The film Forbidden Planet, an update of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, shows a group of spacefarers attempting to investigate a world where the previous technologically advanced inhabitants have mysteriously died out. It seems the inhabitants must have been killed by an invisible monster. The monster attacks the humans and is repelled by their technological ingenuity. But it returns. Each time it returns, it is fiercer and stronger and bolder. In the end, the monster turns out to be the inner repressed fears and instincts of the earthmen: their collective Id, manifested, magnified and materialised by the alien technology hidden under the planet’s surface. The spacefarers think they represent rational, intelligent, civilising forces. But by representing themselves in this way, they are in denial of their own Dark Side. They learn that it was the aliens’ own collective Id that destroyed their civilisation and left them with a dead world.
In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker only exists because of Darth Vader –literally, because Vader is his father, and metaphorically, because Luke trains as a Jedi knight in response to the forces of Evil that Darth Vader commands. It would appear that the Universe can only be made manifest by polarising itself - since in the end All is One. So the question is: Must Luke and his father fight to the death? Or can they be reconciled?
The Western attitude in our fight against the War on Terror brings all this to mind. We live in a green, fertile land; the terrorists live in a dry, dusty desert. We live with a complex, civilised infrastructure; they live simply. We have the rule of law; they live by warlord and gun law. We are rational and secular; they are irrational and religious. We value this life; they value the next life. (It is our perception of the enemy I refer to here, rather than what they actually are!)
Modern metaphysics sometimes suggests that for each of us, our world is a projection of our own inner psychology. Objects in the world are symbols or aspects of ourselves which we need to consciously integrate; other people are attracted into our lives for the same reason. Is not Islamic fundamentalism the Shadow of Western values, everything we hate and deny?
Tony Blair once made a strange speech linking the defeat of terror with the abolition of poverty in the Third World. Then he went to war. But you cannot defeat your own Shadow by fighting it. It comes back as clever and as big as you. And we need it – as symbolised by our need for oil. You cannot ignore your own Shadow.
Our task, then, must be to express the forces within us to make ourselves Whole. If we are Whole, there is no Us and Them, no Good and no Evil; everything is valid if given its rightful place, nothing is the enemy, to be distorted by denial into fear and hate. How can we achieve this? The Way is this: First: Acknowledgement, second: Acceptance, third: Love. We must go over to the poor countries and build for them; show them how to maintain a civilised way of life; give away all our expertise, lovingly. Make them our friends. Only then can we defeat our own Shadow.