The Fascination of Unconscious Evil

Stories in which the protagonist is unaware of the fact that he is the bad guy.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego- personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.

In the 1987 film, Angel Heart, a New York City private investigator name Harry Angel is hired to track down a missing person—a once-famous 1940s crooner named Johnny Favorite. Angel takes the case and pursues investigative leads to Harlem and New Orleans, discovering Favorite’s involvement in the occult, voodoo, and black magic. Along the way, everyone Angel interviews about Favorite ends up gruesomely murdered, and Angel is haunted by nightmares, blackouts, and a growing sense of doom that something terrible is pursuing him.

Ultimately Harry Angel has the terrifying realization that he is Johnny Favorite, who sold his soul to the devil for fame. In an effort to escape his pact with the devil, Favorite kidnapped a young soldier named Harry Angel in Times Square on New Year's Eve, and sacrificed him in a black magic ritual.

Favorite, along with his cultist associates, murdered Angel by cutting out and consuming his heart, allowing him to steal Angel’s soul and identity. Though the plot device is clumsy, the psychological drama of a man who is unconscious of the fact that he is the doomed and damned man that he seeks is pretty cool.

Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel in Angel Heart, 1987.

Harry Angel resembles Dr. Victor Frankenstein in his struggle to confront his internal shadow. In Angel’s case, he persistently represses awareness of his shadow until circumstances force him to confront it. In Dr. Frankenstein’s case, he projects his own moral failure and irresponsibility onto the monster he created, thereby avoiding recognition that he is the bad guy.

The American novelist Henry James is famous for his cool and elegant development of an unreliable narrator. There’s a great moment his short story The Aspern Papers, when the reader realizes that the narrator—who seems like a cultured and sympathetic scholar—is actually a ruthless and deceptive villain. The naive reader doesn’t entirely grasp this until the old woman—whose privacy the narrator is violating—confronts him and declares that he is a scoundrel.

Through the technique of the unreliable narrator, the reader is trapped inside a mind that justifies, lies about, or fails to recognize its own depravity.

As Carl Jung saw it, growing up is the process of individuation—that is, achieving full awareness of who you really are, including your capacity for self-deception, egocentricity, and even evil.

For some time now, it has seemed to me that the American psyche has been deformed by its inability to recognize its shadow. This lack of self-awareness finds frequent expression in what Jung called projection—that is, perceiving one’s own vices and bad intentions in others, and regarding these others with unrelenting hostility.

Thus, whenever we hear US government officials fulminating about the wickedness of our purported adversaries, we must always consider the possibility that they are projecting.

For example, during and after the 2016 presidential election, the Hillary Clinton campaign claimed that Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russian agents to obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Immediately I sensed that she was projecting. I therefore wasn’t surprised to learn that, through the attorney Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign had hired the Washington, DC-based firm Fusion GPS to perform “opposition research” on Donald Trump.

Fusion GPS hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to conduct the research. Steele used his network of contacts in Russia to gather dirt on Donald Trump, including unsubstantiated claims that Russia possessed compromising material on him and that he had engaged in activities while in Russia that could be used to blackmail him.In other words, the Clinton campaign accused Trump of doing precisely what she was doing.

In the realm of foreign policy, both US political parties frequently accuse Russia, Iran, and China of all manner of meddling and perfidy. While I have no doubt that these three countries do their share of mischief in the world, there is no greater meddler on earth than the US government and its intelligence agencies.