The Projection of Fear, Evil, and Reason's Insufficiency
Since it is universally believed that people are merely what their consciousness knows of itself, they regard themselves as harmless and so add stupidity to iniquity. They do not deny that terrible things have happened and still go on happening, but it is always "the others" who do them. And when such deeds belong to the recent or remote past, they quickly and conveniently sink into the sea of forgetfulness, and that state of chronic woolly-mindedness returns which we describe as "normality." In shocking contrast to this is the fact that nothing has finally disappeared and nothing has been made good. The evil, the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the obscure misgiving are there before our eyes, if only we would see. People have done these things; I am human, sharing in human nature; therefore, I am guilty with the rest and bear unaltered and indelibly within me the capacity and inclination to do them again at any time. Even if, juristically speaking, we were not accessories to the crime, we are always, thanks to our human nature, potentially criminals. In reality, we merely lacked a suitable opportunity to be drawn into the infernal melee. None of us stand outside humanity's black collective shadow. Whether the crime lies many generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that is always and everywhere present—and one would therefore do well to possess some "imagination in evil," for only the fool can permanently neglect the conditions of their own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making them an instrument of evil. Harmlessness and naivety are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in the vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease. On the contrary, they lead to projection of the unrecognized evil onto the "other." This strengthens the opponent's position in the most effective way because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side, increasing the formidableness of the threat. What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. Here, of course, we come up against one of the main prejudices of the Christian tradition, and one that is a great stumbling block to our policies. We should, so we are told, eschew evil and, if possible, neither touch nor mention it. For evil is also the thing of ill omen, that which is tabooed and feared. This attitude towards evil, and the apparent circumventing of it, flatters the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry evil into the wilderness.¹
But if one can no longer avoid the realization that evil, without anyone ever having chosen it, is lodged in human nature itself, then it bestrides the psychological stage as the equal and opposite partner of good. This realization leads straight to psychological dualism, already unconsciously prefigured in the political world schism and in the even more unconscious dissociation in modern individuals themselves. The dualism does not come from this realization; rather, we are in a split condition to begin with. It would be an insufferable thought that we had to take personal responsibility for so much guilt. We therefore prefer to localize evil with individual criminals or groups of criminals, while washing our hands in innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil. This sanctimoniousness cannot be kept up in the long run, because evil, as experience shows, lies in humanity—unless, in accordance with the Christian view, one is willing to postulate a metaphysical principle of evil. The great advantage of this view is that it exonerates the conscience from too heavy a responsibility and fobs it off on the devil, in correct psychological appreciation of the fact that humans are much more the victims of their psychic constitution than its inventors. Considering that the evil of our day puts everything that has ever agonized humanity in the deepest shade, one must ask oneself how it is that, for all our progress in the administration of justice, in medicine, and in technology, for all our concern for life and health, monstrous engines of destruction have been invented that could easily exterminate the human race.
No one will maintain that atomic physicists are a pack of criminals because it is to their efforts that we owe that peculiar flower of human ingenuity, the hydrogen bomb. The vast amount of intellectual work that went into the development of nuclear physics was put forth by people who devoted themselves to their task with the greatest exertions and self-sacrifice and whose moral achievement could just as easily have earned them the merit of inventing something useful and beneficial to humanity. But even though the first step along the road to a momentous invention may be the outcome of a conscious decision, here, as everywhere, the spontaneous idea—the hunch or intuition—plays an important part. In other words, the unconscious collaborates too and often makes decisive contributions. So it is not the conscious effort alone that is responsible for the result; somewhere or other, the unconscious, with its barely discernible goals and intentions, has its finger in the pie. If it puts a weapon in your hand, it is aiming at some kind of violence. Knowledge of the truth is the foremost goal of science, and if in pursuit of the longing for light we stumble upon an immense danger, then one has the impression more of fatality than of premeditation. It is not that present-day humanity is capable of greater evil than those of antiquity or primitive cultures. We merely have incomparably more effective means with which to realize our proclivity to evil. As our consciousness has broadened and differentiated, our moral nature has lagged behind. That is the great problem before us today. Reason alone does not suffice.
¹ In the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, the 'scapegoat' was a literal goat upon which the sins of the community were symbolically placed before being sent into the wilderness, effectively "removing" sin from the people. This ritual provided a sense of purification and absolution, but it didn’t actually eliminate evil—it merely relocated it.
The quote suggests that modern individuals and societies engage in a similar psychological process: rather than acknowledging the evil within ourselves, we project it outward—onto others, enemies, criminals, or external forces—and metaphorically send it away. This "circumventing" of evil flattens our self-awareness, allowing us to remain blind to our own capacity for wrongdoing.
By doing so, we deceive ourselves into believing that evil is something external rather than an inherent part of human nature. This self-deception is what makes people more susceptible to being used as instruments of evil themselves, since they fail to recognize or reckon with their own shadow.