Watch someone describe their political opponents. Not the policy disagreements (those are often legitimate). Watch the emotional texture. The certainty that the other side isn't just wrong but malevolent. The sense that they're dealing with something alien, incomprehensible, almost inhuman.
This is the tell. When someone describes an outgroup with that particular cocktail of revulsion and fascination, they're usually not seeing the outgroup clearly. They're seeing something else.
Carl Jung called it the shadow: the parts of ourselves we cannot accept, and so refuse to see. The shadow doesn't contain only our worst qualities (though it contains those). It holds everything incompatible with how we need to see ourselves. The rage that a peaceful person cannot acknowledge. The weakness that a strong person cannot admit. The cruelty that a compassionate person cannot face.
What we deny doesn't disappear. Tangential, but related to my writing on preference falsification. It operates underground, shaping perception, generating projection. We locate in others what we will not locate in ourselves. And we hate them for carrying it.
This works identically at the collective level. Groups have shadows. Nations have shadows. And the shadow's favorite hiding place is the enemy.
The American left has built its identity around compassion, inclusion, tolerance, and the protection of the vulnerable. These are genuine values, genuinely held. But shadow material clusters around whatever we most need to believe about ourselves.
The left's shadow includes its own authoritarianism: the impulse to coerce dressed in the language of care. "We know what's good for you" becomes compulsion when people refuse to comply. The rhetoric is therapeutic; the energy is controlling. Vaccine mandates, speech codes, the soft enforcement of correct opinion through social and professional consequences. The shadow of tolerance is intolerance.
The paradox of tolerance is a concept that says if a society extends tolerance to the intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance.
The shadow includes contempt for ordinary people disguised as concern for them. The progressive who advocates for the working class while sneering at their culture, their religion, their tastes, their "backwardness." The concern is genuine at one level. The contempt is genuine at another. Both are true. But only one is acknowledged.
The shadow includes cruelty toward heretics: the special viciousness reserved for those who leave the fold or question the orthodoxy. J.K. Rowling, Bari Weiss, anyone who moves from "ally" to "problematic." The punishment for apostasy exceeds the punishment for never having believed at all. This is not the behavior of people secure in their compassion. It's the shadow leaking through.
When the left looks at the right and sees authoritarians, bigots, and cruel people indifferent to suffering, they're seeing something real. But they're also seeing their own disowned material, projected onto a convenient screen.
The American right has built its identity around strength, self-reliance, patriotism, and resistance to tyranny. These are genuine values, genuinely held. And the shadow clusters here too.
The right's shadow includes its own fear: the terror beneath the toughness. The apocalyptic rhetoric, the sense that everything is under threat, the weapons stockpiled against imagined invasions. The person who performs strength most aggressively is often the person most afraid. Real confidence doesn't need to dominate every interaction. Real courage doesn't require constant enemies.
The shadow includes tribalism disguised as patriotism. "America first" can mean prioritizing national interests in a world of competing powers (legitimate). It can also mean the tribe is all that matters, and outsiders aren't fully real. The flag becomes not a symbol of shared principles but a marker of who belongs. This isn't patriotism. It's the shadow of patriotism: collective narcissism dressed in red, white, and blue.
The shadow includes indifference to suffering disguised as self-reliance. "Personal responsibility" is a genuine virtue. But it becomes shadow material when it functions as permission to ignore suffering you'd rather not see. The bootstrap mythology flatters those who succeeded and condemns those who didn't, without asking too many questions about the difference. The callousness is real. It's just inadmissible.
When the right looks at the left and sees authoritarian elitists who despise regular Americans and want to control how everyone thinks and lives, they're seeing something real. But they're also seeing their own disowned material, projected onto a convenient screen.
Here's what projection does: it makes the other side monstrous. Not wrong, not misguided, not operating from different premises. Monstrous. Incomprehensible. Evil.
This is the tell that the shadow is operating. Real disagreement doesn't feel like that. You can disagree with someone profoundly and still see them as human, still grant that they might have reasons, still recognize that you could be wrong. Projection eliminates all of that. The enemy becomes a screen onto which you throw everything you cannot face, and then you fight it there instead of in yourself.
The emotional satisfaction is immense. Nothing feels more righteous than battling your own shadow while believing you're battling evil. You get to be the hero of a moral drama without doing the harder work of self-examination. You get to externalize the problem. If the bad thing is out there, then you don't have to find it in here.
Both sides are doing this simultaneously. Each sees the other with perfect clarity (because they're seeing their own material) and with perfect blindness (because they don't recognize what they're seeing). Each is convinced the other side is uniquely dangerous. Each is wrong in exactly the same way.
I wrote recently about Athens: how it generated extraordinary flourishing for roughly a century, and how it decayed from within. Plato watched it happen and traced a cycle of degradation: rule by the honorable gives way to rule by the wealthy, which gives way to rule by populism, which gives way to tyranny.
The Athenian shadow, by the end, was enormous. A century of success had generated wealth, and wealth had generated hubris disguised as democratic confidence. They couldn't face what they'd become: an empire that dominated allies, a democracy that silenced dissent, a people who had substituted appetite for reason. So they projected. The problem was always someone else. Aristocrats who thought they were better than everyone. Philosophers who asked uncomfortable questions. Eventually, Socrates himself: the man who kept suggesting they examine themselves.
They killed him.
Of course they did. When the shadow is that large and projection is the only coping mechanism, anyone who threatens to make you see yourself becomes an existential danger.
Athens didn't fall to Sparta. It fell to the enemy within: the shadow it would not face, which eventually consumed the capacity for self-governance.
Jung's answer to the shadow was not suppression, not victory, not exile. It was integration. You do not defeat your shadow. You acknowledge it, withdraw the projection, find its proper place. The rage that a peaceful person cannot admit might be legitimate anger that needs expression. The weakness that a strong person cannot face might be vulnerability that needs tending. The cruelty isn't eliminated. It's integrated, held in awareness, given appropriate form.
What would integration look like at the collective level?
The left might acknowledge: We have our own authoritarian impulses. Our compassion has a coercive edge. We sometimes despise the people we claim to champion. Our tolerance has limits, and those limits reveal something about us.
The right might acknowledge: We are more afraid than we admit. Our patriotism shades into tribalism. Our self-reliance can be an excuse to look away from suffering. Our strength is sometimes performance covering fragility.
Neither would need to abandon their values. The values are real. But they would see themselves more clearly, and therefore see their opponents more clearly too.
The monster across the aisle would resolve into a human being: wrong about some things, right about others, carrying their own shadow just as you carry yours.
I don't know if this is possible at scale. Projection is easier than integration. Moral certainty feels better than ambiguity. And the incentive structures of modern media reward shadow projection with engagement, outrage, and tribal solidarity. The business model of the attention economy is essentially the monetization of the collective shadow.
But I think this is the question the present moment poses: Can we see ourselves clearly enough to stop projecting? Can we withdraw the shadow from the enemy and find it where it actually lives?
Or will we do what Athens did: kill the messengers, exile the questioners, and let the shadow consume us while we congratulate ourselves on our righteousness?
