Evil
By George Elder, 5/30/24
One of the difficulties of psychology is that one may have to unsay what was said—given the differences among people, even the different stages of development of the same person. Nor is it possible to speak simply and objectively about the psyche since we are always subjectively inside it.
This is especially true for the opposites, “good and evil.” For if we were to treat them as we just treated the “opposites” of high and low, success and failure, masculine and feminine, etc., we would have to say that Hitler had a point or that there was a silver lining in slavery. And that is not the case. It is true that good and evil are relative and that we cannot always be sure what is good for one person and bad for another. But the “moral opposites” are a special case. As Edinger puts it, they are the “most crucial and terrifying pair of opposites”—especially today since the malevolent half of that pair is dangerously active. (Mystery of the Coniunctio, 13)
It is as if a “spirit of evil” were loose in our midst, a contentious spirit making even decent people find only fault in the world. Crudeness goes unchecked. The morally weakest among us seem to lie, steal, and murder more often than usual and more at random. It is disturbing.
Traditionally, a culture’s religion has had the role of facing up to evil, explaining it, and providing guidance for how to deal with it.
In the Bible, we find a God who is good, who creates a good world that includes good human beings. But those humans “disobey” God—thereby introducing evil into the world. Jung writes: “Deviation from the numen seems to be universally understood as being the worst and the most original sin” (Letters, 2:370) Psychodynamically, this means “disobeying” the life requirements of the Self archetype (“God within”), i.e., the purpose for which one is here. The biblical story tells us that we have sufficient free will to deviate—leading to the feeling of guilt, if not just anxiety and depression, for failing to live as one should.
But the myth contains ambiguities. By being bad, Adam and Eve had their “eyes opened” to the “knowledge of good and evil”—imagery of becoming conscious of the moral opposites themselves, something that strikes us as good. Furthermore, they did not just willfully disobey but were “tempted” to do so by an evil serpent in the Garden of Eden. And it was God who put that serpent there. Eventually, this strange talking reptile would be called Satan (“adversary”) in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would be the good God’s evil opponent.
Nevertheless, all three religions of “the Book” committed to the proposition that Jung expresses in Latin: Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine—“All good from God, all evil from humanity.”
Hinduism is more open about its ethical ambiguities. In the Bhagavad Gītā, the good warrior Arjuna is reluctant to slay his kinsmen in battle lest he accrue bad karma—and ruin his current and future lives. But the driver of his war chariot is Kṛṣṇa (the divine avatāra or incarnation of Viṣṇu, the Creator) who commands: “Do not become a coward, Arjuna”—Stand up and fight! Besides, the Lord is the “origin and dissolution of beings,” and all those destined to be killed that day on the battlefield will be killed—whether or not Arjuna cooperates.
It is all part of the cycling of the ages or yugas: from an initial Golden Age of righteousness to the present evil Kali Yuga of “anger, lust, passion, pride, and discord . . . . an excessive preoccupation with things material and sexual.” Thus, good and evil are inevitable, part of a universal dynamic whereby the one flows into the other—somewhat like the dynamic of yin and yang but over vast periods of time. (See relevant pages in my Snake and the Rope.)
The world’s religions tend to be optimistic about all this. They rely upon the free will of human beings to do good and resist evil (from whatever source). Moral codes (the ancient Egyptian “Negative Confession,” the biblical “Ten Commandments,” Buddhism’s “Five Precepts,” etc.) provide guidance for how to live correctly while the threat of punishment—sometimes eternal punishment—provides added motivation not to live in sin.
It all works out for the good. In Western religions, at the “End of Days,” evil is conquered while good people receive their just reward—fully and forever. In Hinduism, the good and the wise become one with Brahman—sat-cit-ānanda (“being, consciousness, bliss”)—while enlightened Buddhists enter an ineffable Nirvāṇa or a Celestial Buddha’s Pure Land. For these Indian religions, however, this good outcome is not so much a victory over evil as it is a victory over all the pairs of opposites—by going “beyond” them, and not just morally but mentally.
Jung did not need to be reminded how evil human beings can be. After all, he lived through two World Wars: “Something of the abysmal darkness of the world has broken in on us, poisoning the very air we breathe and befouling the pure water with the stale, nauseating taste of blood.” (CW 10. par. 410) He even agreed with the axiom, “all evil from humanity”—for the reason that it could not come from anywhere else in a world depleted of metaphysics, with no transcendent Deity and no real Devil. People may say they believe in such things, but they don’t behave that way.
This means, for Jung, that the traditional religions have died—which is why their moral codes no longer carry force, why there is more gratuitous evil in the world and so little guilt. Of course, there are no longer consequences in an Afterlife, no heavenly reward for good behavior and no torment in hell for being bad.
Still, it is remarkable how few people will admit to being bad or even wrong. Criminals claim they were discriminated against or had no choice, while lesser miscreants claim that “Everybody does it.” And they may be right. Edinger explains:
In order to survive, it is absolutely essential that the ego experience itself as more good than bad. . . . And this of course explains the creation of the shadow, for the young ego can tolerate very little experience of its own badness without succumbing to total demoralization. It also accounts for another universal phenomenon—the process of locating evil. Evil has to be located, it has to be fixed and established as residing in some particular spot. Whenever something bad happens, blame or responsibility must be established if at all possible. It is exceedingly dangerous to have free-floating evil. Someone must personally carry the burden of evil. (Mystery of the Coniunctio, 13-14)
That “someone” is someone else, carrying the projection of one’s own shadow, even if that other person is also guilty. I have already written in this space on the unconscious “Shadow” and its “Projection.” They help us understand the moral ambiguity in religious materials.
The conscious ego (that the religions call broadly a “human being”) may try to be good by following the sacred moral code. The well-meaning ego may even follow the traditional “good God” as its model (“be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect,” Matthew 5:48). Buddhists try to imitate, even identify, with the Body, Speech, and Mind of the “perfect Buddha.”
But it always fails. And that is because there is an unconscious shadow on the other side of consciousness that wants to do otherwise—and often gets its way. That explains St. Paul’s perplexity: “I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.” (Romans 7:15) It explains the unending conflict in rabbinic Judaism: the “urge to do evil” (yetser ha-ra’) alongside the “urge to do good” (yetser ṭov).
“Good and evil” reside within the psyche as a pair, but they are almost always split from each other—one of them in the “light” and the other in “darkness,” the “right hand” not knowing what the “left hand” is doing (in thought, word, or deed). Of course, one experiences evil all around; but it is “outside” in other persons. Notice that nations never want war, but there is war—and always only in “defense,” for which each nation has fortunately stored many weapons.
As for the “good God” of the Bible, Jung reminds us that this is a theological distortion. The God of Hebrew scripture is actually amoral or morally ambivalent: “Yahweh gives death and life, brings down to Sheol [hell] and draws up; Yahweh makes poor and rich, he humbles and also exalts.” (I Samuel 2:6-7) “I am Yahweh, unrivalled, I form the light and create the dark, I make good fortune and create calamity; it is I, Yahweh, who do all this.” (Isaiah 45: 7) In the New Testament, this God so loved the world that he sacrificed his Son to appease his wrath (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
“Satan,” then, is a name for the malevolent half of this image of God—theologically separated from the benign half to give the comforting impression that divinity is the source of “all good” and not also of evil. Job suffered the whole truth and protested divine injustice. Christians plead in their Lord’s Prayer, as if addressing the Serpent: “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”
I have already written on this site that the “God” of religion, by whatever name, is the “God within” the human psyche—what Jung calls the archetype of the Self within the collective unconscious. And this is true psychologically whether or not one believes in God. It is what the Upaniṣadic sages called the “Inner Controller.” Now we learn that the opposites of “good and evil” reside not just at the personal level of our psychology—as ego and shadow—but in our impersonal depths, side by side, “controlling” us unawares and making it almost impossible to do good and avoid evil.
We can no longer be confident that—in the “End”—it will all work out for the good. And trying to go “beyond” this conflict of opposites (as Nietzsche tried to do by staying away from people) is to give up on the human enterprise.
What, then, can we do?
First of all, Jung says, “you have got to cling to the Good, otherwise the devil devours you.” (Letters 2:135). I’m surprised how often he says that—given the ego's small amount of will power and the difficulty of defining good and evil, while traditional moral codes are all too clear. Nevertheless, Jung is saying those codes list very real sins to which we must pay attention lest we lose our humanity, our culture. He adds to them “unconsciousness” as one of the “toughest roots of all evil.” (CW 11, par. 291)
It follows that “clinging to the good” includes self-reflection, bringing as much consciousness to one’s actions as possible. Indeed, “we must have the freedom in some circumstances to avoid the known moral good and do what is considered to be evil, if our ethical decision so requires.” (Memories, 330) In this way, “ethical decision becomes a subjective, creative act”—rather than obedience to some outer rule or even the law of the land (written by unreflecting officials).
But one’s shadow persists: “That is to say, he can do good, but cannot avoid evil even though his ethic impels him to test the strength of his will in this regard.” (Letters, 2:364) And so the second thing we can do is become as conscious as possible of our personal shadow—rather than repress it “out of sight” (but not out of mind) and rather than project it onto others because unacknowledged within ourselves. In fact, the withdrawal of projections is a life-long task, a gathering of oneself spread about in the world. Otherwise, we just keep “infecting” the environment with our own unconscious immorality.
I think it is possible to make progress in this regard even without analysis. Indeed, it must be the case since analysis often gives a false confidence that the “shadow work” has been achieved. But the work is very difficult, ongoing. Listen to the very conscious Jung as an old man:
My shadow is indeed so huge that I could not possibly overlook it in the plan of my life, in fact I had to see it as an essential part of my personality, accept the consequences of this realization, and take responsibility for them. Many bitter experiences have forced me to see that though the sin one has committed . . . can be regretted, it is not cancelled out. (Letters 2:277)
That is a glimpse of what it means to stop trying to be “perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect” and to be (honestly and more modestly) merely “complete.”
What then of “Satan,” or the Buddhist “Māra,” or the ancient Iranian “Ahriman” who chose the lie rather than truth—images of archetypal Evil? Although residing in the depths of every human psyche, this transpersonal Shadow is not actually accessible and is as far away symbolically as “Hell.” It is an ineradicable structure of the unconscious and cannot be assimilated by ego consciousness. But it can be known to exist—and anticipated. Divine Malice acknowledged is likely to be less malicious than great evil that one naively imagines “can’t happen here.”
Furthermore, an ego that has some sense of its own shadow is less open to possession by an uprush of collective unconscious energy—in either its benign or malign manifestation. Nor will it take on more guilt than deserved since, sometimes, “The Devil made me do it,” is the proper judgment—humiliating though that may still be.
“Test the spirits,” is good biblical advice to counter possession of any kind. Edinger writes: “It means every stream of libido, every inclination, every fantasy stream that comes up, has to be critically examined. It has to be related to by a conscious, critical, judging, moral ego.” (The New God-Image, 114) This is a glimpse of living seriously.
Finally, there is a very advanced Jungian view that just as the “good” side of God incarnated (according to the Christian myth) in Jesus so the “bad” side of God can incarnate in ourselves—not only so we learn to handle evil better but also to “transform” or humanize the dark side of the archetypal psyche. It may mean “succumbing in part,” Jung writes, but that carries the danger of succumbing entirely, with dire consequences. (CW 17, par. 319). One can study this new religious idea in Jung’s essay, “Answer to Job,” in Edinger’s Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s ‘Answer to Job,’ and in his The New God-Image. They belong to the future when “good and evil” are no longer so split but sit closer—like the lion and lamb at the End of Days.
