Shadow Work
A call to action! Analyzing Silicon Valley's commodification of Jung's philosophy, part 2.
If your declaration that you’re “not trying to be an asshole” gets little response besides a few laughing emoji reacts, it’s probably time to consider your tirade complete.
Thankfully that’s exactly the way it recently went on one of the Discord servers I belong to. (Not the Creekmason Initiates server that has sprung up around the content here, though definitely one in a very similar cultural niche.) I found myself generally impressed with the comportment of the whole community during the incident.
Not only did no one particularly rise to the rage-baiting going on from one disgruntled member, but once their hard-time was through, the ranter themself went on a courageous amends tour. They publicly pinged apologies to all the people who had chimed in throughout the mostly one-way conversation.
I thought the responses of other members were, overall, pretty effective. Even heartwarming.
Unlike other communities where someone flying off the handle might inspire volleys of vitriol right back at them, here in this Discord—which I’m purposefully keeping unnamed—the sentiment was different. Almost all the responses were expressions of empathy and calls for compassion.
It was very clearly a Server united by our desire to serve. One especially focused on the tech-enabled and -exacerbated dehumanization of our ideological opponents.
The rant itself was more of a call to action than an invitation to mud-wrestle. It wasn’t mean-spirited trolling. It wasn’t a targeted dunk.
It wasn’t even really off-base, as many of the people who interjected pointed out. If it had a rhetorical fault, it was simply in using the second person “you, you, you” to criticize an abstract other who may or may not have even been present on the server. It would be impossible to judge whether the criticism levied at the general audience really fit any particular member.
So the shame continued to be batted around with no clear target, with no one spending more than a message or two countering it. And every message that did pop up in opposition was just full of love.
I’m grateful to be part of the kind of place where what could have derailed into a pretty vicious argument that required moderator intervention stopped far short of that.
Interestingly though, despite—or perhaps actually influencing—the success of those prosocial de-escalation tactics, the conflict still had all the hallmarks of the exact kind of shadow work that social media so often enables.
Online, we’re often offered the option to confront the parts of ourselves of which we’re not comfortable admitting ownership
The shadow of that prosocial inclination toward improving the world via mediation, patience, camaraderie and love is a dissatisfaction with people who aren’t behaving with the same civility.
To be clear, the shadow of a commitment to prosocial behavior isn’t exactly anti-social behavior, it’s feeling like you have the moral high ground. Again, this ranter wasn’t exactly trolling to wound, they were trying to inspire. They were trying to spark action. To honor the urgency of our poly-crisis. They were just doing it through phrases that indicated superiority and that might provoke a prickle of shame. Phrases like, “it seems like your concern is only aesthetic.”
People often think a person’s shadow is composed of the binary opposites of the things that they value. This line of thinking goes: we're taught to worship beauty, youth and rationality, so we must have a shadow of ugliness, old-age and uninhibited emotion.
That’s not exactly my understanding.
A better example comes from the shadow work classic, Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin. Providing only minor spoilers, the mage main character, Ged, creates his vicious shadow through the exercise of his unusual potency. His vaunted strength as a wizard itself inspires the shadow: it’s composed of arrogance. Or perhaps insecurity about being accurately perceived as powerful.
A shadow isn’t the opposite of the light. It’s the inevitable byproduct of the light. It’s a negative-coded component or consequence of a characteristic generally considered positive.
The shadow of someone who is trusting is that they’re gullible. The positive characteristic of “spontaneity” casts a shadow of “thoughtlessness.” Being admirably “self-aware” often comes with being “insecure.”
The way I understand shadow work, the dark side is often a potential synonym for the light side that simply connotes “wrongness” or “badness.”
The other important characteristic of the shadow is that it is often so shameful to us, that we are unwilling, or even unable, to acknowledge we frequently present that side to the world.
Staring into that abyss can be incredibly captivating.
That’s why social media apps utilize our discomfort with confronting our own shadow: in order to create “stickiness”
As you may have gathered, this is part two of my series on the commodification of Jung’s ideology by the purveyors of what I sometimes like to call “scrolling media.” (Part one, about the commercialization of synchronicity, can be found here.)
The metric of “stickiness” often tracked by companies like X and Meta refers to the difficulty that an app engenders toward putting down the phone. Media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff, compares it to flypaper: a headline or comment that causes us to become trapped, with the all-too-frequent side-effect of our own harm or degradation.
Algorithms use shadow confrontation to promote stickiness.
As I mentioned last time, there might be zero intentional volition behind this strategy. The way these algorithms are developed is often by providing a machine learning system with tons of data and an objective like “stickiness” and then letting it go crazy with experimentation and analysis to figure out what strategies most effectively produce the desired end-result.
Sort of validates Jung a bit when you think of it that way.
It also explains why every third video on my TikTok For You Page is promoting shadow work.
This ideology is in the water. As the machines learn to mimic the theories that Jung laid out, his guidance toward self-actualization through the process of individuation becomes more and more appropriate, applicable and potent.
Why not use your scrolling feed as an opportunity to practice shadow work?
When you encounter the voice of someone from the opposite end of the political spectrum who is doing or saying something you consider reprehensible, check in with your body. If you feel a twinge of outrage, disgust or anxiety, you’re probably experiencing an instinctive revulsion toward a characteristic of yourself that you’re afraid to admit you present.
If Trump is tweeting xenophobia and it pisses you off, ask: in what ways are you, yourself, projecting a shadow of “tendency to Other” through your expression of the virtue of loyalty?
If a climate doomer’s comments about civilization’s imminent collapse trigger you, instead of posting data that more violently inflames the conflict, you can ask yourself how you are personally exhibiting a shadow of pessimism and despair through shining a bright light of reason and rationality.
If a Q-Anon devotee puts you on the defensive by accusing you of belonging to elite satanic pedophiles who rule the earth, instead of trying to “cure” a random internet stranger with logic, you have the opportunity to look at the ways that you act on a shadow of paranoia as a result of casting your own little candle-flame by seeking meaning.
The algorithms are surfacing these kinds of triggers to you because they have discovered that people “like you” spend more time on the app when they are arguing with others onto whom they have projected their own shadow.
The algorithms have recognized that it is “sticky” to show people the parts of themselves that they are unwilling to admit exist.
The unintended consequence is that we have an opportunity, constantly, to confront the aspects of our own selves that we have erroneously deemed unworthy of love.
And what do you do once you’ve confronted your shadow? Integrate it.
The real shadow work is learning to accept that there are “negative” consequences to even our most prized “positive” character traits.
To integrate your shadow means to embrace it.
The easiest way I’ve found to do this is a kind of alchemical transmutation of shadow to gold. You can know any particular shadow characteristic as its positive-coded synonym if you take the time to uncover it. Then through ritual, meditation or therapy, you can learn to love that shadow characteristic as just another beautiful part of yourself.
Why is this important?
In my own exploration of shadow work, I’ve arrived at two important outcomes to integrating a shadow characteristic.
I am better able to healthily express the light aspect from which the shadow is cast.
I am less likely to project my shadow onto others and overreact to their behavior as a result.
With regard to number one: I’ve found that the behaviors I am least aware I exhibit are the ones that I am most likely to allow to be toxic. Without being mindful and self-aware, it is impossible to catch the automatic processes of my subconscious that create undue harm in the world.
In fact, my own aversion to a personality characteristic of which I am ashamed tends to seem to cause me to exhibit that characteristic with even more volatility and zeal. It’s as if the things I hide and repress are only given an advantage over my conscious mind that allows them to sneak up on me and explode dramatically through my behavior.
Perhaps this is part of why the Discord ranter I mentioned earlier was not engaged more pugilistically. The people who responded were each able, in their own way, to vocally demonstrate their comfort with the shadow characteristic we all contain of feeling self-righteous as a result of feeling passionate and doing the hard work to change the world.
Possibly partly because those members know that any of us are occasionally vulnerable to getting into that kind of dark mood, they were quick with their empathy during the incident, and quick to forgive after the fact.
The second item is perhaps even more important.
When we stop projecting our own shadow onto others, we contribute to planetary healing
By being comfortable with our own darker aspects, we can love them when they show up in another.
In fact, I have often found that I am less tweaky about ascribing to others the shadow characteristics that I’ve done the work to integrate. It’s as if having a secret shame causes me to be subconsciously on guard against any indication that those deplorable behaviors are surfacing in the world.
I am so much more likely to jump down the throats of others for behaving in ways I wish I could personally prevent for myself. Often, it’s not even a fair, objective assessment of reality that sparks this kind of aggression; it’s pure projection.
This inspires something meaningful: an ability to compromise with the parts of your friends, family, and internet strangers that you find objectionable.
Asserting non-negotiable boundaries for the shit other people do that grinds your gears can be a healthy, helpful, effective step away from the codependency so many of us are raised to embody. But ultimately, if we want to have relationships, we have to recognize that there is always compromise involved.
By projecting our shadow onto the Other, we make them unlovable. By setting impenetrable boundaries we valorize alienation and earn ourselves a peace that brings with it painful loneliness.
There are consequences to not accepting others as they are, flaws and all.
As the Hermetic dictum states, “As above, so below.”
Nature is the Other we feel we must subjugate or escape from in order to avoid her inconvenient and scary parts. We don’t accept the parts of ourselves that are dirty, creepy, and primal and we project those shadows onto nature.
As a result of our fear of dirt, we sanitize everything, spray pesticides everywhere and overprescribe antibiotics.
I want to close with this observation by Markael Luterra of the Dendroica Project.
This is from Markael’s recent piece titled Poetry of Belonging and it reflects our Othering of nature due to our projected shadow much better than I could have hoped to write it myself.
There exists in Western cultures a great fear - a biophobia writ large - that insists upon order and control. Our dwellings are carefully painted and caulked and trimmed, their once-living bones converted to uniform building blocks and drywalled over. Any ants and spiders and insects that make their way inside are summarily executed. We fear bears and cougars and lightning far more than the risks would justify, while we feel comfortably safe in our climate-controlled, upholstered vehicles despite the much greater risk of death or harm. Many among us prefer to live in high-rises and concrete jungles where other living creatures are welcome only when they are installed or purchased - everything else is a pest or a weed. There seems to be a broad consensus that we “modern” humans have thankfully left behind a messy, dirty, bloody world full of pestilence and suffering - a “nature red in tooth and claw” - and that we are destined for a life in fully-synthetic walled-off environs of skyscraper cities or Mars outposts or interstellar spaceships.
Because they remain unintegrated, we need to control these shadow aspects of ourselves, and so we attempt to control them in nature.
This is the exact dominator mentality that has produced our ecological crises. We have tried to submit the Other to our will, and as a result we have created myriad catastrophic, unforeseen consequences.
As above, so below.
By loving ourselves wholly, all the way through, we are able to love our neighbors. Through accepting and compromising and loving the mess that is other people, including those that social media feeds us in order to provoke a triggering emotion that keeps us angrily glued to the screen, we can resonate love that trickles up to become love for the biosphere.
It’s a little woo, but worth trying.
By taking advantage of the opportunity social media provides to confront our own shadow and learn to love ourselves, it’s almost as if we could siphon a couple miles-per-hour off the hurricanes that are battering our coasts.
It’s almost as if warming to our own unmentionable flaws will prevent the warming of the oceans.
Maybe cultivating self-love will save us.
The worst that could happen is that we ride through this apparent poly-apocalypse with just a sliver more joy.
And ride through together ... thanks for the clear insights (((*)))