“Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. In this latter case, unfortunately, there is no scientific test that would prove the discrepancy between perception and reality. Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naively projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection.”
-- Carl Jung
THE SHADOW SOULS
The psychologist Carl Jung developed a theory of something he called the “Shadow Aspect.” It’s an unconscious aspect of the self that we repress and then project onto someone else as a criticism of their differences from us. Usually it is some dark aspect of humanity and we use it to justify our hatred of another person or group. In a sense, it’s like a photographic negative of who we are, something that we despise, but that is actually a part of our being. Our mirror opposite.
Jung felt that when we repress this dark aspect of ourselves it manifests itself in the world at large, coming to life, so to speak, in the form of some enemy or rival.
I couldn’t help but be struck by this notion in noting the response of many “progressives” to the candidacy of Sarah Palin. For months I watched people indulge in cult-like devotion to Senator Barack Obama. This was not a devotion to his policies, particularly given that those policies were not terribly different from those of his democratic rivals. It was a devotion to some image or concept of what Obama represents.
Many people are justifiably angry about the last eight years of the “W” administration. These people feel we’ve lost our way both politically and morally. I wholly agree with such criticism.
However, many critics go much further. They see the behavior of the conservatives in America as a dark and dangerous “other” that needs to be vanquished. They see conservatives as ideologues who will accept any activity from their leader as long as he’s their leader and follows an right-wing ideological framework.
Yet, in many ways, this is a mirror reflection of their own behavior, their own blind hero-worship and ideological devotion, but rather from the left rather than the right.
To fight off their own demons and to hopefully slay their enemy, they have projected an image onto someone that seems to know what they want and what they have been looking for. He is someone who is “handsome,” “charming,” and “charismatic.” He is Senator Barack Obama.
At times when people speak of Obama, it sounds as if they’re talking about a lover of theirs or even a messiah. Though many perceive of him that way, they are loathe to admit it (certainly not to themselves).
Some, however, are willing to be open:
“Barack Obama is inspiring us like a desert lover, a Washington Valentino… We're talking about it; we're getting involved, we're tuning in and turning out in numbers we haven't seen in ages. My musician friends and I are writing songs to inspire people and couples all over America are making love again and shouting "yes we can" as they climax!”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lili-haydn/why-obama-is-like-a-deser_b_89285.html
Okay. Now, if you’re at a point in your life where you shout political slogans during sex, there’s something deeply wrong with you. You don’t need a political leader, you need a psychologist. Still, this is far from the only example hat Obama is a representational image rather than a flesh-and-blood candidate of issues and policies.
For some he is a “Lightworker”:
“Many spiritually advanced people I know… identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/06/06/notes060608.DTL?
For still others, he is “God-like”:
“I’m taking a special look at Barack Obama because he’s a lot closer to a Jesus-type than the other candidates, by quite a bit. What if God decided to incarnate as men preaching “hope and change.” And what if we didn’t recognize them, because we are so dull, and let them slip away, not availing ourselves of the opportunity to be led by God!”
http://www.jg-tc.com/articles/2008/03/31/opinion/letters/doc47f0586a2ff1b441328510.txt
And, finally, yet for many, he is “The One”:
“`I do believe I do today we have the answer to Miss Pittman's question – it's a question that the entire nation is asking – is he the one?’ Winfrey said. `South Carolina – I do believe he's the one.’
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1207/7281.html
This is only a very small sample of these types of things that have been written and said about him. The above quotes and articles are not anomalies.
To be sure, Obama has been skilled at manipulating these sorts of feelings. Those who argue that he has no complicity in these projections are dead wrong:
"We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
“Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that… this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Beautiful words, though no less calculated.
With such hunger on the part of voters and such skilled and mellifluous speeches on the part of Obama, he became something larger than a politician in the eyes of many of his supporters.
Barack Obama is a brilliant man and a brilliant politician, but I think any sane person knows (I hope) that he is not a God-like Lightworker, a desert lover or “The One.” However, the fact that he has engendered these types of responses is reflective of, I think, the subconscious of those who feel (and write) these things.
It reflects a need on the part of his followers to find someone to lead them out of the wilderness. It reflects their need to vanquish the demons of the last eight years. It is also indicative of an angry mass consciousness which has created a Manichean narrative which requires characters of evil to parallel it’s characters of good.
If you have a hero, if you have “The One,” then you must have a villain— “The Other.” Initially, that villain was Senator Hillary Clinton. She became characterized as something of a cross between “the other woman” and Medusa.
She was excoriated as all that is wrong with politics from “triangulating” political strategy to deranged narcissism. She was pilloried with every historical prejudice towards dangerous women. She was likened to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. It was said that her campaign was racist and cynical. It was written that she didn’t concede properly and that she didn’t properly “embrace” him at the Democratic Convention.
Again, if you doubt the extent of this characterization, please see:
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/02/hillary-sexism-watch.html
In short, she was the dark and dangerous female “other” who threatened the ascendancy of “The One.” As Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero With A Thousand Faces:
“The testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer.”
Well, The One prevailed. But then something happened. The Shadow had not been destroyed, only sublimated. The extremes of idolization and the depths of misogyny which combined to lead Obama to victory produced its mirror image in a new rival— Governor Sarah Palin.
Who is this woman? Who is this cipher from the Alaskan tundra? She is Obama’s mirror. She is Obama’s Shadow Self. She is the very embodiment of those superficial aspects which make Obama popular, while at the same time representing the opposite of the that for which he stands politically and the very demons which his supports hungered for him to slay.
The Cult of Obama engendered the Shadow of Palin.
Let’s be clear. I do not believe that Palin possesses the intellectual depth of Obama. (In contrast to Hillary Clinton, who is brilliant in her own right.) What she possesses are telegenic, biographical and ideological attributes for the right similar to those which excited the left about Obama.
The similarities are striking.
Her youth is the counterpoint to Obama’s. She’s 44. He’s 47.
She’s a former beauty queen and TV sports reporter. Obama is routinely complimented on his movie star good looks.
She is a former high school basketball star who led her team to the state championship while playing with a stress fracture. Obama played on a high school basketball team that won the state championship and was known for his tenacious playing style.
Palin had been governor of Alaska for less than two years before being nominated as the Republican vice presidential candidate. Obama had been in the Senate barely two years before he began his candidacy for president.
Her biography as an Alaskan outdoorswoman and mother of five have captivated her Republican base. Obama’s biography as the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a white woman from Kansas transfixed his supporters.
She is a hard right-wing ideologue. Obama is seen as a champion of liberal/progressive causes.
And let us not forget, she is a “she.” As a woman, she represents that for which so many of Obama’s supporters (both male and female) have reacted to so strangely and stridently— the female interloper in a political world dominated by men.
What is most tragic to me about the Palin ascendancy is that it exposes that aspect of the “Obama Nation” for which I have been critical— It’s cult-like nature. So crazed and invested in destruction, demonizing and idolization have many of his supporters been that, to me, in some strange and cosmic way, they sowed the seeds of a true progressive’s potential undoing.
In this year when there is the real and tantalizing possibility that a progressive agenda led by Obama will take hold of the White House, it would be a crime if the extreme nature of many of his supporters turns out to be the political and cosmic undoing of much-needed change in the political agenda.
The Cult of Obama. The Shadow of Palin.
Let us not be shocked that the one has engendered the other.
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