unprovoked aggression, the only option is to fight back.

    When we are feeling strong emotions, however, we are open to manipulation. Any time I feel a strong emotion of anger or fear due to a situation in my life or through what I see in the media – as I am feeling now – I ask myself, am I being manipulated? If so, by who, and for what end?

    Who will benefit, if due to my anger and dismay at the brutal and morally wrong treatment of Ukrainian civilians, I somehow begin to fear or hate Russia or Russians?

    What if I decide, in my anger, to fan the flames of hatred, anger, and war, rather than douse them? Are we to support the spread of this conflict, rather than hope for peace?

    If there is one thing I have learnt over many years of diving deep into the metaphysics of light and dark it is that there is much that we are unaware of. We are all pawns in a greater game than we are aware of, you could say.

    If it turns out that the game is rigged, and no matter which side seems to come out on top, the house always wins, then the only option is to stop playing the game.

    Hitler’s prophecy speech of 30 January 1939.

    What is the Influence of Evil?

    The genius of evil is that it influences us through our deepest fears and weaknesses. If, for example, your deepest fear is failure, being attacked, overwhelmed or destroyed. Perhaps this is the result of an unsafe and traumatic childhood.

    This could manifest as paranoia, fear, or deepest shame at the loss of personal or national prestige, as is perhaps the case with a ‘strongman’ such as Putin. This is perceived as a threat to your very existence.

    When some external event triggers this terrible internal fear, the very personal and overwhelming nature of this trigger is how evil influences a person. Evil finds our unconscious hidden weaknesses, and exploits them ruthlessly.

    How do we recognise the influence of evil on ourselves? By hating another person, race, or nation, we are acting under the influence of evil.

    This is the genius of evil: it realizes our deepest fears through the prism of our distorted perceptions. It preys on our weaknesses, separates us, divides us, makes us hate instead of love.

    It is rare indeed, for someone to wake up in the morning saying “today I choose to be evil”. There are also those who can be described as pure evil – consciously evil – in the sense of acting with intentional malice, but these people are rare.

    For the most part, evil slides in unseen, unconsciously, through our psychic blind spots. What lengths would you go to, to avoid your deepest fears? To avoid a perceived existential threat to you, your family or nation? This is how ‘normal’ people do the most terrible things. Evil locates our deepest fear and weaknesses, plays on them, magnifies and exploits them.

    Like a computer virus exploiting a line of faulty code, evil exploits the faulty code of the human race. Shame, fear, anger, and trauma are the gateways into the body, poisons, faulty code, through which evil may stem, if allowed.  These are known as the three kleshas or poisons of Mahayana Buddhism: ignorance, attachment and aversion, from which evil arises.

    Projection of the Shadow

    The great psychiatrist Carl Jung elaborated on the projection of the shadow being the greatest moral threat of our age.

    A threat to the very future of humanity, and one the majority of people are utterly unaware of.

    We psychologically project that which is disowned, unbearable and unconscious in ourselves, onto the other, thereby ridding ourselves of the need to make conscious decisions, take responsibility for our actions and integrate our experiences.

    Thus Jung writes in Archaic Man that ‘Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena… Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.’

    He adds in Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934:

    Modern people … are ignorant of what they really are. We have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche and Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly.  We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.

    If we do not acknowledge and own our shadow, we project our inner darkness onto the unfortunate recipients of our projections, as human beings have been doing for millennia of wars and cycles of destruction.

    Ballads of bravery (1877) part of Arthurian mytholog by Lorenz Frølich.

    Mythology and Psychology

    Invariably, humans fall pretty to some great mythology, whether it is nationalism, tribalism or religious belief, which assures them that their cause is just.

    We are not far removed from the Crusaders in this regard, who believed they were saving Jerusalem from heathens – in the twenty-first century as much as in the twelfth.

    The psychological projection of the shadow is how mostly men are capable of inflicting barbarous acts of evil onto the ‘other’, who has generally already been thoroughly dehumanised and demonised.

    Recently, a former officer of the US Navy Seals Special forces, one of the men who led the hunt for Bin Laden, told me how easy an operation this was to undertake.

    He said that one of his main responsibilities in Afghanistan and Iraq was to keep his men in line, reminding them of the humanity of the enemy. In a warzone, how easy it must be to forget.

    In his book on evil The Lucifer Effect, the psychologist Phillip Zimbardo, who also designed the Stanford Prison experiment, wrote:

    I don’t believe anybody’s inherently evil. I believe we’re inherently good. And until they get put in a bad barrel. And there are a lot of bad barrels. A lot of jobs that we take encourage us to cheat, to lie…. If you’re a prison guard, afraid that prisoners are going to attack you and you have to create a false illusion that you’re domineering, you’re dominating them, you’ll shoot to kill then that’s the image. I believe in the goodness of human nature. And it’s being put into situations that corrupts that.

    Zimbardo defines evil as exercising power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), destroy, or commit crimes against humanity.

    From his psychological analysis of the US soldiers at Abu Ghraib who committed atrocities on the Iraqi POWs, Zimbardo shows that evil is situational.

    Like it or not, we all have the potential to be a Nazi prison camp guard in us, given the right situation and dehumanisation of the enemy.

    The Russian people have perhaps a greater understanding of this than most, given their brutal history and capacity for resilience and suffering. As one of their greatest novelists, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, put it: ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’

    Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.

    The Red Peril 2.0

    How easy it is for us in the West to demonize the Russian threat, the hapless Slavic soldier from the steppes, conscripted as they have been for centuries to die as cannon fodder in a war they did not want.

    This appears to be a reawakened Communist threat. Indeed, the idea of invading hordes from the east is a deep fear ingrained in the West, since the time of Genghis Khan and beyond.

    In recent times it has been the threat of militiant Islam, the Muslim horde overrunning Europe, but our collective Western shadow is now projected elsewhere.

    In some bizarre, surreal joke of history, we are apparently witnessing Chechen fighters, suffering from severe historical amnesia, from a land so terribly brutalized by Putin, take part in the invasion of Ukraine.

    Likewise, and in a perfect mirror of a paranoid Putin – a dinosaur whose thinking is conditioned by bipolar geopolitics of the Cold War and Great Game of the nineteenth century – the West with its expansionist foreign policy represents a threat to the very survival of his beloved Russia.

    Apparently, this existential threat is to be countered at the cost of total war.

    Ukraine and the West believes it is protecting itself from the threat of Russia, as has proved to be the case.

    Putin and his acolytes believe they are protecting Russia from military encirclement as a result of the eastward expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War. These have become two disastrous self-fulfilling prophecies. Thus both perspectives have turned out to be valid on their own terms.

    It’s history repeating itself, even so far as Putin making the same strategic mistakes as Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1942 in greatly underestimating the vastness of Ukraine and over-extending supply lines.

    Hitler, of course, committed the same folly in reverse in the 1930s, emphasizing the need for Lebensraum, living space, for the German people, who were apparently threatened by the great Slavic hordes to the east.

    Hidden Forces

    What would you do, if you felt as if your nation or family was under an existential threat, and only you had the vast power to stop it?

    Do you think you would commit acts of evil to ‘protect’ yourself, believing this to be for the highest good in the circumstances?

    There are hidden forces at play here. I use the word hidden intentionally, knowing that some will understand what I am trying to say. Those who have ears to hear will hear.

    How else can we make sense of the ritual of bloodletting that so-called rational actors seem to periodically engage in, most clearly perhaps in the massacres of the First World War, when the most ‘civilized’ of nations sacrificed their best and brightest.

    For what? How could humans behave in such a barbaric and irrational way?

    Human beings often operate like actors on a stage, contending with forces greater than we can imagine. These might be described as the anabolic and catabolic forces of nature, involving endless cycles of growth, death, decay and rebirth.

    My first experience with ayahuasca on Maui, Hawaii many years ago, demonstrated this to me very clearly. For whatever reason, I did not fear looking into the darkness. That night I left the safety of the ceremony and went out alone to stare into the unknown of the dark jungle.

    Instead of fearing the dark, I wanted to understand it.

    Nietzsche warned: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster … for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you,’ but this was not my experience. I found that looking into the abyss gave me a greater understanding of the world.

    Jung, so well versed in ancient knowledge and metaphysics, brought these themes to a psychological level, writing

    The sad truth is that man’s 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 over the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy will defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be (Carl Jung, Approaching the Unconscious).

    The Metaphysics of Light and Dark

    We live in a world characterised by duality – light and dark, good and evil. These are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other.

    Irrespective of anyone’s spiritual beliefs, you may still find useful insights in spiritual traditions on the nature of evil.

    In the ancient Zoroastrian tradition, it was believed that the universe is a battleground between Good (Ahura Mazda) and Evil (Angra Mainyu). Angra Mainyu is not God’s equal opposite, but the destructive energy that opposes God’s creative energy.

    It is essential for us to remember that this battle is not external to us as humans. It is an internal process in everyone.

    Even in the Bible, Isaiah 45:7 says, ‘I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create calamity. I am Yahweh, who does all these things.’ In other words, according to an Old Testament view, Yahweh (God) is the source of all things, light and dark.

    The Taoist yin yang symbol captures the essence of this most beautifully. The seeds of light grow in the dark, the seeds of dark grow in the light.

    Other metaphysical systems were all too aware of this too – that too much of anything becomes its opposite. The Mediaeval Jewish Kabbalists saw evil as a result of unbalanced force. For example, the benevolent dictator, motivated by the seemingly altruistic aim of protecting his people, can easily become a tyrant. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the folk wisdom goes.

    In a tremendously complex world bedevilled by unintended consequences, we are often unaware of the full consequences of our actions, yet we are still responsible for them. A classic example is the arming of the Taliban, formerly the mujahideen, by the U.S. in pursuit of its geopolitical ambitions of bringing about the demise of the USSR in Afghanistan the 1980s.

    In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism and a treatise on the ethics of war, we are told that Krishna (God) gave humans free will so they would have the volition to choose love, but ‘impelled by material desires, the souls engage in evil deeds and are subjected to others’ evil actions, as per the inexorable law of karma.’

    Comanche Indians Chasing Buffalo with Lances and Bows, by George Catlin.

    Wetiko

    Jungian analyst Paul Levy, in his seminal work on the origins of evil Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil brilliantly describes how humanity is suffering from:

    a spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness.

    Many traditions speak of a concept similar to that native American idea of wetiko. The Jewish- Christian gnostic mystic tradition, for example, draws on descriptions in the two-thousand-year old writings known as the Dead Sea Scrolls – found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi – of the archons, who have imprisoned the divine spark of human souls in material creation.

    Likewise, the Bible speaks of a ‘counterfeiting spirit’ deceiving humanity. The Tibbetan Buddists speak of humanity trapped in the matrix of samsara, of suffering.

    The essence of evil is that it helps continue the illusion of separation of souls from universal consciousness, from source.

    This is perhaps the deepest symbolic interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. The fall of matter from spirit, the loss of our connected state of original innocence.

    Evil prevents us from recalling who we truly are. It separates us from each other and from whence we came.

    A destroyed Russian BMP-3 near Mariupol, 7 March.

    What can be done?

    First, on a macro level, the consciousness of the human race must evolve to a point where war is no longer acceptable, for any justification, under any circumstances.

    Otherwise, paranoid, wounded, power hungry men, for it is almost always men who start wars, will inevitably find a justification for their actions.

    As the astrophysicist Carl Sagan said:

    Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

    It will be necessary to make war an absolute taboo and to ostracize those who participate in it. It may take many generations and even millennia for this to occur, but happen it must.

    Peace must be a conscious choice for humanity. As Margaret Mead put it: ‘Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a means of solving conflict?’

    There are some encouraging signs that in this first European war of the social media age, this may be happening – via the compassion and condemnation of the international community.

    But this cannot only apply to wars started by the ‘other’ side, it must apply equally to wars started by or supported by the West in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Otherwise, Western hypocrisy and privilege continues.

    For this to happen, a global shift in consciousness is required, if not rogue actors will easily take advantage of a more peaceful world.

    It will also require a much more equitable world, one where justifiable grievances can be addressed and resolved equitably, before violence is resorted to.

    Is it naive to believe such a world is possible? Perhaps, but in a world of nuclear weapons, we surely have no choice but to evolve and ensure our long term survival.

    It will also be necessary to change the current structures of power, so that the concentration of political power no longer allows the egos of weak, wounded men to force wars and mayhem on their people.

    As part of this evolution of human consciousness, some form of collective healing will be required to address the psychological wounds of the human race, the majority of which is traumatized as a result of centuries of war and oppression.

    Otherwise, wounded man-children will continue to play out their traumas and pathologies on a world stage; handing these down to the next generation.

    We would do well to remember the indigenous wisdom that the seven generations to come inherit the traumas of the past seven generations.

    Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).

    Personal Responsibility

    Secondly, on a micro level, as individuals, we must take personal responsibility for the psychological awareness of our shadows. Becoming aware that we are not always as good as we imagine ourselves to be.

    As Jung put it:

    Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.

    We need to educate people on the need to make conscious what is unconscious, unhealed, unprocessed, unowned in them, before they find someone or something else to project their deepest fears and darkest thoughts on to. This is of the utmost importance for the survival of the human race, and not talked about nearly enough.

    How can we expect peace in the world when we are at war with ourselves? If we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves.

    Our outer world reflects the state of our own inner psyche, individually and collectively. That our currently external reality is in such dire shape reflects the inner collective reality.

    If we do not mend our ways the great ritualistic dance, the great cosmic game of growth, death and rebirth, construction and destruction, with human beings as mere unconscious pawns, will begin again, as it has for many of the past millennia, but this time with the threat of nuclear annihilation.

    Feature Image: Mushroom cloud from the explosion of Castle Romeo in 1954.