Imagine if you can, Donald Trump has arrived as a gift, to illuminate for us the American “shadow” at this pivotal moment in history. The Swiss Psychiatrist C.G. Jung refers to “the shadow” as the dark side of one’s self. The shadow, Jung wrote in 1963, “is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden” aspect of our personality hiding out in the unconscious. Failure to recognize our shadow leaves us exposed to the destructive possession by our disowned shadow.
Are we prepared to see the message of the shadow, illuminating our ongoing collective cultural flaws—more prevalent and tolerated than we would like to admit—from narcissism and misogyny to racism and bigotry? Are we prepared to face the fact that our extractive neoliberal economic ideology has utterly failed us, including trade policies that Trump has shined a light on? Will we now address the lost dignity and fear among a majority of hard-working Americans while wealth soars among a small percentage of Americans to grotesque levels? Do we finally acknowledge the corruption of the special-interest-owned polity controlled by the donor and ruling classes who operate under different rules from the rest of us? The shadow points to lost trust in our institutions for good reason, from government to Wall Street to big business to mainstream media. Do we now see that wealth and winning at all cost is not success, that we lack urgency in dealing with the crisis in American education, or in our mental health crisis? (Yes, Trump appears mentally unstable.) Finally, and perhaps most dangerous in the long run, the shadow points to our lack of moral responsibility to deal with climate change with an urgency that is far beyond anything Obama has proposed.
Trump is of course a dangerous conman. The opportunist wants to “make America great again,” invoking a sense of loss among the vulnerable and cruelly seducing with false promises. But more deeply, is this call to recover our greatness not the shadow pointing to our inflated pride in the idea of American Exceptionalism? Is it not time we honor the greater and higher ideals America was founded upon – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – and the timeless and universal values of humility, grace, gratitude, and loving membership within the beautiful and diverse humanity we share with one another, and with all life itself?
A prescient article on the collapse of American Oligarchy, written by Capital Institute’s Science Advisor Dr. Sally Goerner in April, is well worth a revisit on this new “morning in America.” And her timely analysis of the psychological underpinnings of Trump when he won the Republican nomination has now become essential reading if we are to understand why “this neo-fascist upsurge is a classic consequence of the breakdown of the bonds of love, strength, and intelligence that hold a society together and why rebuilding these bonds is critical to our survival.”
It’s been a slippery slope to our current predicament in my adult lifetime. I experienced this slide first hand on Wall Street beginning in the early 1980s, where our terminal, finance-driven neoliberal ideology first manifested, and then metastasized throughout society. So blame me. Turns out we were more clever than smart.
On one level, waking up on 11-9 felt worse than when I experienced 9-11 first hand. I have had very difficult conversations with my children, one of whom had to field questions from her second graders about whether “grandma would be deported.” It’s all incomprehensible, terrifying, and as my daughter said, it’s an embarrassment.
And yet…
The “great change” we must usher in was not happening before. It was not going to happen under Hillary Clinton. The mere fact that the Clintons have amassed a $200mm fortune since the former President left office, without creating any economic enterprise, is beyond unseemly. With hindsight, it was a mistake of the Democratic Party to allow her to run, despite her unmatched experience and the appeal of the first woman to reach the White House. The self-important Party hacks were simply “not serious” about the real systemic change that awaits, and which is required. And that decision now has very real consequences. They could be catastrophic. Or maybe not? The stock market recovered quickly, predictions are a fool’s errand when the future is truly unknowable. Maybe this is just the jolt we need to seriously begin to question who we are as a nation…what values we stand for… And what responsibility the elite – in politics, business and finance, and in the media – has to the health of the greater whole.
Will we devolve into a second civil war? Will we destroy our last chance to deal with climate change responsibly? It’s unknowable today.
Or perhaps we will usher in a positive 21st century American Revolution and inspire the world again. Such a revolution will be built on a new story to replace the growth-at-all-costs, extreme neoliberalism that we have most certainly outgrown, and is in conflict with our understanding of how complex systems behave. This new story of the Integral Age entails a fundamental and profound shift to holistic thinking across all domains, with dynamic networks replacing failed command and control institutions. It demands clarifying means and ends in our economics and aligning them with the universal principles that define all other systems that survive over time, and the emergence of a regenerative society that is most certainly underway. Not overseen by Trump of course, but in the opportunity he will afford us, difficult as it is, to stare at our shadow over the coming four years, a mere blip in the course of history.
Peace!
