Introduction
This sequel to “Events Along The Way” continues the examination of the unintegrated shadow and its collective consequences. It addresses the stigma of opposing a mainstream culture that enforces conformity through authoritarianism and social reinforcement, even when that culture sustains dysfunction and undermines the accountability and stability that built Western civilisation. The essay argues that the elevation of those who reject personal responsibility over those who build and maintain order has inverted the structures required for a healthy society, and that the resulting backlash against “patriarchy” and tradition is itself a failure to confront and assimilate the shadow. Drawing on the same framework of shadow work, mythology, and historical cycles, it proposes that genuine righteousness and the recovery of civilisation depend on individuals and communities identifying and following the paths that safely integrate the shadow rather than enabling its unassimilated expression.
Finding The Path
Confronting the psychological and emotional stigma of going against the mainstream cult which dominates morality and behaviour through authoritarianism, prejudice and social reinforcement.
When an individual can see a better way of doing things than what the community is enabling, to the extent that the community pressures anything which does not conform to the community standard, and will shut down innovation in order to sustain the status quo, whether that is moral or immoral or, more often, a mixture of both.
In western civilisation, the individual was empowered to be able to do something about it. Especially so in recent generations where that empowerment became an enablement, an entitlement, where questioning and fighting against the stability has actively led to the destruction of this stability.
The persecution of those who represent the counterbalance traditionally inherent in western civilisation as being somehow immoral for intending to maintain the stability and the continuation of traditions which created the stability.
The tradition is sound.
What has happened in the early 21st century is that those who have failed have succeeded in infiltrating and taking over every institution, maintaining and often violently maintaining a dominant narrative, but their rights are more superior than the rights of those who achieve, create stability, and are accountable for their behaviour.
This is the method through which the destruction of Western civilisation is occurring.
What began as empathic and humane idealism that humans should have rights and be treated equally has inverted the structure which provides stability for all. Entitlement, by the destructive elements who reject accountability, has elevated them above those who have the faculty of critical analysis, management, reason, and the intention of holistic wholesome stability.
It has been a mistake to allow them to succeed at that. The backlash against that is criticised as being immoral, controlling, evil, without any critical analysis going into what its actual objectives are seeking to destroy. In summary, the delusional are abusing the rational.
Everything we have inherited in our civilisation has come from the hard work of those who accept accountability, and it has come from the reason, the rationality y and the efforts, often of physical graft, of those who invest in the stability.
The backlash against the authority of a straight and stable society (“patriarchy”) has come through the root of enablement of negative human traits and the elevation of them to equal and above the status of the stable wholesome human traits.
By refusing to confront, accept, assimilate those negative traits so that an individual may become integrated and wholesome, the community has let the individual down as much as the individual has let the community down. Social pressure or community pressure to conform to the backlash instead of conforming to the stability because there has been no solid navigation system to differentiate between safe confrontation, acceptance, assimilation of the shadow self, compared with enablement and acceptance of what the shadow self is when it’s not successfully integrated.
The fall of civilisation is a result of non-assimilated shadow selves being given free rein, rather than being successfully channelled through healing systems for integration and wholesomeness.
The acceptance that we all have a shadow self, the identification of what it is, how it functions in the individual, how it functions collectively in terms of the collective unconscious and the effect it has on the community, and the failing of the previous systems to be able to successfully channel it towards wholesome integration, should be topics openly on the table for public analysis.
Because of the nature of the shadow self, we collectively and without coherent open agreement prefer sweeping it under the rug and then wonder why the rug has turned into a monster which is swallowing us all.
It is already at the stage where civilisation is falling. It is because we will not personally and collectively confront, accept, assimilate the shadow self and that of the collective unconscious, to become wholesome, to perpetuate a stable civilisation.
Some of the oldest and most loved mythologies of the roots of this civilisation are the very same story which I’m talking about here, both on an individual level repeatedly, and collectively for kingdoms and countries all of which have confronted exactly the same patterns that are being discussed here.
There is a wealth of information to extrapolate from them, comparing the fall of this nation to the fall of that nation for example, which can only be done during safe and stable times. We are not living in safe and stable times.
We’re at this stage of recognising where we are on the wheel, and what it’s going to take for us to rise up again rather than falling off entirely into the pits of extinction. It is an existential crisis. It happens to every generation. Some generations managed to have sufficient forward planning to make it easier for several generations to come in the future. For example, we’re currently using roads and buildings constructed by ancestors whose names we have forgotten. If we do not maintain their repair, it will not be very many generations before all of that crumbles and is overgrown by wild nature.
It appears from my analysis that a common agreement on how we should be living needs to be reviewed. We conform to things which we have no choice in shaping because if we do not conform to those things, we lose it or are penalised. There is resentment and anger for that. Everybody wants more power before they’ve proven that they have the self-responsibility to take accountability for any greater power than they already have.
Systems built on trust are valued only so far as they are trusted. The backlash, the death cult movement against stability, has encouraged us not to trust any systems at all. The infiltration of those institutions by members of the death cult has proven that we cannot trust them.
This is used as leverage in an attempt to smash them down completely, with no plan what to replace them with other than a vague notion that perhaps a more strict religious law or perhaps an ideology which historically has been a failure, sold on the false promise of giving more power to individuals and local collections of those who think like them, which is to say, who are as dysfunctional as they are.
Hope is a powerful light. False hope is an equally powerful light to those who do not know how to discern between truth and falsehood. All those following false lights are easily identifiable as those who are not able to discern between truth and falsehood. They of course don’t see it that way. Especially when they have to conform to a community which indoctrinates them that it is righteous normality.
There is the Catch-22. Everybody thinks they’re the righteous. Nobody wants to change bad habits. How can we identify what is actually righteous?
The proposal of this writing is that the righteous are those who bother to do the shadow work, using that framework, to confront, accept, assimilate the shadow which results in integration and wholesomeness. The awareness is an acceptance that there are paths to channel those energies safely, and that there are also, without those paths, a lot of problems. So it becomes necessary to identify on an individual by individual basis what the paths are which will help a person achieve integration of their shadow self, for them to become wholesome. This requires self honesty, which unfortunately is a rare thing because so many people maladapt to dysfunctional communities and broken ideologies. The state, society, the systems and institutions, the community, has largely let everybody down.
We can and should argue that the people to whom we pay our taxes are the people who are responsible for providing us with some awareness of how we can become more successful, which starts at teaching us the structures of how to straighten ourselves out. When what those institutions provide does not answer the questions we ask or fulfil our needs, they’re not fit for purpose. They have to adapt.
Failing that, we have to bypass them; we have to adapt. We have to straighten ourselves out, which means finding out for ourselves, what are the methods by which we can straighten ourselves out? What would that lifestyle look like? How can my needs be met that my shadow self is dealt with in a safe way, instead of it becoming a monster by my avoiding it?
How can we avoid the forces that would use that dysfunctional monstrous version of ourselves as pawns in their own game, to destroy the civilisation which has provided stability for generations of our people?
What did they do in the past which we failed to do throughout the living generations, which is resulting in the destruction of this civilisation?
Finding the Path : Summary
The path begins with the recognition that the shadow cannot be eliminated by denial, projection, or social consensus. Because the shadow is what we repress, any culture that rewards the refusal to own it will eventually be dominated by its projected and unassimilated forms. The practical task is therefore to distinguish between the safe confrontation, acceptance and assimilation of the shadow—which leads to integration and wholesomeness—and the mere enablement of the shadow in its unintegrated state. Without that distinction, social pressure simply replaces one form of repression with another, and the collective unconscious continues to act as an unacknowledged force shaping institutions, narratives and behaviour. The work is individual, yet its absence is collective; the path is found by asking, for each person and each community, what conditions allow the shadow to be channelled rather than given free rein.
See Also: Events Along The Way
See Also: Finding The Path
See Also: Walking The Path