Carl Jung once said that "to confront a person
with their shadow is to show them their own
light." It might seem counter-intuitive
but it's one of his most powerful insights; the idea that the path to illumination and
becoming whole can only be found by exploring

the darkest parts of who you are. And that each
and every person has a hidden capacity for evil.
It's a terrifying realization and it's only when
you make the choice to face your own demons,
the things you're most afraid to explore,
that you can uncover your light and reach

your highest potential. For me, it's also
the key insight in the movie Fight Club;
it's a film that's just as relevant
today as it was when it came out in 1999.
"When you wrote Fight Club you tapped into
something that it was really fascinating for me."

"But it is that existentialist moment
where you realize that you have to
sacrifice your youth for something.
It's a very Martin Heidegger moment
where you realize you have to become
a being living towards death. You're

not going to live forever and you've
got to give your life to something." It's hard to deny its cultural impact. "The first
rule of Fight Club you do not
talk about Fight Club." "What the hell happened to you? I get it the first

rule of Fight Club right?" We can think
of Fight Club as a kind of modern myth;
a warning about the dark impulses that exist
in all of us, and there will be spoilers ahead. This is the narrator of the film; the whole story
is told from his point of view. He hates his job.

He drifts aimlessly from one distraction to another. We never learn his name, but his experience is so common that we can't help but think that he's meant to represent all of us. He has insomnia, and he says that when you can't sleep, nothing feels real; 

you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake. This is the first clue that something has gone very wrong. His half-waking state symbolizes the fact that he's unconscious; sleepwalking through life, he's in denial about the most basic facts about who he is. 

It's here that we meet Tyler Durden, a mysterious man who rejects society and encourages the narrator to embrace his more primal instincts. But there's a problem: Tyler isn't a real person; he's an imaginary projection of the narrator's subconscious mind. 

Tyler embodies all the things the narrator wishes he could be: confident, assertive, charismatic, but he also represents his darker side; a hidden urge for power, chaos, and destruction. All the things he's repressed into his subconscious. And so the irony is that the narrator in fact has all 

the qualities he admires in Tyler because they're the same person, he's just too unconscious to recognize it. One day he meets a woman named Marla Singer. He likes her, but he's so disconnected from his own feelings that he won't admit it even to himself. He's desperate for intimacy, but when she 

hugs him, he pushes her away. It's something a lot of people can relate to. We live in a world that cuts us off from our innermost authentic being. A system of social conditioning that keeps us from going after the things that would make us feel whole and alive. "We are the middle children of 

history, "Tyler says. "With no purpose or place, 
we have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression 
is our lives." Why does this happen to us? If you imagine what you were like when you were 
one or two years old, you had what you might 

visualize as a 360-degree personality. As children 
we naturally express every part of who we are, but very soon our teachers, parents, and 
other authority figures begin to influence us. We learn that some parts of us are socially 
acceptable: politeness, taking instructions, 

being easy to get along with. Little by little 
we learn to conform. We build a self-image that carries within it everything we think of as good. 
It becomes a social mask that we present to the world. Jung called this "the Persona." It's 
reinforced by the world around us. By itself, 

the Persona isn't bad. It's an important part of 
ego development, but it's only one fragment of a much bigger self. In Fight Club we see how the 
narrator builds his persona. He becomes a slave to 

what he calls the Ikea nesting instinct, spending 
his free time buying mass-produced goods. It becomes a part of his identity and he asks: "What 
kind of dining set defines me as a person?" But all of this has another side, because at the same 
time that we're building our ego and our persona, 

a hidden part of ourselves is growing. The 
same people who tell us that some parts of us are good also tell us that other parts of us are 
shameful and wrong. Things like rage, jealousy, and resentment; all of the qualities that don't 
fit into this ideal self-image become the very 

things we reject in ourselves; creating what
Jung called "The Shadow." The sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide; the parts
of ourselves we completely disown. We find it so unacceptable that we repress it, pushing
it deep into the unconscious mind. In Fight

Club the narrator's Shadow is Tyler Durden; he's
all the things we've been conditioned to reject. He steals cars, he works as a waiter
where he contaminates the food, and at night he splices single frames of graphic
and offensive images into family movies. And he

encourages the narrator to do the one thing we're
all taught from an early age never to do: fight. The shadow is the flip side of ego development
because we all have within us two selves: one conscious, the other unconscious; one we embrace,
the other we disown; one we display and the other

we hide. They develop side by side out of the same
life experience, and so the ego and the shadow are mirror images of each other. This process happens
to everyone. It develops naturally in every young child but there's a danger when we hide too much
of ourselves away. Because the more we put into

the shadow the less we have conscious access to,
and the bigger and stronger the shadow becomes. Jung wrote that "everyone carries a shadow and the
less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life the blacker and denser it is... at all counts
it forms an unconscious snag thwarting our most

well-meant intentions." Because repressing the
shadow doesn't make it disappear. It's still there just below the surface where it continues to work
behind the scenes. When we ignore it, it takes on a life of its own influencing everything we do;
causing all kinds of compulsive behavior. This

is exactly what happens to the narrator. He comes home one day to find his apartment in flames, but he's repressed so much of himself that he doesn't even realize that he was the one who did it. At night when he can't remember if he's been sleeping or not, Tyler runs wild, 

and his shadow impulses take over. Tyler tells him that "you were looking for a way to change your life, you couldn't do this on your own." And so to maintain his self-image as a good and moral person, he has to shift the blame to something else. This is so common that we see 

it virtually every time a famous person makes a public apology. Will Smith's Oscar slap might be one of the clearest examples of someone who's built a persona on kindness and non-violence, and yet his unconscious shadow reveals a level of rage and aggression he's kept hidden. 

"I don't believe in violence as the reaction to violence, no no no like violence begets violence. I just couldn't connect to violence being the answer, love had to be the answer... there is no part of me that thinks that was the right way to behave in that moment." When people 

apologize for outbursts like this they'll often say things like "I don't know what came over me, that's not who I am." And yet it IS who they are. It's the shadow side they're unconscious of 

because they've repressed it to the point where it feels like a separate self. The more they disown it the more it possesses them, making them act out in all kinds of unexpected and damaging ways. But it's a mistake to think that the shadow is always bad. It can be destructive, 

but it also holds tremendous energy and positive
potential. It carries inside of it many of your greatest gifts and undeveloped talents. Most of
the qualities we've left behind from our childhood can be found somewhere within the shadow. The
psychologist Marie-Louise Von Franz describes

a patient she had; a 48-year-old man who'd lost
a lot of the joy he felt when he was younger. This man told her about one of his dreams where
he was wandering in the yard of a strange building

when all of a sudden an old childhood friend
showed up; someone he hadn't seen in years, decades. They walked together and saw three
beautiful horses running in the grass, but what did it mean? Von Franz says that her
work with the patient revealed that the old

childhood friend represented "a still
unperceived part of the dreamer's own personality," something that had been a part
of him when he was a child but had long since abandoned and lost. And yet here he was in the
world of the dream ready to make friends again.

Our shadow is the lost part of us that wants
to reconnect; it wants to find expression, not to be hidden away. The horse symbolizes the
freedom the dreamer stands to gain by accessing these primal instincts, reclaiming his lost sense
of play in much the same way. Tyler Durden also

carries the positive qualities that the narrator
has lost. Tyler's not afraid of pain or adversity, he's the strength and the resilience we need to
pick ourselves up when we hit rock bottom, the part of us that wants to be tested, to see what we
could really accomplish if we had no other choice.

Because it's only after we've lost everything that
we're free to do anything. It's an important point
because Tyler himself says that he's free in all
the ways that the narrator is not. The shadow also
includes the unlived life inside of us and when we
learn to integrate it we can access a powerful new

energy that we wouldn't otherwise have. These two
parts of ourselves are always in tension. While
the ego works to protect its positive self-image,
the shadow works to expand that self-image. It
pushes us to explore the undiscovered parts of
who we are. It's the reason that true change can

never come from the established values of
the ego; it can only come from the shadow. There's a scene where Tyler confronts a man
named Raymond who works at a convenience
store. He takes his wallet removes his student
ID and asks him "what did you go to school for?"

"To be a veterinarian," Raymond tells
him. "Well why did you drop out?" "Too much school," he says. "Would you rather be
dead Raymond?" It's here that we learn that this
wasn't a robbery at all. Tyler returns the
wallet and says "I'm keeping your license,

I know where you live, and I'm gonna check
up on you. If you're not on your way to
being a veterinarian in six weeks you will be
dead." He lets him go and Raymond runs away. "What was the point of that?" The narrator asks.
"The point," Tyler says, "is that tomorrow will

be the most beautiful day in Raymond K Hessel's
life. His breakfast will taste better than any
meal you and I have ever tasted." What Tyler does
in this scene is absolutely terrifying and morally
questionable, but the shadow is an archetype
that exists outside of conventional morality.

It's beyond ideas of right and wrong. It's the
chaotic force in our lives that fights against
stagnation. The moment we're too comfortable, when
we've played it too safe for too long, the shadow
is the creative impulse that pushes us past our
comfort zone so we can keep growing and connecting

with the things that make us feel alive. And
when we experience loss, when it feels like
our world is crumbling all around us, the shadow
is where we draw the strength and resilience we
never knew we had; it was in us all along but it
was unconscious, waiting for us to tap into it.

To make his point Tyler says that "you are not
your job, you are not the contents of your wallet,
you are the all-singing all-dancing crap of
the world. You are the same decaying organic
matter as everything else and we are all part
of the same compost heap." Why? Because in so

many ways the shadow IS the crap of the
world. It represents everything within
us that we've thrown away and tossed out like so
much garbage. Garbage that's foul and offensive,
but it's also the fertilizer that brings new life
to decay. And so it's our rejected shadow side

that holds the key to rebirth and renewal. It's
what makes it possible to transform ourselves
and become who we were really meant to be. This
idea is actually common to many philosophical
traditions including alchemy. The early alchemists
attached a lot of importance to what they called

the "Prima Materia" which is the beginning
substance used in the alchemical process, and
yet it was also described as 'useless excrement.'
Most people ignored it, dismissing it as worthless,
but through a process of heating it, distilling
it, and putting it through intense pressure, it

could be transformed into gold; that same pressure
is what we need for our own transformation.  Jung emphasized the importance of living
your own unique life and connecting with who you really are; it's a never-ending process
of becoming whole, which he called individuation.

The psychologist Jolanda Jacobi wrote that: "All
too many people do not live their own lives, and generally know next to nothing about their real
nature. They make convulsive efforts to adapt, not to stand out in any way, to do exactly what
the opinions, rules, regulations, and habits

of the environment demand as being right, and so
they are slaves of what other people think." But the path to individuation is fraught with many
pitfalls. As we've seen, within the shadow also lies our darkest and most destructive impulses.
So how do we guard against these dangers?

Because the shadow is unconscious it can only be
known indirectly. One of the ways we see it is in something called "shadow projection." It happens
when we look at other people and see within them the very things that we most want to deny in
ourselves. For example, when the narrator first

meets Marla he's been visiting many different
support groups for people who are dying. Even though he's perfectly healthy, he pretends that
he's dying too so that he can feel a sense of closeness and emotional release without having
to face the fear of death in himself. When Marla

shows up to all the same support groups that
he's been going to, it makes him angry. "She's a liar," he says. "She has no diseases at all,
she's a tourist, a faker." Of course, he might as

well he's just describing himself. He projects all
these labels onto Marla because it's always easier
to see them in other people than it is to admit in
ourselves. But an even bigger problem emerges when
large groups of people come together and
act out their shadow projections all at

once. When they single out people to target
and blame for everything that's going wrong,
it becomes scapegoating. Whether it's political
opponents, people with a different way of life,
or a different ideology, it's always the
same: one group takes out all their hostility

and frustration by projecting their negative
qualities onto another group. With the rise of
social media it's easier than ever for people to
form ideological tribes where they project their
own shadows onto people they disagree with. They
never think of themselves as evil and yet they

see lots of evil in other people; this is called
the "Collective Shadow," and it takes many forms;
from mass hysteria where whole countries become
possessed by their darkest shadow impulses to the
fanaticism that happens when a persecuted group
carries the projection of everything the larger

society rejects. It often takes hold in a
leader who then carries and spreads those
projections in ways that easily spiral out of
control. As Nietzsche once wrote: "Madness is
something rare in individuals but in groups,
parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule."

We see it when men from all over the country begin
to join Tyler in huge numbers; it grows beyond the
fights they run in underground clubs and it
becomes a movement, expanding to every city
across the country. And it's no longer Fight Club
it becomes "Project Mayhem." If Tyler Durden is

an expression of the personal shadow, then Project Mayhem is an expression of the collective Shadow; all the things our culture tries to repress and hide, the things our society finds so unacceptable it pretends doesn't even exist. The problem is, just like with the personal shadow, 

the more a culture tries to repress it, the more destructive it becomes. What's alarming is that these men aren't criminals or psychopaths like you might expect. They're ordinary working people who've been seduced by a charismatic leader: "They are the people who cook our meals, haul our trash, 

connect our calls, and drive our ambulances." Every single one of them feels more and more detached and disenfranchised by a system that treats them as disposable cogs in a machine, and they connect with Tyler's message because they're hungry for meaning and purpose in a 

world that seems more empty and superficial every day. Over time, we see how the members of Project Mayhem mindlessly conform and become disturbingly cult-like. The first rule of Project Mayhem is that you don't ask questions. The goal becomes destruction for its own sake, to bring down the 

buildings of major banks and credit card companies in order to reset the debt record; it's here that Project Mayhem spirals totally out of control, and Tyler reveals his dark vision for the future. "In the world I see, you're stalking elk through the Grand Canyon forests around the ruins of 

Rockefeller Center. You'll climb thick vines that wrap the Sears Tower... when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison in the empty carpool lane of some abandoned highway." What we see in Project Mayhem is a microcosm for what happens when we 

try to repress the collective Shadow; it releases our worst impulses that threaten to destroy the basis of civilization itself. And what's truly terrifying is that the leader of the movement could be anyone. The narrator isn't special, he's not an evil genius, he's not even consciously

aware of what he's doing. We see examples of this in the rise of fascism in World War II, but no group is immune from the shadow. Even ideologies that seem well-intentioned, that come from a genuine desire for good can fall victim to it. When governments use censorship to silence voices

they disagree with they're acting out a kind of cultural repression. When ideas are canceled from the mainstream they're pushed away into our cultural unconscious but they don't disappear; they're just forced further underground. Because throughout history we find that some of the most

evil people who carried out the most horrific cruelties believed they were doing good. When the shadows of entire countries are projected onto the face of an enemy, any group can be made into a scapegoat. Those who are possessed by the shadow genuinely believe that by destroying their enemy

they're ridding the world of evil even as they perpetuate that same evil within themselves. So what can we do? Jung tells us that the only way we can hope to challenge the world's evil is to become conscious

of the shadow within ourselves. It's what the narrator does at the end when he finally realizes all the damage he's done. He takes responsibility and accepts that he's the one that unleashed Project Mayhem onto the world. Most people are afraid to face their own darkness because they're

worried it might consume them if they do, but
it's just the opposite. The shadow takes hold of
us only when it's unconscious. Because "until we
make the unconscious conscious, it will drive all
our behavior and we will call it fate." Reclaiming
the shadow doesn't mean acting it out; it means

becoming aware of the darker aspects within us
so we can discipline them and bring them into
our control. The shadow isn't something we fight
against or destroy, it's a part of ourselves that
we're meant to explore so we can reclaim those
aspects that we've lost. In a future video we'll

look at how you can integrate your shadow through
"shadow work." Once it's available you'll see it
appearing on the left side of your screen, and I'd
absolutely love it if you pressed the like button,
it really helps me out. Do you have any stories
about confronting your shadow? Do you have your

own theories on Fight Club? Let me know. I'd love
it if you left a comment with a shadow emoji. As
always, thanks so much for watching, take care
of yourselves, and I'll see you in the next one.

Fight Club: Carl Jung’s warning for a lost generation

Fight Club: Carl Jung’s warning for a lost generation

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