Why Good People Do Bad Things. Understanding the Darker Sides of Our Soul

Why good people do bad things: understanding our darker selves

“For many years I have been trying to solve this psychological puzzle. Why are people cruel, and why are they kind? Some measure of evil can be found in most people's behavior. I see my next task as studying evil and trying to understand it.” (A. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, p. 371 📚)

This is about everything we are afraid to find in ourselves because it might damage our lives: for one person, bursts of aggression; for another, forbidden drives that feel impossible even to discuss with someone else; more broadly, everything “dark” that exists in each of us.

“The word Satan comes from the Hebrew word for ‘adversary,’ and devil from a Greek word meaning ‘one who throws.’ This suggests that the ancients had already grasped the multiplicity of the human soul and the presence of a shadowy ‘antagonist’ within.
But instead of explaining that antagonist as the work of some supernatural force—the prince of darkness, for example—depth psychology argues that this opposing energy is us, and we are it. As Milton’s Satan says, ‘Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell’” (p. 51).

That revolting sense of something bad inside us is rarely brought fully into consciousness. We control it harshly because it can hurt both us and the people close to us. “Who can bear this burden: to see oneself across the whole range of human qualities? Was it not our brother Oedipus who, after learning the full truth, blinded himself and begged for a quick death?”

“No wonder the Ego does not clap its hands with delight when it is forced to come face-to-face with the Shadow.”

💡 And yet… these moments can also contain the seeds of healing and a broader understanding. When we meet our own reflection and begin to make out, in the dark glass, dim but more complete outlines of our nature, we may become more human, more conscious and, frankly, a little less dangerous to the people around us (p. 36).

✒✒✒A little less dangerous to the people around us!!! Yes. 🖌🖌🖌

❓ But how do you express your Shadow without making other people pay for it? ❓

If you want development… okay. You are prepared to meet all this pain face-to-face. That is your choice.
But other people should not have to suffer because of your pursuit of self-knowledge. So what can you do?

So far, I know three ways:

🥇 “Jung said the patient must remain in solitude” (p. 106)

People whose impulses are especially powerful sometimes withdraw and live through periods of self-abasement away from society. In their inner world they pass through cycles of “Life–Death–Life” and return to ordinary life stronger (C. Pinkola Estés).

As Oxxxymiron puts it:

“So I emerge from another episode
Of self-deprecating psychosis once a season and the rakes
Are all the same, I'm just as stubborn, don't trust the tables
Though clearly in vain, real Struggle, such Thug Life
Favorite of all methods, to gain a special ability
To put myself in a hopeless well, so that
I am my own jailer, judge, patient, pet
Forgetting what sentenced for experiment to control”

🥈 Weaken the Ego’s control with alcohol.

“No wonder T. S. Eliot suggested in his play ‘The Party’ that a bar or a Dionysian feast might become a new confessional. Quite a few people really have managed, during ‘libations,’ to pour out their souls and express genuine parts of themselves in moments of freer self-expression. This Spirit of Freedom lives in each of us, but we learn early that showing it is too expensive in our tribe or family, and only the effect of the ‘potion from the flask’ or group approval allows this split-off part of the soul to appear.”

🥉 The most common way, however, is simply to suppress the Shadow.

There are hundreds of variations. Freud described the soap opera in which people using this third way live: “that daily soap opera, where the pulsating Id, cursed and suppressed by the Super-Ego, leaves the frayed Ego to invent accommodative compromises, to repress in fire-drill order, rationalize, project onto others, and resort to endless distracting displacements in order that the serene life might continue in this precarious house of conscious life” (p. 208).

But suppression deprives us of energy we may badly need—especially now.

Never before has humanity had so many possibilities, and never before has it known so much neurotic misery. Never has there been so much light—and never such a Shadow (p. 203)❗ Our age is discovering energies powerful enough to destroy humanity itself. To encounter one’s Shadow means “to live dangerously” (Nietzsche). Yet “to set sail upon the sea of the unknown—that is our destiny. To suppress the Shadow is to hug the shore in fear of this open sea. Only thus, going out into the open sea, can one attain spiritual breadth and chart that unique course which will lead us to the New Land which we are called to make our own” (p. 285).

The monsters are already inside us. If someone wants to study them—and, by understanding them, put that force to work in the service of development—let’s do it.

We are conducting research. We are looking for people like this.

✅ 1) Recording EEG activity and physiological indicators
✅ 2) Keeping charts with markers showing the amplitude of emotional experiences (AEP). Here, the range of your negative emotional experiences is treated as an indicator of the magnitude of your Shadow.
✅ 3) Psychological counseling

Together, these approaches can help reveal the strength of the Shadow and support the later integration of that energy and knowledge into conscious life.

🏅 This fourth way is roughly related to what Freud called sublimation, though it is not quite the same thing. A high amplitude of passions will never be completely safe. But if a person like that finally gets a grip on themselves—everyone else may end up clutching their own heads 😃

📍📍📍📍📍📍📍📍📍📍📍
This research is dedicated to those who left our world young,
Who lived dangerously…
Whose Shadow destroyed them.
Who accepted the battle, whose life was a game—without rules! (🎶)

This research is about:
Those “outcasts” inside the system who would rather risk something in this life than give up the experience of passion.
Those who go all the way!
Those for whom life is more than satisfying their needs.
The mad ones, the rebels…
We are waiting for you at the Faculty of Psychology of St. Petersburg State University.
📍📍📍📍📍📍📍📍📍📍📍

“To come to know this Other will also be a new beginning for us—the task of integrating this energy and this knowledge into conscious life. Otherwise it will continue to realize itself through unconscious channels, causing harm to us and our neighbors” (p. 208).

“The Shadow can play a positive role in the process of individuation. It is less adapted and hence more truthful, it is less acclimated and hence more primordial, less conditioned and more yielding and so conveys far more fully the wholeness of that person we are called to be in order to share ourselves with others.”

Maslow wanted to develop a concept of a “psychology of evil.”
I picked up that torch, and its fire showed me
that even our secret “flaw” can become a key that opens doors. ☝️

“All our institutionalized religion, all our humanistic and scientific education, our enlightened morals are unable to keep completely civilized and highly educated souls from lethal possession by the Shadow” (p. 231).

Hardly a day passes when I do not return in my mind to this disturbing paradox—when it does not ask me to devote myself more fully to my calling as a psychologist, to renew myself each day, and to follow the ancient Greek instruction: “Know thyself.” ⚕