Wednesday 7 October 2015

The Man of Shadows.

In Western societies only women are judged worthy of study. Women are viewed as more complex than men (and maybe they are) and more interesting. This has made men invisible. Men have become the norm and women have become the exotic.
You are worthy of study.
df A photo posted by Richard Ford (@richard.ford) on

Statues in London. In order to get a statue a man has to do something heroic. A woman simply needs to embody an idea.

There is a man to haunts the imagination of the world, thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.

This man is the villain of every Hollywood film ever produced and he has many faces. Only occasionally does he play an Englishman but we recognize him immediately he appears. He plays the Germans in war movies, aliens in science fiction and the devil himself in supernatural horror. He remains calm and polite as he commits crimes that turn blood to ice- and his accent is always cultured English.

You know him.

On occasion this man becomes the hero of the movie- think of James Bond for instance. Yet he remains the same monster. He blows the brains from his enemy and makes a joke as he does so. He smashes heads with an iron bar, straightens his tie and rejoins the cocktail party- feeling nothing, it seems.

Who is this man? Why does he transfix the world?

Carl Jung believed we all have a shadow- power that we are afraid to use because of the evil we might do.

It is you.

You are the Man of Shadows. You are the Hollywood villain. You are James Bond.

Knowing who we are does not obligate us to behave badly. It simply means that we may walk in the world knowing that we are capable of protecting our loved ones if we need to do so. Paradoxically this confidence means we are less likely to attract trouble in the first place.

The western nations (and particularly the men of the west) have not been defeated by force of arms. We have been defeated because we are afraid of what we might do if we were powerful.

You are the Man of Shadows. It is time your enemies feared this fact more than you do.

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