The Aftermath of a Cultural Shadow Eruption

Assuming we survive this one

Tody Elliot on Unsplash

What happens after our shadow has erupted, the thing long-feared has happened, and caused irreparable harm? Everyone sees it. We can no longer believe the cultural myths. We are not the land of the free. We don’t have a government of the people, by the people, or for the people, and we haven’t ever had one. At least not yet.

And, surely, we have been here before, this moment where people have died, and it seems there is no possibility of pulling the soft blanket of our illusions up to our chins again. If you’ve ever been in any kind of recovery, you know this crisis is also an opportunity, but you also know the whole family system is complicit.

The good news is, we can no longer pretend. The bad news is, we can still double down on the addiction by claiming there is no other way to live. So, we have two choices. We can admit we are in trouble and seek healing, or we can continue to capitulate, appease, and allow because we are terrified that otherwise, we will die.

At this point, we could have a whole long history lesson about all the other times this culture has had a reckoning and turned away from it, but let’s start with the moment we are in now.

We’ve had every opportunity to address this problem before it gave power to the Heritage Foundation, the tech oligarchs, purveyors of government surveillance systems, and the ruthless political opportunists who are in charge now. We knew J6 was treason. Refusing to return top-secret documents was treason. We knew Trump was an entitled, unrepentant sexual predator. And we know he won’t release the Epstein files - ever. Yet, his approval rating remains around 39%, fueled and funded by enemies of our state through paid media outlets and influencers. No matter how many times pundits tell you he’s tanking, he’s not. So, what do we do about our MAGAland and the undeniable part of us that allowed all this to happen? That’s two sides to the same whole, if you’re keeping score.

It turns out, the only way to heal shame is to humble ourselves.

First, we admit we are a death-phobic culture addicted to power. We start by telling the truth about everything, even our own complicity and benefits. Though we are terrified that it will start a civil war, we arrest everyone who has earned a prison sentence, starting with the treasonous top.

This will require a Truth and Reconciliation Commission-style hearing in which immunity is granted in exchange for the truth. That means some really horrible actors will be let off, but I would argue that a public mea culpa with all the gory details is not a free pass. We, as a culture, have to behold the extent of our addiction to dominance, and the existential terror that makes our evil seem banal. Cruelty has been woven through all our systems from the very beginning, and not by “them,” by all of “us.”

We must see it all, to the depths of our depravity, and then we must act:

1. Tell the unflinching truth.

2. Feel all the difficult emotions, knowing they will be terrible.

3. Make amends even though there is so much we can never atone for.

The slaughter of 60 million buffalo was an act of genocide. Laura Nyhuis on Unsplash

For example, we cannot make up for our indigenous genocide or the attempted eradication of a whole way of life. We cannot atone for the centuries of slavery or the wars that took land from Mexico and the institutional racism against people already living in their homeland. We cannot make centuries of unnecessary suffering right. All those generations that are gone now cannot be made amends to. But we can listen and try to do what their descendants say we must do to make things right from here on. This means reparations, surely it does, because what are reparations but another way to say amends?

Are people balking already? Thinking this is impossible?

That would mean we are still in the grip of the addiction to power and force in a death-phobic culture that has refused, until now, to admit we have an addiction. But we do. Ask anyone who had a huge deficit to recover from and now has decades of sobriety about the joy that brings. It’s as big as the sky. Amends only seem impossible until we make them the most important thing. And yes, we can afford it.

But this is not enough. Our addiction to dominance got us into this problem, and only abstinence can get us out. We, the dominant white culture, must step back and allow - no, trust - others to lead. The antidote to the poison of an addiction to dominance might just require us to let power slip through our fingers. We have to admit we haven’t done such a cracking job of it so far. To my mind, New York has already moved in this direction by electing Zohran Mamdani, but there are still many ways the old guard could sabotage it. But my money is on him and the coalition he built.

How do you tell a raging alcoholic how much better life can be if they would just stop drinking? Maybe the rest of us just need to build community, share the joy, and let them watch us thrive.

We have never been an honest culture, not since the first day we set foot on indigenous soil and set about the project of colonization, with the fear of God and the fear of Death (which are the same thing) firmly centered as our mythology.

All the terrible things we have done, we justified by telling ourselves that this is what God wants. But surely, we have matured enough now to know (though I suspect we always knew) that there is no God like that.

There is no god who wants human beings to dominate Nature.

There is no god who wants men to dominate women.

There is no god who wants white people to dominate everyone.

There is no god who ever wanted genocide.

There is no god who ever wanted slavery.

There is no one called God who created us as isolated skin bags who want to live forever or as long as humanly possible, no matter the cost, like some Disney villain.

If there is an intelligence behind life on Earth, and there is evidence to support this view, that force, which I call Love, factored Death into every facet of life. There has to be a reason for this, and it’s not, as our Puritan forebears would tell you, because God despises us, or tests us to find out what omnipotence already knows, or punishes us with original sin for his own creation of disobedient women who eat apples.

Perhaps life and death are the same thing, a oneness. Perhaps she’s a spiritual teacher, a spiritual lover, a best friend. Perhaps, Death is love, too. Embracing Death doesn’t mean we’d all run out and kill ourselves. It just means we will make better decisions, because what’s important is front and center: We are all impermanent.

If we loved her and learned from her, we could accept that we will not live forever. She would teach us that no matter what we do, only love matters. And joy. And Peace, beauty, and right action, and every other facet of the diamond that is divinity. We are all of that, though I think we each have an affinity for expressing one more than the others. Mine is joy.

In fact, I would argue that even the top 1%, the only ones who “win” at our cultural game of dominance, are devastatingly unhappy. Does anyone imagine that Trump, J.D., or Steven Miller is overflowing with joy? Pete Hegseth? How about the billionaires, Peter Thiel, Elon, or Bezos?

I remember the aftermath of my first shadow eruption. Terrible all the way to homelessness. Then, someone told me to surrender. Blink. Blink. I didn’t have a thing left, and on top of that, I was in debt. “Just say it,” she insisted. “I surrender.” The thought filled me with terror because I knew these were not just empty words. Something was listening and taking me at my deepest intention. I would lose control, the thing I feared most. “You are already out of control,” she said.

And that’s my point to everyone in the dominant culture. The collective is out of control. Thinking we can fix MAGA is one of those pesky half-measures that will avail us nothing, except a repeat of our addiction cycle.

After the devastating shadow eruption of WW2, Carl Jung defined four stages that cultures must go through in the wake of a shadow eruption like ours.

1. Acknowledge Collective Guilt.

2. See that the individual is the only bulwark against a repeat.

3. The victors must avoid psychic infection by refusing to use the same authoritarian methods of the regime that just fell.

4. Choose integration over repression. We must not create an “other” who did this fascism thing.

I think Jung is wrong about number 2. If the individual is the bulwark, we are utterly lost, hence the endless repetition. Fortunately, we are not individuals; we only think we are. In fact, many cultures in the world are not individual-centric.

I bet you are all aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Of course, if you are a feminist, such as I am, you are also allergic to hierarchies, even this one. What you may not know is that after he published his famous theory, Maslow visited the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in Alberta, Canada, and they blew up his belief in self-actualization by demonstrating that interdependence and self-transcendence for the greater good of the community are far more important and mature. They flipped his pyramid on its head because 80-90% of them had a level of self-esteem seen in only 5-10% of Americans. Their culture was not based on individual dominance. Maslow’s revised theory holds that the highest goal we can achieve is an interdependent community in which the needs for safety, food, and belonging are met for every member.

Maslow’s revised theory was ignored. We weren’t ready to pay for the social systems it would require. Perhaps now, we can see that clinging to a culture built around individual dominance is way, way, way more expensive in every kind of cost.

The answer to our patriarchal dominance problem isn’t a focus on equal rights for women without changing our dominance worldview. I have argued many times for a matrifocal community where a mother’s needs in raising the next generation are more primary than a man’s need to go to work and be Father Knows Best. That and we need an alternative to the isolating nuclear family, which makes child-rearing so difficult. Notice I didn’t ask for an end to it, just an alternative alongside.

The indigenous nations of the Americas have been holding the answer all along. How ironic is that?

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me.

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