In the 2010s the EU, in the stated interests of energy efficiency, mandated that all new vacuum cleaners would be limited to 900W energy consumption.
Across the room from me as I type is a vacuum cleaner rated at 2000W. It cleans very well, but in the EU today this would be illegal to sell. If its power consumption was halved, it would not be nearly as effective, and we would need to vacuum for longer, simply using more energy.
Whether or not the policymakers at the EU understood that merely limiting the power rating would not linearly reduce the amount of energy used, they most certainly did not understand the law of second order effects.
Another unforeseen second order effect of this policy was that manufacturers, now needing to produce according to efficiency standards as tested using EU methods, simply optimised their products for passing the test under the conditions as configured. Again, not necessarily for effectiveness or efficiency in reality. Dyson in fact challenged the EU over this in the European Court of Justice and succeeded.
Understanding second order effects should be part of the basic toolkit of any policy maker. A policy maker who does not understand this is no less absurd than a maths teacher not understanding long division. And yet true to irony the people in charge of making such decisions are often the least equipped to make them. Perhaps it is a tall order to expect anyone to understand the law of necessity universally, but not to expect them to encounter the consequences of principles they embody implicitly.
The German idealist Friedrich Schelling, who coined the unconscious, wrote in 1800 that “through freedom itself…something I do not intend is to come about unconsciously…whereby out of the most uninhibited expression of freedom there arises unawares something wholly involuntary, and perhaps even contrary to the agent’s will.”
Every act of will made without full awareness, or that insists on one thing to the exclusion of others, will necessarily produce what it sought to exclude. This is not a mistake in itself, but it is a mistake to ignore them.
It’s not a stretch to say that coming to terms with second order effects both in principle and in practice is the path to all meaningful progress. And that whether an individual does this willingly, or merely manoeuvres to avoid the consequences of their own making as they happen, is what sets the conditions for growth in any meaningful sense.
Thus understanding second order consequences should be in the basic toolkit not only of those with the authority to make decisions that govern the rest of us, but of anyone interested in genuine adult development.
Carl Jung, whose psychology was rooted in German thought dating back centuries, coined the shadow—a concept widely misunderstood by much of modern psychology let alone social media: how it comes about, what it is and how it relates to the idea of projection. Intrinsic to this topic and its philosophical lineage is the interconnected nature of all things, and yet more often than not the concept of the shadow is explained in non-integrated, self-sealed ways that merely raise more questions than answers. Other aspects of the mind like complexes and emotions (especially fear, shame and guilt) are often conflated with shadow, and precise definitions of the shadow are rarely given. So in this post, I thought I would give my concise explanation of the shadow while revisiting some of my work on Shadow Dialectics and the Shadow Map.
The shadow is simply the second order consequences of your own existence, specifically those which you don’t want to look at. That captures it, philosophically.
Everything has a metaphysical dark side: the Sun, this table, economic growth, you. Shadow is simply this broader concept as it applies to your self and the aspects of you that are subject to resistance.
It is not possible for anyone to be without shadow because it is not possible for anything partial to be entirely whole and simultaneously separate from existence.
It is also natural and necessary that there would be resistance to whatever goes against your current thesis. Your personality is a thesis that forms through iterative stages, not all at once. Progress of any individual, organisation, team, or culture is largely determined by the extent to which they are willing to reconcile with what has been left out. This is the process of all creation.
Understanding what is truly in a person’s, or any entity’s, shadow is generally more straightforward than many would have you believe—it is simply whatever is left out by any principle they are not able to apply universally, and it is always pointed at through explicit irony and implicit self-contradiction.
The person who insists on utmost kindness in all situations will be the most unkind to you when you do not fit their idea of what kindness is.
The person who insists on absolute efficiency will be the most inefficient in their ruthlessness. They will fixate on their idea of what is good and leave out what really matters for fear of the tension they would need to encounter.
The one who believes in the non-judgement of other approaches and other cultures does not do the same honour for people who they believe make such judgements.
The one who insists that there is no truth only perception is themselves making a truth claim.
The one who insists that everything is a projection—especially criticism—is suddenly unable to locate this principle when it would apply to others’ admiration of them.
The one who elevates feelings over reason must reason with you about why reason is wrong, while simultaneously caring little for how you feel about reason.
The one who argues that emotions don’t matter does so with great passion.
So on and so on.
Exceptions are simply artefacts that have not yet been accounted for by a principle. Thus it is still principle being operated on, but the principle of ‘I do what I want when it’s convenient.’
Back to the EU for a moment—if it was genuinely concerned about energy efficiency per se, then it would reconcile with second order consequences. But the fact that it doesn’t reveals that it isn’t, and that the real motivations behind its actions are not purely what it claims. One who claims to be interested in one thing cannot simultaneously fail to take action against it without consequences.
All solicitations to power produce second order effects and hence necessarily contain shadow. That’s essentially what power is—an insistence on an outcome predetermined to be the right one by something that has no way of knowing this: the pursuit of an idea of self to its metaphysical limits; the pursuit of one metric of growth over all of the others that might matter; the insistence on supposedly authentic expression at the expense of doing what might be useful to others; and countless other examples. All of which lead to self contradictions where the pursuit of what they value becomes not only unhelpful in the end but positively counter to what they intend.
This points to two ways in which shadow material primarily comes about—two opposites that share an underlying unity. Both of which are explained by my Shadow Map model and in further depth in the Mapping the Shadow series on YouTube. They correspond to the Power Position and the Shadow Position of the Shadow Map respectively.
One is the dark side of our very own thesis—which we don’t realise as a problem because, after all, it has more or less worked until this point, and it just ‘looks like’ a good thing. The ruthless person believes they are efficient. The manipulative person believes they are being kind. Because it does appear to resemble kindness and it does resemble efficiency, at least in their current understanding. What each fails to realise is that ruthlessness is inefficient and manipulation is unkind, but they will eventually brush up against the consequences of these behaviours in their world because that’s precisely what they have given the green light to through their action. And it is happening outside of them—the world is a problem—but it’s also what has passed through their filter because of what they themselves value implicitly.
The second is not the extreme of your own thesis, but its precise opposite. The ruthless person actually needs some kindness in order to be genuinely efficient. The manipulative person actually needs to be reasonable in order to be truly fair and therefore kind in any real sense. But because of how each has learned to navigate and invested their energies, what they really need appears as the very last thing they want, and what they try to be becomes wholly counter-productive to itself. Any thesis taken to its extreme must run to its opposite, because ultimately it becomes an argument with what is, what must be and what it itself needs in order to exist. This effect of running to the opposites was coined by Heraclitus as ‘enantiodromia.’ Applied to human personality and behaviour, the two extremes that appear so far apart must ultimately find unity in a moral sense, i.e. be equally immoral, and it is through them that we can understand what morality really is.
These same principles can be applied to the aspects of your personality type. Each function of mind has its own dark side in the form of a Power Position and its opposite, both of which are kinds of shadow. You can learn more about your own personality and its potential pitfalls by taking the Personality Dynamics Assessment at makeitconscious.com/pda
The shadow is often associated with or even equated to evil, and this is not entirely wrong. While the shadow can appear in any number of qualities and flavours—not all of them intrinsically bad—directionally speaking, evil is the ultimate second order consequence, arising by virtue of freedom itself. Genuine shadow work is therefore a trajectory towards becoming ever more aware of and reconciled to evil, both inner and outer. A full understanding of evil and alignment with true morality is the theoretical, logical end point of all meaningful shadow work, as well as a cessation of undue harm to oneself and others. It is not, as is often suggested without any sense of irony, becoming merely apathetic, or erecting new and more elaborate defences against ‘triggering.’ This is why the shadow ultimately is not just a personal matter but an archetypal one.
Understanding this intellectually alone does not lead to resolution, because this is ultimately a question of energy. It is necessarily the case that tension must be borne out for contradictions to be reconciled. True shadow work always involves an energetic exchange that is facilitated by responsibility and empathy i.e. the willingness to meet and be transformed by the opposite. It helps greatly with this work to have some understanding of the holistic nature of what sits behind the dynamic—a map and explanation of what is happening—but this is also an understanding that develops dialectically throughout the process itself. None of this can bypass the struggle or the suffering required, but it does change your relationship to it. Suffering becomes more conscious and voluntary rather than repressed and neurotic.
Meaningful shadow work must always involve the direction of the will back on itself, what it has produced unintentionally, and on the principles that must sit behind your decisions. It is ultimately about aligning yourself with the only way things can be and becoming ever less contradictory in yourself.
