Sadly, the emergence of Donald Trump as a viable political candidate early in 2015 has quite frightening parallels to the emergence of Adolph Hitler in Germany in the 1920s, and we should all take note. Did you ever think of the evil in you?
“But what happened to my day? Torches were kindled, bloody anger and disputes erupted. As darkness seized the world, the terrible war arose and the darkness destroyed the light of the world, since it was incomprehensible to the darkness and good for nothing anymore. And so we had to taste Hell.
“I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, your goodness became brutality, your love became hate, and your understanding became madness. Why did you want to comprehend the darkness! But you had to or else it would have seized you. Happy the man who anticipates this grasp.
“Did you ever think of the evil in you? Oh, you spoke of it, you mentioned it, and you confessed it smilingly, as a generally human vice, or a recurring misunderstanding. But did you know what evil is, and that it stands precisely right behind your virtues, that it is also your virtues themselves, as their inevitable substance? You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children’s fairy tale. But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces. The most extreme coldness draws near.”
The Red Book by C.G. Jung, P. 274; Reader’s Edition P. 265. Note: In this passage, Dr. Jung was writing about World War I.
Sadly, the emergence of Donald Trump as a viable political candidate early in 2015 has quite frightening parallels to the emergence of Adolph Hitler in Germany in the 1920s, and we should all take note. Did you ever think of the evil in you?
When Dr. Carl G. Jung wrote the words in the quote above, Adolph Hitler was still a broken former corporal living in a homeless shelter in Vienna. These were not words about him. Dr. Jung was speaking of the “Spirit of the Age,” and how a psychic epidemic swept over Europe at the beginning of World War I, which brought death to millions.
All of us have a Shadow, and I don’t mean in the physical sense, but rather in the psychological sense of Dr. Jung. If you think you are perfectly good, you are wrong. Goodness cannot exist in our psyches without evil as a countervailing part of the dualities, which comprise the energies of the psyche. In the movie Star Wars, this part of us is referred to as “the dark side,” and it is wrongly projected as an external menace. The Shadow is the very substance of a popular television genre, which includes Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Scandal, Blunt Talk, and Mr. Robot.
Television and movies are often ways society learns about issues actually taking place in our psyches. When you are tempted to do something, which you know is unacceptable to society and modern civilization, your memory can access the lessons of a movie or some other work of art, in order to make a personal judgment along the continuum of your own morality between the extremes of good and evil. This is a normal means of educating humanity; just as bloody gruesome fairy tales and campfire ghost stories provided those functions for earlier generations.
But sometimes a psychic epidemic can overwhelm one’s personal morality, and because of this we must be very vigilant. In Dr. Jung’s day, World War I could not end until all sides were completely decimated. Only then could one side say, “Enough!” We struggle with the same sorts of psychic demons today, because Middle Eastern extremists have not had enough, and they will not stop their murderous sprees until they have—either because they’re all dead, or because they see they must try something new, because modern civilization will not countenance their existence as barbarous murderers.
The problem is, we must all do a little fore thinking. The leaders that negotiated the Treaty of Versailles after World War I were justly angry about the carnage, so they imposed horrific terms on the German people. This resulted in extremely severe postwar conditions in Germany, which caused the resentments upon which Adolph Hitler could build. He often used “The Diktat of Versailles” as a monotonous battle cry, thus mobilizing those resentments and refocusing them on World War II.
It took tremendous wisdom and courage after World War II to institute The Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe, and resulted in our enemies becoming among our strongest allies in the last half of the 20th Century. Of course, there were those who demanded retribution from the Germans and Japanese, but fortunately two rounds of global war were enough and wiser leaders prevailed.
Americans are justifiably angry for any number of reasons, and there is a hunger for a leader who will redress our many grievances. Donald Trump has suddenly taken up Adolph Hitler’s strategy of focusing resentments against immigrant and minority populations, among several others. Like Hitler, Trump has relied on the complacency of the intelligentsia during his rise to power, and now we see many TV commentators of both parties, who are completely taken by surprise by Mr. Trump’s popularity.
The only solution to this problem is to bring it into consciousness, and talk about the lack of wisdom in his approaches. This “wall” he wants to build across the southern United States is a case in point, as Jaoquin “El Chapo” Guzman proved on July 11, 2015, when he tunneled out of a maximum security prison in Mexico. General George Patton rightly said, “Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.” How will a 1,500-mile long wall work?
We must all take a breath, examine our own Shadows, and then look at our problems with the wisdom of Secretary of State George Marshall and his colleagues at the end of World War II.
Oh yes, if Donald Trump were in power, we can imagine the mass deportation he promises, but how will that look and work? Will the buses carrying deportees to the airports remind Jews of the buses used to carry Holocaust victims to their death? What does such brutalization of society mean for the future of the United States as a world leader? Will we be seen as the “shining city on the hill,” as Ronald Reagan had it, or more like Auschwitz revisited?
Photo credit: The Arrogance of Evil ID 19119980 © Linda Bucklin | Dreamstime.com
