Demons & the Machine, John Vervaeke & Jonathan Pageau - My comment

We don’t often get to hear enough depth on the subject of evil within the new wave of intellectual discourse in the West. In this Rebel Wisdom interview with John Vervaeke and Jonathan Pageau, the idea of evil as an independent force was brought up and Jonathan had some key points. I then wrote a detailed comment on this subject that you may read, below.

Love it!! Regarding Jonathan’s comments on evil as a parasitic force, demonology and possession, this subject is right up my alley. At 23:45 he says: “To understand demonology is to understand that evil is transpersonal, it has a kind of parasitic intelligence. You can recognize it, name it and see the pattern, and you can notice it when it embodies itself. And you can see that most of us will give up to some “demon” sometimes ( I get angry, etc.), but then sometimes some people get completely ‘taken over’ by a parasitic pattern and possessed. “

Putting on my Jungian hat here, the reason why Hannah Arendt noticed “the banality of evil” is because of the ego/shadow boundary in the psyche. We push down and repress our primal, animalistic drives that are unsuitable in civilized society where they fester and grow in the personal and collective unconscious (the shadow). We utilize cognitive dissonance so that we cannot see our own inbuilt evil and we throw our primal and uncivilized drives and intentions onto other people (projection, scapegoating).

But our shadow material is not just raw energy floating about, irrationally popping up here and there. The human psyche is an ecosystem of energetic “entities” that translate, process, displace and sublimate raw energy into functional behavior in the same way that a cell is composed of organelles that process molecular energy to be used by the body. In the Jungian view, there exist many collective “archetypes” in the genetics of humanity that constitute our raw energetic drives which are then processed into the personality by what Jung called “complexes”. There are functional complexes (mother complex, father complex, the ego, the persona, etc) and then there are dysfunctional “autonomous complexes” which Jung also called “splinter psyches”. These are your demons. In innumerable ways, specific and developmental trauma can wound the developing psyche causing a fracture or split which gives rise to an autonomous complex. In the case where someone is “possessed” by anger for example, a complex has been triggered and is gaining access to the conscious ego where its energetic needs are fulfilled by the behavior it activates.

Now what if a byproduct of consciousness itself is a split between ego and unconscious that by default creates the shadow and within it autonomous complexes, and that an entire shadow tapestry or ecosystem is living side by side with our conscious lives pushed out of view by cognitive dissonance? Here we get to the dark energy behind the “machine” and the “banality of evil”.

Jungian shadow work is a process of going down the rabbit hole into the shadow to bring this material up. “Taking the red pill” is a colloquial term that means the same thing but it points to the shadow as it plays out in culture and social systems as corruption or “integrated” evil.

Depending on the stage of psycho-social consciousness we are in ( I often use the Integral stage system), we will personify this shadow ecosystem and its constituent parts as spirits, demons or the devil, complexes, or we will project it out onto other groups that threaten our primal needs, etc.

Now, why do people intuit that evil is autonomous or exogenous to the personal psyche? For one, because there is a discordance between shadow material and the conscious ego which cannot integrate it so it’s perceived as “other”. But also because the psyche itself is not limited to the individual body. I like Daniel Seigel’s definition of mind as “an embodied and relational field of energy and information”. The psyche itself is a collective “state” maintained between all in a society but also resonating with the entire biosphere. All of our psychic material, conscious and unconscious, beneficial or parasitic is collective. So evil (shadow energy) is an autonomous and somewhat external force, but so are the energies that we think of as loving and mutualistic. Love can take you over because some complexes are seeking that kind of possession while anger or hatred can take you over because the complexes channeling that elemental energy are written with that type of scripting. Therefore we personify this as both angels and demons and all kinds of spirits and deities. Are they real? Sure. Archetypes are real and complexes of the human psyche are real but we have to symbolize them to see them just as we have to write down an idea into words or create a movie character to transform psychic patterns into conscious meaning.

Technocracy seems to me to be just the newest form of the shadow archetype of tyranny which is the result of the imbalanced Royal (king/queen) archetype in the collective psyche. See Robert L. Moore. In the modern west where we have outgrown monarchy, an oligarchical technocracy is a regression and is a symptom of too many people continuing to live out a parent-child relationship with authority instead of psycho-spiritually developing their own personal sovereignty. The recent C-19 scenario showed us how dire our situation is. An autonomous complex channeling the tyranny archetype in the collective psyche pushed itself up into our lives and we buckled. Technocracy is the nightmare that we are collectively dreaming up to show us that we are “way” out of balance and that we are totally falling down on the job of maintaining psycho-social-spiritual health. As more of us take personal responsibility for our own shadow material, our own thoughts and behavior, and live lives of high psycho-social integrity, technocracy will falter and burn out.