Lies In a Mirror
Subtitle: An Essay on Evil and Deceit
Publisher: Blackhall
Published: 2006
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 304
First sentence: Lies in a Mirror 
Chapter 1

The Dynamic of Evil


There is a lie behind every crime. In order to cheat people of their money, fraudsters first dispossess them of their prudence by lying to them. Greed does the rest. When someone goes out to rape or kill another person, they will ensure that their victim is disarmed into a false sense of security by pretending, up to the critical moment, that they mean no harm. 

Chapter 10

He Was Nothing


Within a few years of defending MD, the ‘respectable’ schoolteacher whose double life troubled me, I began prosecuting cases of sexual abuse: meeting the victims of incest, rape and childhood sexual abuse. No amount of study equips you for that experience. The victims are entitled to expect that the lawyer who undertakes the prosecution will pursue the case efficiently. That, however, is not all. They are hurt at the deepest level by their experience. They constantly query why their lives have been fractured. The advocate appearing for the State, they believe, should have some of the answers. I did not have any. But, no one could heartlessly brush people away by claiming that a lawyer’s function is clinical and that he or she has no capacity to deal with hurt. Perhaps the least that you could do was to listen. 

In those early days, before the courts began to order victim impact reports, time spent listening could be justified on the basis that it enabled you later, in open court, to ask the right questions in order to explain how they had suffered at the hands of the accused. Some victims hated their abuser. Strangely, these were very few. Of those subjected to sexual abuse, it was most often the parents of abused children who insisted that they wanted the perpetrator dead or spoke of him in demonic terms. The victims who suffered directly almost never said anything like that. They had other things to say. None of it was fantastic, or fanciful. Instead, it made sense. They reported what had happened to them. They spoke about the nature of their abuser coldly. Those who encounter murderers rarely live. I have met very few; only a couple of survivors of isolated rural robbery murders where another person was chosen for ‘interrogation’. The victims of sexual attacks are rarely killed, particularly within the home or institution where they are preyed upon. Their tormentor wants them to be available for the next time. Even more than the subjects of torture, those used for criminal sexual gratification get to know the whole person of their abuser. They see him in all of his colours and not just when he is energised by negativity. They have stared evil in the face and survived. Does that experience give them any understanding of the inner quality of the people who serve it?

In RG, one of the first of those cases, a builder had stayed from time to time with the same handful of families in a town in the west of Ireland. The men of those houses were in the same line of work as him and needed him on various jobs. Over years, he had abused a succession of the daughters of these households. He picked his opportunities late at night or by returning to the house he was staying in at a time when he might find a girl alone. Those who he had molested had suffered dreadfully. When the word came that the accused was going to plead guilty, I spoke to each of them individually. What, most of all, they wanted me to make the judge understand was that the abuser was nothing. It was a startling statement. At the time, I thought of this as an emotional response to a dreadful experience. I was wrong. A succession of cases over the years, criminal and civil, showed the same pattern. These victims had no emotion for the accused because, as many put it, he was “not worth it.” As we say in this country, he was “a waste of space.” If they felt anything about him at all, they claimed it was pity, because he was “so pathetic.” The victims who spoke to me all tended to claim the same thing, using a range of terms to indicate that their abuser, while all too real, had reduced himself almost to the point of not existing. They were all deeply upset. Their lives had been maimed by evil but, despite that, the tones in which they spoke were more in observation than in condemnation. In the cases of the victims who remained children when the abuse was discovered, confusion as to what had happened to them left them not wishing to speak. If it was a parent who was the abuser, then the children, even as adults, expressed their revulsion by refusing to refer to their father as such: instead, he became Mr Whatever, not “Daddy”. Those who survived abuse into adulthood all spoke of the two-sided and deceitful nature of their abuser. Is this to be identified as a pattern that marks out the servants of evil?

When Sabine Dardenne came to describe Marc Dutroux, the man who had abducted her and held her as a twelve-year-old sex slave, a similar attitude to her abuser emerged. In her memoir ‘I Choose to Live’, she characterises him as a “calculating, manipulative and plausible liar.”  Dutroux spun a web of fantasy about his criminal perversion by claiming that he was merely an intermediary; capturing children for a vicious criminal network that served the sexual gratification of important public figures in Belgium. He told Sabine that he was terrified of his mythical boss figures. Explicitly, he said he was their “victim.” It took the police years to sort out fact from fiction in his account before the case could come to trial. In the end, the reality was that he had acted solely for his own gratification, assisted by his wife and another accomplice. His allegations threw Europe into a frenzy of speculation as to how pervasive corruption was in public life. The truth was that he was not the puppet of a criminal gang; only perhaps of his own perversion. The only fear he had was of being caught. He was not affected as to how his actions would destroy other people. He let two small girls starve to death, when he had been imprisoned earlier, rather that run the risk of revealing their whereabouts and finding himself with a longer sentence. He returned to his activities when that sentence was shortened for his good conduct. How else, one wonders, could he behave in prison? While Sabine was held in a dungeon in his house, he kidnapped another adolescent girl called Laetitia for the same purposes. When, at his trial, the presiding judge asked him why he had also abducted her, he replied that it was Sabine’s idea: “She was driving me mad, begging me to get her a friend.”  As Sabine put it, “he lied as easily as he breathed.”  When she was permitted by the court to put a question to the accused, she asked him why he had not murdered her. He claimed that he could not find it in himself to kill her because he had become “attached to her.” This ridiculous lie, feeling affection for a human captive whom he had treated far worse than a factory farm animal, confirmed Sabine’s opinion of her tormentor: “He was tiny. He was abject. He couldn’t tell the truth, not even once in his life. He didn’t frighten me in the least. He made me laugh.”  

If you start off from the idea that a person can realise a huge range of potential, from being someone who enhances life to being someone who is a destroyer, one question recurs again and again. How does it happen? You would be a lucky person if over your lifetime you did not see someone you know deteriorate, in terms of the kind of person they are. As a lawyer, you do not see that kind of thing happen. You merely see the results of it. The opposite can also happen. A person who is lost can suddenly reappear as a new person. That is seen, but rarely. I encountered it once only. I defended a man on a drugs charge. I will call him EK. The case was fought on his instructions that the police planted the narcotics found in his flat. After four days, where it became increasingly obvious that the jury and the judge were sceptical of this defence, my client changed his plea. He was bitter, feeling himself let down by confederates in the drugs trade who, as he had said in an unwise confession statement that had been revealed to the jury, had left him to ‘take the rap’. It was an draining experience, dealing with his self-image of victimhood. A review of his lengthy sentence had been ordered for two years later. He left for jail completely deflated. I thought that any chance of progress while in prison, much less rehabilitation, was hopeless. I dreaded meeting him again. When the time came for me to visit him in jail, to find out if anything good might be said in prison reports about him, I expected nothing but the worst. The idea of a review promising an early release was something that was then possible. It was meant to encourage reform. Abuse of that system was possible through pretending a change of heart while gathering together every possible scrap of paper from every possible source that might express a kind of a hope that the offender had improved. I walked into the visiting cell of the prison and met, in effect, a new person. My client had utterly changed. He was bright and optimistic; full of life is how best to describe it. He hoped that the review would succeed. If it did not, he was prepared to serve the next two years of his term. He had genuinely pursued real education and had done well; he had learned to play the guitar and done a university-level course. He looked back on his prior life as something that he was leaving behind and on his criminal associates as people to be forgotten by moving to another part of the country. He was released. The criminal justice system heard nothing further from him. It was none of my business how this transformation had happened. I did not ask anything beyond what he had wanted to tell me. What was apparent was that within an individual, any individual, were powers that could change them for worse, as was obvious to any criminal practitioner, and for better, something which I had never seen. When I had last met EK, he had nothing and yet his personality had amplified apparently out of nowhere. Are there deeper forces that people with nothing can draw on?

In the folk tale ‘The Woodcutter’s Son’, recorded by the brothers Grimm, a boy goes with his father to work deep in the forest. The boy wanders off and comes upon an ancient tree. In among its roots, he finds a bottle from which a spirit cries out to be released. Without thinking, the child unstops the bottle. A spirit emerges that towers over him, telling him that now he has been released he must break his neck. Cleverly appealing to the vanity of the spirit, the boy suggests that its powers could not be so great as to allow it to become small enough to re-enter the bottle. “Of course, I can do that”, says the spirit and goes back in. The boy traps it. Now that he has it under his control, he will only let the spirit emerge again if it will not harm him. The spirit agrees and the boy frees it. In gratitude, the spirit gifts him a cloth that both heals and turns base metal into silver. In the result, he becomes happy and well off. 

This folk tale never mentions deceit. It is about the powers that lurk within all of us: how they can enhance our lives or else destroy us; the dual nature of unconscious forces. Generations of parents and grandparents would have told children tales like this to warn them that there are powers in the world that are beyond our control. Experience has repeatedly confirmed that the greatest destroyer, and the greatest enhancer, of human life rest within the human mind. If these powers are to be let out, it must only be when we are using our wits to exercise some control over them. When we do not exercise that control, is it the case that those powers will certainly destroy us? We are entitled to wonder why the forces of the mind should not be completely benign. This is not life. That kind of naivety ignores the machines of torture, hatred and deceit that are the invention of human intelligence. Someone thought these things up, and the recurring pattern of those thoughts came from somewhere. In May 1942, Carl Jung wrote a letter to an English friend in which he warned her against trusting the impulses of her unconscious as if her mind were a loving parent. He wrote that the unconscious mind was an aspect of nature, and was to be treated as warily as any other natural force:

It is inhuman and needs the human mind to function usefully for man's purposes. Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her. She is like the needle of the compass pointing North, which is most useful when you have a good man-made ship and know how to navigate...The unconscious is useless without the human mind. It always seeks its collective purposes and never your individual destiny. 


Jung was saying no more than the folk tale: you must be wary of following the impulses that your mind seems to find attractive. Instead, you have to think. It might reasonably be said that when you lie, you think. That is not the point. It is the engine within the unconscious to which your mind is allied that moves through your thoughts. Fundamentally, the process of human transformation, long-term or short-term, seems to depend on the aspect of the mind to which consciousness allies itself. You can choose the world, because reality is reflected only in truth, or you can choose fantasy. This perhaps affronts nature, but so what? 

The chapters of this book go some way to show the integration of deceit into the process of destruction. That, however, does not mean that deceit is the engine of destruction: that when you lie the effect is to risk a volcanic eruption of savagery. Why would the consequences of deceit not turn out well? Possibly, you could argue metaphysically, because lies distort nature. Such an argument personifies nature, giving it a personality. That nature is like an offended beast that will strike back against unreality is no more than a myth. Surely, deceit merely reduces our understanding and that is the limit of its consequence? The limit of any rational argument on deceit should be that those who distort their understanding with unreality cannot understand the world. My suspicion is that there is some natural process at work in the choice of deceit over truth; that enhancement and destruction are aspects of how we relate to our unconscious minds.

When the composer Wladyslav Szpilman was spared from a Nazi police patrol in Warsaw by the pleading of his father, an incident touched on in chapter 7 of this book, he had many more trials to survive before the Nazi occupation of Poland ended. After being helped to escape from the Warsaw ghetto, for months he hid alone in an unoccupied flat. Eventually, Captain Wilhelm Hosenfeld, a member of the German army, discovered him. Instead of killing him, the German officer helped him to survive until the Russian army captured the city. Captain Hosenfeld was a man who had seen evil in many of its forms. Two years earlier, he had confided this observation to his diary:

Lying is the worst of all evils. Everything else that is diabolical comes from it. And we have been lied to; public opinion is constantly deceived. Not a page of a newspaper is free of lies, whether it deals with political, economic, historical, social or cultural affairs. Truth is under pressure everywhere; the facts are distorted, twisted and made into their opposite. Can this turn out well?  

I can only offer a personal view that it cannot. It is not just that lies are the basic weapon of crime and that criminals are liars. It is because lies deform people. When you meet people who have subjected themselves to this process, and certainly the criminal courts are just one good place to meet them, it strikes you that the lies have changed the person using them. A lie is an attack on reality. It affronts creation. It attacks the clarity of our perception, the very basis of consciousness, and leaves us vulnerable to unpredictable consequences. Lies weaken us in our personality while supposedly enhancing our lives. If you create a life that is built on a lie you can never trust the impulses that emerge from your mind. Whatever it prompts you to do, through emotion and suggestion, will follow the pattern that you have imposed on your mind to filter it through. When that filter is deceit, your impulses will be to seek false leaders, to join ideologies with all the answers and to hate all that is of you but which you deny to yourself. It seems to me that when you weaken yourself down to what Solzhenitsyn might call a threshold state, the danger emerges that when you need the help of your unconscious mind, it is more likely that you will get the demonic side.

Even among the Vikings, it marked out a person as having gone to the bad that they would try to destroy someone else by telling lies about them.  Those who habitually lie to their advantage ignore the unpredictable power of deceit. Instead, people think of the benefits that deception will bring them. Rationally, perhaps one might think that the worst thing about deceit is that it leaves those who use it open to unforeseen effects. You might limit that to the consequences of being found out in a lie, but perhaps it goes further. Deceit causes injustices, big and small, to those with whom we interact. Probably, we really do not care about that. But we should care about weakening our very selves. Deceits that touch on our nature, what we are and how we define ourselves, leave us open to negative eruptions of the potential of our minds. Consistently, those who have observed evil people, whether false leaders encountered in the grand circumstances in which they surround themselves, or criminals on the lesser stage of life, refer to their smallness, their lack of colour or warmth, their banality. The corrosive effect of deceit was perhaps what Solzhenitsyn had in mind when he referred to the torturers in Stalin’s system of injustice as filling the space that they occupied with rottenness.  He was a crime survivor and, like many of those whom I met, what he may have been driving at was the propensity of evil to reduce people. Deceit is the prerequisite. When you start that process, do you really run the risk of being taken over?

Some have attempted to approach the problem of evil by describing it as the absence of good. In the natural world, cold is the total absence of heat and darkness is the total absence of light. You might reason that evil is merely the absence of good. The theory runs that when all goodness is suppressed then all that is left is evil. This would be to describe evil as nothing. The early Christian philosophers went so far as to describe as good all that is created; but since evil destroys good, they reasoned that evil was nothing. That is not a sufficient answer. Evil has real effect. It is probably right to call evil inhuman because, for it to run rampant the humanity of our species must first be reduced. On the one hand, criminals without power are miserable creatures. Equally, criminals in the guise of divine leaders and paradise-promising ideologies are no less inhuman. When humanity is reduced to nothing, then something that exists as a force in its own right, takes over and causes havoc. This is not a random occurrence. It happens in circumstances that are identifiable by their falseness and lack of human scale. Where there is no humanity, false myths begin to take over. The ground for violence is prepared by inflation of self-regard, group-regard and adherence to historical untruth. Humour, culture and sympathy based on a recognition of weakness, as part of the human package, are all diminished in those who follow aggressive impulses. These qualities are all essential components of the aliveness of our minds, of our consciousness. What marks out the people who turn to destruction is the reduction of the humanity of their personality through deceit. If there is a threshold point, then beyond that.

Consciousness is our inheritance. It is the sole means to direct our actions away from compulsion and towards willed behaviour.  Consciousness, like all talents, is present in greater or lesser degree in particular people. It is, however, not just a random gift of inheritance. Like hearing or sight, it is indispensable for the existence of human society. Consciousness can be fostered or it can be squandered. The actions of individuals can be directed to the spreading of truth and sanity or the creation of those situations that inflame contagions of mythic thinking. Each individual can only develop consciousness through a determined effort to engage with truth to the exclusion of all deceit. Life requires us to strive to maintain the balance of sanity. Unconscious forces emerge almost randomly, but perhaps most predictably in situations of personal or social crisis. These are the danger points. It is when you need an amplification of your understanding the most that you are most likely to grasp wildly for any solution. Events that power emotions that are too huge for our minds to deal with are like the spirits that emerge from the bottles and lamps of folk tales. Their powers are never entirely benign. At the least, they set a test to be overcome before their help is won over. The people who love deceit, those who strive for total control over others as a substitute for self analysis, like to let those kind of spirits loose: once they have calculated the consequences. We can be manipulated by burning buildings, enemy insurrections and murdered presidents. In fact, any attack on the symbols of our self-definition. You cannot expect a sane balance to emerge from your mind if you have distorted the world by lies. We are liable to become prey to false myths when we believe falsehoods. 

Our job is to question and to analyse. Those who accept the truth retain the facility to be guided by the unalterable world of what is visible and tangible. Consciousness is that part of the mind which sees the truth. In terms of choices there are only two: the choice of affirming the truth, including the necessity of cleaning up the unpleasant squalor of our own lives, and the choice of living out a lie. Carl Jung had a clear view of the dangers of dabbling in unconscious emotions when the mind was not in control over what might emerge. His way of putting it resembles the fairytale experience of the woodcutter’s son:

If an archetype is not brought into reality consciously, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it will be realized in its favourable form; on the contrary, there is all the more danger of a destructive aggression. It seems as if the psyche were endowed with consciousness for the very purpose of preventing such destructive possibilities from happening.  

Surely, aggression should be random and chaotic? After all, without the resources of the human mind, you could not provoke a minority population into self-defence and then paint it as a threat that needs to be put down mercilessly? This is a random example of deviousness, a function of cleverness. It requires reason. That implies that you are using your mind. Does consciousness not mean that you are using your mind and that is all? Unfortunately, deceit seems to be the abuse of consciousness. It is what the abuse of consciousness triggers off that is the point: what emerges from our unconscious minds in the abuse of the guiding function of the mind. The negative side of human nature has its own perfection. People who serve evil may be one-sided. That does not mean that they cannot be clever. 

Instincts strive to realise themselves. This is not to personify them. If the drives behind destruction are based, as Jung might argue, on the negative side of the images of instincts within our minds we can expect them to release ideas and impulses every bit as compelling as those which affirm life. We can expect our minds to be facilitated in choosing the right lies that will throw a mantle of hatred over those we wish to destroy. False leaders will be regarded as hero leaders. They will act as if they are men of purpose. Negative ideologies will supply all of the answers, as if they had a communication of divine will. They will supply the rituals of sacredness to those who crave the spirit but who are fractured by dishonesty. 

The patterns within which these phenomena emerge will have similarities as to their fundamentals. The difference from the patterns that enhance life will be that they are a trick. As people diminish themselves through lies, they will want, more and more, to run under the falsely protective mantle of the leaders whose ambition is to control everything with lies. It is they who create the false reasons for aggression. It is they who tell the people what they are to see when they look in the mirror. It is they who plot and scheme to throw people into a panic so that they have nowhere else to look than to them and to their false vision of a shining future.

Situations of crisis must be transcended, not yielded to. Consciousness must hold its focus on reality so that truth can be allowed to co-operate with the mind. Truth is the unaltered reflection of nature. In its totality, the mind must respect nature for otherwise it loses what Jung claims is the only fixed bearing to which it can be anchored.  To deny reality is not to set the mind free. Rather, the predictable result seems to be to ally it to the forces of chaos.

Lies deny creation and block out nature's gift of wisdom. The truth is positive while deceit is negative. Truth denies nothing, since it affirms reality, while deceit seeks to destroy reality. A lie may be disguised as a false interpretation or as a self-serving justification. No matter what form it takes, a lie turns the mind away from the world. Instead of looking out, we look inwards blocking our view towards the solution of problems with walls made from our fear of the truth. In consequence, the machinations of those who seek to manipulate events that turn humanity towards violence are, as well as being deceitful, characteristically rigid in their thinking. Such people require to be protected by lies. Otherwise, the deceit and primitiveness of their thought will be exposed.

Our task, says Robertson Davies, is to “look at life through eyes that are as clear as one can make them.”  I agree with this as an aspiration, though I often wonder how any other process than untruth and its consequences can succeed. Cheating, self-regard and aggression seem to be infinitely stronger in our world. Is there any power in the truth, in the sense that the truth helps people by coming to their aid? If you were a religious person, you might think that the Divine nature requires creation to be acknowledged in truth: that those who are allied to truth work in accordance with creation and receive its benefits. In conversation with one of his friends, Saint Seraphim of Sarov expressed that idea in this way:

Though the pagan philosophers also wandered in the darkness of ignorance of God, yet they sought the truth which is beloved by God. Because of this, God-pleasing seeking, they could partake of the Spirit of God. It is said, that nations who do not know God, practice by nature the demands of the law and do what is pleasing to God. The Lord so praises truth that He says of it Himself by the Holy Spirit: "Truth has sprung from the earth, and justice has looked down from heaven". 

I am not equipped to say whether or not this is so. What experience has taught me is that people can affirm the truth in situations where they should have no strength. Where, as in the M D case or the Franz Stangl case, a realization of the truth can destroy people, the opposite can happen and the truth can empower people. The difference seems to be that living a lie is destructive, but affirming the truth garners strength from somewhere. In the realm of sexual abuse, it has happened several times that an adolescent who is mired in abuse by an adult, suddenly takes steps to stop her tormentor out of consideration for another person. The reality that what has happened to her may be inflicted, for instance, on her sister, gives her the courage to overcome threats of violence and the self-abnegation involved in marking oneself out as a victim of this process. All of a sudden, and often for no definable reason, evil is confronted and stopped. Where do people get the courage? I cannot answer that question. All that can be hoped is that there must be another process that is the opposite of deceit; that there must be unconscious powers at the disposal of people who affirm life. From our small minds, I do not believe that we can take the steps that transcend torture on our own. Can the affirmation of truth really help us?

This question was starkly posed for me one day in a crowded Dublin courtroom. The occasion was the list for the arraignment of prisoners on all kinds of crime that are tried before a jury. Those dozens of accused who might need a jury to try their cases in the months ahead were listed together to see would they plead guilty or not guilty. This process also dealt, very occasionally, with bail applications pending trial. It was all in public and with no provision for privacy. Where a person says that they are the victim of incest, they have a right to a private hearing, with only the press present as representatives of the public. Their names can never be revealed. The law, however, made no provision for a private bail hearing in an incest case.

JK, as I will call her, had been abused by her father for many years. In effect, she had been turned into his wife, with none of the rights and dignity of a spouse. She had never led a normal life: no friends, no boyfriends, little schooling and no love. It all became a horrible burden. I do not know what brought her eventually to make a complaint to the police. When she did complain, it was taken seriously. Her father fought the resulting charge. Not just in court, by fair means if you like. He went out of his way to try to re-establish the dominion he had once exercised over her life. She had left home, if you could call it that. He found out her address and made it his business to see her, eventually speaking to her. In tears, blandishments and requests for her to look at the misery of his life, he asked her to drop the charges. She did not want to. Possibly, she resisted so strongly because she had younger sisters. Then he went to her, waylaid her, and threatened to “spread her blood all over the wall.” She told the police. They decided that all that could be done was to try to take away his bail. That application, to revoke her father’s freedom pending the trial, had to be made in public. She was close to disintegrating at that point, or so I was told. On the appointed day, she turned up in court. Her hand was cold and she was trembling. She had bought, and was wearing, an elegant new coat. She walked into the courtroom and took the stand. Her bearing was one of dignity, despite her embarrassment. The charge had to be explained to the judge. The use of the euphemism “section 2 of the 1905 Act” told every lawyer there what the issue was. It was all that could be done to maintain any pretence of privacy. Everyone knew what had happened to her, prison officers, accused persons and lawyers, especially when the charge was against her father. In a clear voice she told her story. Her father denied it. The judge believed her. That was the end of her being one of the abused in life. At least, I hope so. The courage that she displayed was unwavering.

Where do people who have been abused get the will to fight for truth? Carl Jung might perhaps say that this was an example of transcendence; a process whereby the mind comes to the aid of those who have lost everything but the chance to appeal for whatever help there is in the universe. His expression of it is not so far from that of Saint Seraphim. Transcendence, he wrote, corresponds with the theological formula of grace.  He commented: "psychology has no proof that it does not unfold itself at the instigation of God's will."  Is the idea that you con get something from apparently nowhere when you have nowhere to turn? RH, one of Jung’s patients who was suffering from alcoholism, was advised by him that all further treatment was hopeless. On the psychologist’s advice, he went and immersed himself in a religious atmosphere and hoped for a conversion experience. Apparently, it happened. His doctor had also advised another man, BW, that further treatment for the condition was hopeless. The advice of Jung, relayed to him through an intermediary, was all that he had left. BW described his state as one of “ego collapse at depth.” Completely alone and with no hope, he cried out “If there be a God, will he show Himself.” In a letter to Jung, he described what happened next:

There immediately came to me an illumination of enormous impact and dimension…My release from alcohol obsession was immediate…In the wake of my spiritual experience there came a vision of a society of alcoholics, each identifying with and transmitting his experience to the next…to carry the news of the scientific hopelessness of alcoholism…This has made conversion experiences…available on an almost wholesale basis. 

According to Jung transcendence takes over and transforms the entire attitude of those who experience it. It can happen through an act of grace, by honest contact with friends or as a result of educating the mind “beyond the confines of mere rationalism.”  If such a phenomenon exists, then it should have an opposite. He never identified that opposite. He had argued that every unconscious power had two sides, enhancing and destroying. If his ideas as to transcendence have validity, then an opposite process must also exist. Since Jung’s ideas of transcendence are based on the premise of honesty, an argument can be made that any opposite of this process must be summoned up by deceit.

But why was transcendence, if it exists, to Franz Stangl and to the people like MD who are discovered in a horrible double life? I am suspicious of clever arguments. One such available here is that honesty was forced on them, instead of them consciously seeking it out. Whether this somehow bars the process of transcendence, I do not know. Another difference between these people and victims like Sabine Dardenne and JK is that a world of evil had been inflicted on them, not by them, and that when it collapsed it falls not on them but away from them. Then there are people who have done real harm, like the recovering alcoholic BW and the reforming criminal. If transcendence happens in those instances through the collapse of their ego, then the hope of life seems to outweigh the burden of the past. This is merely a speculation. Carrying it through, it seems possible to attempt to unite all three categories of examples, but only in a metaphysical way. If you genuinely ask to be made better, it is possible that from wherever such help may come, it may be offered not in proportion to your wrong but in generous measure.

Jung describes transcendence is the process whereby the mind is amplified so that it may be enabled to evolve from one attitude to another.  This function seems to be an inescapable concomitant of the truth. Jung writes that it is a process that unfolds itself at the behest of nature.  As such, deception can have no place in its unfolding. The reality of nature can never deny itself. Experience, and the determined resort to habitual thought-patterns of the mind, can provide the solution to many problems. Sometimes, as in a crisis, this is not enough. We need more in terms of courage and insight than our apparent gifts have endowed us with. We need to be empowered to go beyond ourselves. We can only become newly enabled by relying on what Jung calls the "wisdom and experience of countless centuries" that waits as a transcendent potential in the unconscious mind. 

Individuals who feel helpless are often confined by the inflexibility of their thinking. Every society that promotes aggression structures itself around dogmatic attitudes towards its own people and those it proclaims as the enemy. Through the conscious adoption of fixed attitudes, people can be imprisoned within a one-sided viewpoint of themselves and of the world. A state of affairs proclaimed as a dogma, such as the heroic attributes of the leader of an ideology, requires mental support in the form of the denial of any contrary viewpoint.  This is why aggressive societies tend to be enclosed systems that are fearful of any internal opposition. It is not natural for an individual, or a society, to deny the truth. That denial requires huge energy in shutting out reality. Truth is silenced in the determined pursuit of a self-image, or group-image, that denies the wholeness of the human mind. Honesty must not be suppressed if transcendence is to occur. It seems to be through the acceptance of imperfection in the self, and in the group, that a solution becomes possible. When thinking has become petrified, then perhaps it is only ego collapse, as identified by B W, that can open up new horizons.

The unconscious can also be accessed through lies, but to disastrous effect. Those who proclaim themselves as heroes, or their group as the embodiment of a mission to establish a golden age, are beyond any transcendence from one attitude to another. Falsity is one sided. Because the truth is locked out there are no opposites. There is no dynamic for change within an enclosed psychic system. Paradoxically, it is in apparent weakness that transcendence is enabled. The powers of the unconscious do not exist to be eradicated through denial, but demand to be heard as the inexhaustible resource through which consciousness may be increased. The unconscious yields up solutions only where the individual accepts the inadequacy of any artificial construct imposed upon the conscious mind. This is how Jung puts it: 

	In the end one has to admit that there are problems which one simply cannot solve on one's own resources. Such an admission has the advantage of being honest, truthful, and in accord with reality, and this prepares the ground for a compensatory reaction from the collective unconscious: you are now more inclined to give heed to a helpful idea or intuition, or to notice thoughts which had not been allowed to voice themselves before. If you have an attitude of this kind, then the helpful powers slumbering in the deeper strata of man's nature can come awake and intervene, for helplessness and weakness and the eternal experience are the eternal problem of mankind. To this problem there is also an eternal answer, otherwise it would have been all up with humanity long ago. 

Growth in consciousness requires the expansion of the mind. Something cannot be created out of nothing. It is only possible to add to the sum of any state by the accretion of what already exists. Unconsciousness is a dangerous resource. It must be used honestly. Since consciousness functions through discrimination, the incorporation of those impulses from unconsciousness which affirm truth, amplify nature with understanding. In nurturing consciousness, Jung goes to far as to claim that the mind becomes newly created.  

Nature is the author of the transcendent function and, as such, it demands acknowledgement in truth.  The mental attitude that accepts the burden of the real self-knowledge and the limitations of experience invites the intervention of positive unconscious energy. In those circumstances, Jung claims, people are then enabled to grow away from one-sidedness and towards individuality.  Through the transcendent function, a person grows by the acceptance of reality. This fosters the integration of conscious and unconscious thinking into a state more closely approaching wholeness.  

This state is the complete converse of that which characterises a society engaged in destruction. A function always has an opposite in the human mind. Good is in polar relation to evil, as is love to hate. It appears logical that transcendence too is balanced by an opposite effect. While the transcendent function occurs only by an honest approach to life’s problems and moves a person towards truth, deceptive energy draws the individual into the realm of darkness: that is away from consciousness. This function, for which I have no name, takes on the character of collective chaos. Actions become increasingly less conscious and more subject to the destructive impulses that are conjured up. These functions are not individual, but collective. Self-deception plunges the self-diminished conscious mind of the deceiver into the immense darkness that exists within the unconscious. Those who choose it seem to feed off each other.

Through lies, a person summons up the powers that will destroy the world. Truth is the only principle that invokes the help of nature, and of the flawed expression of nature that is our human mind.
Table of contents: label: 1
title: The Origin of Evil; title: Bibliography, Preface