Too single-minded a pursuit of Utopia results in a wholesale repression of the Self, and ultimately in triumph for the Shadow. In Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, the story has been the same. What matters, after all, is not that we are aggressive, xenophobic, sexual, hierarchical and territorial but what attitude we adopt to these inbuilt aspects of our nature. It is the ethical orientation that counts. However, in order to be ethical, one must be conscious, and consciousness means awareness of things as they really are.
Conflict is the product of duality.
Since duality exists throughout nature, the opportunities for conflict are infinite - as are the opportunities for peace. Dissonance and harmony, opposition and concordance, balance and imbalance are conceivable only in the pretence of polarity. Destruction, like creation, arises from the juxtaposition of opposing forces, and so basic are these contrapuntal oppositions to the fabric of our universe, that consciousness and life itself would be inconceivable without them. Coming to terms with one's own evil is the first and indispensable stage in conscious realisation of the Self, because on that condition alone can an individual become responsible for the events of his life and render himself accountable for what he has projected onto others. Awareness of the Shadow means suffering the tension between good and evil in full consciousness, suffering one's own guilt and, through that suffering, participating in the guilt of mankind.