Q & A 2018 08 August B

Hey everyone, here we go. So, I saw somebody ask right off the bat if there were any women. I think they said girls, actually. If there are any women in the audience, and if there are, well that's good. So welcome! Thanks to all you Patreon people for your continued support. It's a really big deal; it's made a huge difference, and you're a big part of the reason that biblical lecture was so ridiculously successful. I think more than 2 million people have watched it so far, so that's success by any stretch of the imagination.

Let’s start with some questions here. I've got the live chat going, and we also set it up so that we had questions taken to begin with that people could upvote, which seems to be a good idea. Let's start with one from Practice Cube: What would be a practical approach for developing your shadow? Well, that's a good one. Let's do a little review of Jungian psychology.

The first thing is, if you want to know about this, the proper source is Carl Jung's Collected Works, Volume 9. Volume 9 consists of two parts: A and B, published as separate texts. Volume 9 is called "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," and the other one is called "Ion." But in "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," there's a good discussion of the persona and the shadow.

The persona you could say is a good way of thinking about it. You know, you watch all those rom-coms where there's always kind of a beta male guy who's being real friendly and always failing miserably with women because basically, he's lying to himself and to them; he's a persona. A persona is the face that you show to the world when you're trying to pretend and to convince yourself and others that you're, I would say, harmless. But we could say a good person; but a good person isn't harmless. A good person is capable of... Well, maybe a good person is capable of anything but is willing to hold that in abeyance.

I read this interesting commentary a little while ago on a statement by Christ in the New Testament, and the statement is generally interpreted as that the meek shall inherit the earth. But I was looking up the multiple translations of the word meek, and meek is actually derived from a Greek word, of course, because the Bible, at least some of the original forms of the Bible, were in Greek. That word didn't exactly mean meek; it meant something like those who have weapons and the ability to use them, but are determined to keep the machine, will inherit the world.

That means that people who are capable of force, let's say, but decide not to use it, are in the proper moral position. Nietzsche commented on that affair a bit too, you know. He thought of most morality as cowardice—not because morality itself was cowardice, but because most people who are cowards disguise their cowardice as morality. They claim that their harmlessness—which is actually a consequence of their fear and inability to be harmful, say, or to be dangerous—is actually a sign of their moral integrity. And that's a really bad idea.

So, you know, if you're an axe murderer but you don't have an axe, that doesn't mean that you're moral. So now, with regards to... So that's the persona, and the persona is the mask that you wear. That's what persona means, the mask that you wear to convince yourself and the world that you're not a terrible monster. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you don't have to run away screaming. You know, you might think, well, that's a bit of an overstatement, but you was very interested in phenomena such as, say, psychological phenomena that would characterize the actions of someone who might be a Nazi camp guard, for example.

And, you know, that's a pretty monstrous form of behavior. The thing about Auschwitz camp guards is that there's no reason to assume, really, that they were much different than normal people. Now, there would have been exceptions, obviously. But what that means is that perhaps you too could be a Nazi camp guard, and perhaps you would even derive some enjoyment out of it. You might think not, but you shouldn't...