One doesn’t become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter is disagreeable and therefore unpopular. Carl Jung

One of the original purposes of the Archetype in Action™ Organization was to offer strategies for providing therapy for society as a whole. Many of us know that something is seriously out of whack in our society, but we know very little about what causes it and what to do about it. And yet, as Professors Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud rightly said, simply recognizing the problem is the first major step to curing the problem.

Many things we own, say, do or give our attention to represent subconscious aspects of ourselves, and many of those reflect poorly upon who we really are as individuals and as a society.

The other morning I saw an ancient white pickup truck with a scrawled rendition of the American flag emblazoned across its body in the traditional red, white and blue. On the tailgate in irregular letters was this message: ’63 USMC ’68. What does this say to me? It seems to me it suggests that the biggest thing that happened in the artist’s life was his loyal service to our country in the form of being a United States Marine during the Vietnam War, more than forty years ago. He was never adequately recognized for his perceived sacrifice of his service, so he needs to remind the rest of us about it today. Sadly, little in his life is worth mentioning since 1968, and the irregularity of the imagery seems to say that he’s not quite sure the sacrifice for his country was really worth it.

That got me wondering about the popularity of Ford F150 and larger pickup trucks and SUVs in our society. Most of us aren’t driving them because we need to herd cattle, ride fence, or drive long distances off road. For men, perhaps they are a way of saying to the world that they are as virile as the Marlboro Man, although his truck wouldn’t have such a nice paint job. And for both men and women, perhaps they are a way of expressing their need to feel bigger than we actually are, reflecting our own psychic insecurity.

These examples reflect symptoms of the Shadow in our society. While my analysis may not be correct, they are intended to be recognizable to the reader, to start the process of bringing each of our own Shadows into consciousness and resolution, and in so doing offer therapy to our society. Why is this important? If left unchecked, some of these tendencies can lead to genuine Evil manifest in the world.

If we looked at the German people between World War I and World War II, we would have found human beings very much like us. Immediately after World War I life was very tough. The loss of World War I was an economic catastrophe for the Germans, and many were struggling just to survive. Adolph Hitler himself lived in a homeless shelter for three years, but like none we offer today. His shelter had a library, which meant that his mode of struggle was to educate himself. Over the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, German leaders sold the people on the necessity of military might, and the people bought in on it because building up a strong military that could not be defeated (so the thinking went) meant jobs. The jobs meant they could raise their families and start to have a reasonable living, after years of struggle.

I am convinced that during that three-year period with the homeless shelter library, Adolph Hitler read some of the early works of Freud and especially Jung. The symbolism of the Third Reich clearly reflects this, and Jung himself suggests this in his later book, Man and His Symbols. Hitler also began to speak to his fellow inmates during this period, recognizing that he could influence others by his messianic style. He was influential because he spoke to the deep-seated Shadow of his compatriots. As his vision became more warped away from the trajectory of civilized human development, he was able to warp the psyche of his fellow countrymen, until they would perform some of the