Shadows, Savagery, and History

Part III of the "Fundamental Problem" Series

Once again, the introduction to this post bears many similarities to its predecessors. The literary background encompasses the works of Nietzsche, Rand, Campbell, Browning, Solzhenitsyn, and Hardy, with lectures from Peterson on malevolence. Again, I don't claim that nobody else has written about what I'll be addressing here, but I do maintain that I derived these ideas on my own, with the aforementioned literary and lecture background.

Reading world history is a punishing venture. It can turn a contented person into a pure nihilist within one cursory glance, as the savagery, greed, and tribalism of the human race seep through every blood-stained page of every chapter in our collective encyclopedia. An alien anthropologist reading such a book would be disgusted by the destruction humans can bring upon themselves - that is, unless the anthropologist was like us, in which case they would be enthralled by the gore. Even my own tastings of history have swept into my mind like a buffeting wind. At the very start of humanity as we know it, tribes slaughtered one another in animalistic competition. A short time later, civilizations were formed, which drove nomadic people nearly to extinction in their blind growth. These civilizations soon fought bloody wars with crude weapons amongst one another, often for futile and barbaric reasons. Every time there was some semblance of order erected on Earth, an empire or kingdom of sorts, it was backed by ruthless slavery, oppression, and destruction. It's true that Rome wasn't built in a day - it was built upon the corpses of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of slaves.

One might think that as the human evolved, its higher forms of morality and philosophy would lead to a decrease in violence, but of course that's hardly the case. We know a lot about the six to eight million Jews, gypsies, and others who died horribly in the holocaust, but little about the six million Ukrainians who starved to death as a result of the dekulakization of the Soviet Union. Likewise, the Rwandan genocide, a complete failure of Western geniality and grace, seems to fall on the cutting room floors of history. Wars on terror, drugs, and slavery, some of which still rage on to this day, fill our textbooks. It forces one to hearken to Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation, as he rattled off the crimes of humanity for which we're all to blame. 

Yes, I said all. Our savagery plays a critical part in the discussion of the fundamental problem. It manifests itself at times as a lust for violence, as punishment for the sake of punishment, and the abandonment of those values which humans tout as being the separating factor between us and the animals. Carl Jung spoke about "The Shadow" as an integral part of the human psyche; he posited that the first steps to enlightenment was the encounter with "The Shadow" - this savagery within us. He was right, but too few people are willing to take the steps to encounter "The Shadow" these days, and that's understandable - it's a very painful procedure, which leaves one burned to the core if done correctly.

Of course, you could point out that there are many redeeming acts in history - Gandhi's liberation of India, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s tireless fight against segregation in the United States, and the breaking of the Apartheid in South Africa, to list just a few. It may seem that I'm taking a pessimistic view of history by cherry picking the grief and death. I would rebut that the acts of a few great people, like those I listed earlier, hardly counteract the violence displayed by entire hordes of people acting en masse to fulfill some crude, misshapen destiny.

We need look no further than the rise of Hitler in Germany, which we can compare strangely with the rise of socialism in the Soviet Union. Both were the cause of disenfranchised people falling into a victim mentality which spiraled quickly into ideological possession, which was then weaponized through propaganda. Both regimes were infallibly brutal, and left so many corpses in their wake that their malice becomes almost unfathomable.

Christopher Browning describes the lives of German police officers sent to Poland in World War Two in Ordinary Men. These men were old enough to be largely unaffected by the propaganda, so they didn't bear the vengeful spirit of many young Germans of their time, though they were certainly not altruistic. These men were told by their superior officer that there would be times where they were told to do horrible things, and that they could leave whenever they wanted. At the start of their service, the men were simply being harsh police officers - nothing out of the ordinary for wartime policing. By the end, they were taking naked pregnant women out into the fields and shooting them in the heads. Browning details the psychological change these men went through to perform those horrific acts, and while it broke their psyche's completely, the transformation was surprisingly, disturbingly, simple - a combination of ingrained racism, respect for authority, and conformity.

I won't go into full detail about the Soviet Union here (that deserves a post in and of itself), but one can read the grisly details of the gulags in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and some light research into the aforementioned dekulakization will confirm the ease with which a group of corrupted intellectuals can pray upon the weakened mass of a society, turning their resentment into rage. Ukraine went from the bread basket of eastern Europe to a failed state unable to feed its own population. The other citizens of the Soviet Union starved in droves, and the result was a world power driven nearly to cannibalism. These people were not unlike the the German police - they were simply ordinary men.

These are all examples of Jung's concept of "The Shadow" carried out to the extreme, but even now, it may seem detached, since the events which I described happened across the world to people one may assume, in total ignorance of course, to be entirely different from themselves. However, the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment both negate that assertion of difference. In the first case, ordinary people routinely showed a servitude to authority which allowed them to consciously cause another human being great amounts of "pain". In the latter experiment, college students went mad with power easily, and subjected their peers to dehumanizing and traumatic experiences under the guise of perceived authority. These relatively recent psychological experiments confirm that we are all "ordinary men".

We can somewhat root our savagery in our mammalian evolution, as chimpanzees display extraordinarily brutal behavior in the wild. As humans grew as a species, we needed to maintain our sharp spirits in order to combat our predators, which were still creatures like lions, tigers, bears, snakes, and birds. We were prey animals. We needed our savagery to survive. Unfortunately, we developed civilization before our brains could evolve away from these base instincts, and it may in fact be true that the savagery itself allowed us to build civilizations and empires. Regardless, we began to set a precedent for forcibly conquering foes, fighting over scarce resources, and employing pathological manipulation to the masses in order to destroy an enemy.

It should be mentioned that Jung posits a blunt method of "defeating" the viciousness through the integration of "The Shadow". As I mentioned earlier, Jung believed that the first step to enlightenment was developing "The Shadow" into one's psyche. The point he makes strikes to the heart of the solution to this aspect of the fundamental problem: Only in understanding one's capacity for evil can one truly orient themselves in a manner which is "good". We'll forgo the philosophical discussion of good and evil for now, but that seems to be the only relevant way to combat savagery in ourselves - to prevent us from being "ordinary men".

So if we have a solution, why do I maintain that our proclivity for violence and tribalism are part of the fundamental problem? Simply because we still lack a large scale answer. One or two people may be helped by my own writings, perhaps a handful more from the work of the author's I listed to start this essay, but not enough people will understand this problem to the level it takes for true change to occur. Even if there were a solution which could affect billions around the world, there would still be corruption in the institutions capable of advancing societal change, as is inevitable in large human structures. I'll talk more about corruption in the next post, but once again, we have only an individual answer to the problem of savagery: Understand yourself and the dark recesses of your mind, even though it may hurt to do so. Know that every bad deed in history was committed by a human and you're a human. See your shadow and become uneasy allies with it, keeping it at arms length and yet acknowledging its impact in your decisions. Face those parts of yourself you loathe and those thoughts you wish you didn't have, and try to wrestle with them until you can discern their origin. Understand that you are an ordinary person; once you know this, you may be on the path to being more.