The Misprojection of Projection:

For every brilliant idea, there appears to be a legion of impostors waiting to appropriate it to their private purposes. Such is the matter with the modern theory of "projection". The untempered propagation of this theory, well beyond the bounds of psychoanalytic practice, has resulted in another in a growing, endless line of neoliberal excuses that remain characteristic of postmodern life. Where everything is exoteric and available, it tends to be quite cheap in both availability and quality, for those unwilling to put in the effort to investigate the matter deeply tend to peddle it as something easy and, as such, destructive. 

[Don't forget to click the Link below for Coda.]

Life is always difficult, and any ideology which seeks to burden it with undue ease can only lead to its becoming tragic. Flaws of character remain the province of the tragedy; philosophies of transformation, such as Jungian psychology, were aimed at self-improvement and perfection of the Soul, while self-acceptance was a means and not an end. The narcissist is not the one who cannot tolerate his flaws, but one who does not care about those flaws. Among the narcissists, the rarest seem to be the ones pretending to superiority; they are but scapegoats for the mass of narcissists who take the far less strenuous and more successful route: pretending they have no superiors. "Equality" is little more than an excuse, for Life perpetually threatens all attempts to make us equal and identical. Adversity does not dissolve distinctions; it creates them, and so it is said "the flame which burns the wood hardens the steel." 

Equality produces weakness, and a weakness which is willful is an evil. It is narcissistic to assume that everybody is the same, since there can only be one frame of reference for this assumption: one's own ego. While the personal subconscious is a deeper level of the psyche than the ego, nonetheless it is the ego which projects this personal subconscious on the Other. This was what psychologists like Carl Jung, von Franz, and Woodman demonstrated in their theory of projection. Yet the modern intellectual is tempted to appropriate their theory and pervert it, hypocritically, and this we see in the perversion of our modern hero stories, many of them founded in the selfsame source as Jungian Psychology: Mythology.

Note the word "collective". It is not a *personal* projection, nor does it refer to a merely *personal* experience. It *could* be taken as a *sort* of projection, and it remains a *real* exponent for the *collective*.

Most notably, contemporary iterations on the works of Tolkien and George Lucas seek to sell the Hero Story out to that most devious of academic evils: Deconstruction. Heroes in these stories are swapped out for villains, cowards, and apologists for apathy. The Greater Good is deconstructed and destroyed, and all that's left is nihilism and self-interest, the exaltation of the moral grays and treachery. Self-sacrifice is even made "politically correct" by being undermined in favour of a double-standard. Everything becomes convenient and easy, and it emanates from one illusion: that there's "nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so", a platitude that's spoken like a truly tragic adolescent. 

How, exactly?

Jung did not intend this, at the very least. We know from reading him that Good and Evil were as much a problem for this seeker as they had been for St. Anselm. Jung rejected even Kierkegaard on the assumption that the latter was amoral in his writings; quite ironically, this hardly could be further from the truth, for Kierkegaard himself was utterly devout and wrote about the dangers of modernity and liberal society eroding the distinction. 

Yet it must be obvious to all of us in our Day and Age that Good and Evil are not merely a projection. The assumption that the villain of the story must, *in every case*, reflect the individual within the audience is a conceit of pathological proportions. We are *not* identical in our personal subconscious minds, and there are many evils in this World which pass one's conscious understanding and unconscious inclination. The appeal of horror is that it is *not* familiar but rather *alien*; the monster is an object not of sympathy but menacing depravity.

This is because -- while narcissists will always struggle to acknowledge this -- there are far graver dangers than an insult to one's pride. Not every conflict is a personal projection, nor is each solution to be found between a patient and a therapist. Atrocities we witness in both fact and fiction move us out of basic sympathy for Others, and, by that same token, those committing those atrocities are *Other than us*. What they do is hardly universal to the human species, thankfully, and to attempt to universalize *your* sympathy for tyranny in such a way as to condemn the species of this evil is to make the most inane projection of them all. If *you* commit atrocities, the fault remains your own that others hate you, and the people who *oppose* you are defending more than their own pride.

In fact, if there is anything that's truly *universal* in the Human Psyche, it's the understanding that a Hero must eradicate a Villain. This is not a Villain merely in the sense of one's own Shadow. It's a monster who has always served a function in the folklore of the species, and the threat this monster represents is a *collective* threat. Opposing such a monster is a *selfless* duty, representing an *objective* moral obligation, *not* a personal projection. Those psychologists who worked with personal projection knew about this deeper level of the Human Psyche; that is why the works inspired by their theories still remain so popular and universal to this day. 

Those Others we resist are not identical to those whom we protect, for, while the Self seeks to reduce all segregations and distinctions to equality, the Others are not merely Other to the ego, but they also may be Other to each other. Just as fire burns the wood yet hardens steel, so sympathy for those we must protect requires an antipathy to those from whom we must protect them. A compassion felt for innocence becomes a passion and a rage against the guilty who abuse them. It is not that narcissists alone believe themselves to be the Heroes of their private stories; it is that the narcissist alone is *not* the Hero in our **public** story. So, the narcissist becomes a villain, not by thinking oneself righteous, but by thinking less of righteousness itself. Only the villains truly sympathize with villains, yet it's in the nature of a villain to believe that all are equal in depravity, while Heroes know we are distinguished by the multitude of attitudes and actions which we take in opposition to adversity.

**[({R.G.)}]**

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