Understanding Good & Evil | Dear Alexander #036

Carl Jung believed the pathway to completion as a human is through the ‘embodiment of the monster’ — the discovery of ‘the shadow’. Jung didn’t believe you could be a good person until you realised your capacity for malevolence and evil. Once this is understood, then it must be brought under control.

There are typically two types of people…

Person A

A “good person” whose naive to their capacity to perpetrate malevolence.

Person B

A person who’s realised they’re not as morally virtuous as they thought by understanding they have the unlimited potential to express the ugliest parts of the human experience.

Person A thinks they’re a good person because they can’t not be, they’re like a domesticated house cat. They don’t even have the capacity to be bad because they don’t comprehend they can be; there’s no morality in that.

Person B’s morality and virtue is developed through the harrowing realisation you can be every monster you despise if exposed to the right circumstances. The irony is what stops most from becoming the monster is realising you could be the monster. But you learn to control it by befriending it, this is when you encounter ‘the shadow’.

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell” — Carl Jung