The Power of Our Mortality

The Power of Our Mortality:

Understanding the Destroyer Archetype and the Armageddon Paradigm

Debra Oliver

--The Destroyer

Is it the Destroyer who comes?

For the boisterous sea of tears heaves in the flood-

tide of pain

The crimson clouds run wild in the wind lashed

by lightening, and the thundering laughter of

the Mad is over the sky.

Life sits in the chariot crowned by Death.

Bring out your tribute to him of all that you

have.

Do not hug your savings to your heart, do not

look behind,

Bend your head at his feet, trailing your hair

in the dust.

Take to the road from this moment.

For the lamp is blown out and the house is desolate.

Walls are rocking, and the call comes from the land

of dimness beyond your ken.

Hide not your face in terror; tears are in vain;

Your door chains have snapped.

Run out for your voyage to the end of all joys

and sorrows.

Let your steps be the steps of a desperate dance.

Sing, "Victory to Life in Death."

Accept your destiny, O Bride!

Put on your red robe to follow through the

darkness the torchlight of the Bridegroom!

-- Rabindranath Tagore

New York City, September 11, 2001.

8:40 AM

A mother spanks her toddler for making a mess in the cupboards. A morning commuter screams a racial epithet toward the car that cut in front of him. A husband and wife argue over whose turn it is to take the clothes to the cleaners. Two women stand around the office coffee maker engaged in vicious gossip. Two married men eye the same attractive derriere as they get on the elevator. The AM talk radio band blares the latest citizen diatribes about lazy welfare mothers, the burdens of income tax and the rotten nature of the government.

8:45 AM

A jetliner plows into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and through the heart of the American nation.

9:58 AM

The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.

10:28 AM

The North Tower of the World Trade Center collapses.

10:29 AM

For one breathless moment, survivors in the city are gripped frozen in an embrace with eternity. Temporal layers and skins of petty detail are peeled away. They stand exposed, naked and essential in the presence of Life and Death. For one second, all is silence and the wordless, native remembrance of aonial realities. All that remains is a heart still beating.

Then, absolutely nothing is as it was. The mother clutches her toddler, sobbing with gratitude for life. The morning commuter goes straight to the blood bank to donate, not caring whether his blood revives a black body or a white body. As with one heart, the community performs an instantaneous inventory of what each can contribute to help, to save and to heal. A profound and spontaneous outpouring of love, courage, selflessness, dignity and solemnity takes hold. A sacred aura radiates from the city and washes the nation. People ask questions, such as "why?" and "how?" They are suddenly compelled to think and to feel deeply. A radio reporter at ground zero marvels that a bird perches above the ruins, singing. It is reminiscent of Thoreau's statement: "The wood thrush sings to amend our institutions." Only the essentials matter: life, love, relationship, service.

This purification and deepening of being is the power of our mortality. Events like the 9-11 attacks bear the unmistakable signature of the Destroyer archetype.

The proximity of death rearranges the psyche powerfully and inexorably, potently reordering all priorities. A close brush with death thrusts the most cardinal and alive concerns to center stage and vanquishes all lesser voices. It is inappropriate to gossip and bicker in the presence of death and unthinkable to pursue passion and profit in its direct midst. Death demands the deepest accountings of our nature and life tendencies. It tolerates only the highest and best that a human being has to offer and is an especially accurate measure of the stature of our humanity. Those who remain completely unaltered by the sacred proximity of death are those who are impossibly shallow, deeply dysfunctional or criminally deranged.

Death catapults us out of the stasis of daily routines, instantly destroying habits of interaction and suffocating webs of entanglement. It thrusts us into a rarefied atmosphere of tremendously deep and vital experience. We are rarely more alive than when consciously confronting death. And when we stand within the vast electro-magnetic field generated by the poles of Life and Death, the contents of our participation in time, space and circumstance are summed up and measured against the living breath of eternity. Therefore, death is the great purifier of motive and resolve, with the unarguable power to shatter man-made prisons of illusion and to reveal novel dimensions of liberation.

Death is Life's answer to stasis and stagnation. Our mortality is the final and outspoken reality check and a primary cornerstone of our common humanity.

These characteristics of death are recognized universally. The Destroyer archetype, the bringer of death, is a vitally important component of the collective human myth, and so it is found in every culture, together with the physical experience. Although dread of death is a major facet of human nature, there is also an equal and opposite engrossment with its power to transfigure the human landscape. We share a numinous, spiritual fascination with the dynamic power of death. We could ask ourselves the question: "Why on earth is mass destruction so riveting to imagine?" It is riveting to imagine partly because death -- especially if precipitated on a broad collective scale -- may be the only force we are sufficiently familiar with, and which we know to be powerful enough, to shatter the grip of collective evil and to break the hypnotic spell of the status quo. Therefore, the Destroyer, the bringer of death, is the archetype we tend to call upon when our backs are up against the wall.

Invocation of the Destroyer precedes every revolution and each declaration of war. Fiats such as, "Give me Liberty or give me Death!" are simple yet profound. They declare the specific quality of life demanded on a collective scale and pronounce the most comprehensive ultimatum. The willingness to actually die for the implementation of a higher and better principle is the quintessential expression of human power and will. There is formidable impersonal power in this act.

In a different vein and on a personal level, it is common for an individual who is embroiled in an intractable conflict with another person to wish the other were dead. This death wish is an innate default mechanism that springs to mind when all other options are either exhausted or unseen. Fantasizing the demise of an enemy can give people momentary relief from persistent oppression. Fantasizing the death of an opponent is a crude, expedient and often desperate method of achieving detachment from the situation. It is commonly used to buy the psyche time to imagine and formulate what life could look like and feel like in the absence of a given oppressor. However, this death wish can also become an obsession in itself, eventually driving a desperate person to the act of murder. Especially in cases that can lead to a sense of desperation, the need for cultivating the technique of detachment, so often found in Eastern philosophies, is seen in a very practical light. Detachment, combined with a rigorous exploration of options, can take a person much further into a constructive future than can abuse of the death wish.

From yet another angle, a variety of motivational speakers exhort their audiences to live each day as if it were their last. What does this mean? It first requires that we actually sit down with ourselves and deliberately imagine our own death. We bring our minds and imaginations to the brink of that moment when our lives are summed up in the context and presence of eternity. This exercise is a meltdown to the very essence of things and a retrospective look at the procession of events from the angle of their meaning and significance in the long run. It is a moment when consciousness and beingness are maximized and all-important, and when egotism is shaved down to a proper sense of proportion. To imagine our own death calls up a state of sobriety in which the ethical sense is at its peak. We enter a dimension where we realize the necessity for greater daring and depth of experience in daily life and in which we are most strongly motivated to minimize episodes of regret.

If each day were lived in anticipation of an inexorable retrospective of this breadth and magnitude, our lives would be changed dramatically. We would be more alive and conscious. We would embrace greater willingness to stand up for principles. We would be markedly less inclined to succumb to the hypnotic stupor that so often surrounds daily routine and we would surely not "sweat the small stuff." We would be more likely to invest each detail, each encounter, with a maximum dose of the essence of our humanity, our soul, if we lived each day as if it were truly our last.

These few examples illustrate a vital and foundational relationship between empowerment and death. In order to achieve freedom, detachment, circumspection, or a heightened spirit of aliveness, something must die, wane or be shattered, whether the target is a colonial tyrant or simply personal inertia. Implicit in every expansion is destruction of limitation. The target of the Destroyer urge may be a person, a building, a habit, a dysfunction, an ideology or a political system, to name but a few. Although the targets may vary with mind-boggling diversity, the urge to destroy is innate in humankind and is as abiding as any other instinct, if only because the twin urge to expand is ineradicable.

Perhaps as fundamental as the sex drive, the Destroyer urge may similarly be channeled along wholesome or unwholesome lines. We are an intrinsically restless species -- creatures who are designed to grow and expand, whether toward the dark or the light. In one way or another, we are ever breaking ground. Consequently, the pathways of our personal lives are strewn with shattered forms, burst chrysalises and discarded personas. Collectively, we leave behind long trails of spent belief systems, ruins of forgotten cultures and mountains of shed superstition and dogma.

Destruction may be accomplished as a pinnacle of love and compassion. For example, pulling a person or a nation out of the terrifying grip of a neurosis liberates the human spirit trapped inside, but banishes the neurosis and its attendant behaviors. By way of contrast, the Destroyer urge may just as easily be invested with criminal intent, the spirit of conquest, or a lurid and exaggerated cruelty, which tortures and imprisons the life of the human spirit. In other words, there is a soul-killing variety of destruction and a soul-nurturing, life-affirming brand of the same impulse, and a million shades, hues and variations on the central theme of the partnership of life and mortality. Regardless of the endless ways we may choose to relate to destruction, there can be no separating Life from Death. And there is no way to eradicate the Destroyer archetype from the collective experience. It can only be channeled, never expunged.

It is extremely important to confront, to understand and to refine this power of our mortality, especially now when public fascination with the Destroyer urge is at such a peak. From a host of angles, the Destroyer archetype is especially and uniquely active at this point in history, and this poses both a grave danger and an unprecedented opportunity, depending on how we apply it -- both personally and collectively.

Any expansion, whether minor and personal or major and collective, implies the demise of a previous order. With each rite of passage -- leaving home, marriage, parenthood, and maturity -- we leave behind and put to rest some part of ourselves. How well we assimilate the experience of expansion depends largely upon whether we are identified at any given moment with the life impulse that is expanding past its former boundaries, or with the form that is being interred in the process.

So, for example, during the process of globalization that has characterized the 20th Century, we have experienced massive and relentless paradigm death at personal, local and national levels. Old patterns of isolationism have been shattered as the need for international cooperation has emerged. Vintage attitudes such as, "My country, right or wrong!" have lethally collided with new standards for international law and expectations for behavior in a community of nations. Old school patriotism becomes a pathetic exercise in atavism, as love of country fans out to include an embrace of humanity. The ironclad grip of despots who invoke outworn justifications, such as the divine right of kings, or the right to exploit their citizens on the grounds of an inviolate national sovereignty, is being loosened by the on-going implementation of such fiats as the Four Freedoms and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Likewise, the need for neighborhood watchdogs to protect against bullies and the criminal element has ramified to include the need for global watchdogs to check worldwide growth of the self-same elements.

It bears repeating that we respond to these expansions and destructions differently, depending on whether we are identified with the expanding life principle, or with the outmoded form and its sometimes-gruesome death throes. This explains why some are inspired, invigorated and delighted to "live in interesting times," while others are terrified, murderous, desperate, paralyzed or grief-stricken as they behold the crumbling, moribund forms of everything they held dear.

Personal adaptation to the ever-shifting social landscape depends on how we know and define ourselves in relation to the broader social arena. For many people, long-standing tribal, national, and/or religious mores and paradigms take the place of a strong, well-formed and self-actualized personal ego structure. Consequently, when the cohesive social norms or ideological boundaries on which they rely collapse, or metamorphose out from under them, these people literally face the loss of their identities.

For them, paradigm death becomes death of self: they are out of contact with that internal growth impulse or active essence of continuity, which could motivate them to adapt successfully to the situation. And the surrounding expansion process is so devastating, so completely threatening to some that it takes on sinister, mythic and demonic proportions, which may justify in their minds drastic action based on the instinct to self-preservation. Many self-appointed assassins are in the grip of this specific kind of crisis. When brought to trial, their lawyers may plead insanity, which is an accurate assessment of this exaggerated form of dissolution: they have become a living embodiment of the death dance of a paradigm. They have nothing to lose, because the principle of continuity within their personalities has already died and the death urge has taken over.

Likewise, going back to the example of an individual entangled in an intractable conflict with another, death wish is often the instinctual formula for extrication when all other options are either exhausted or unseen. This holds equally true when some aspect of collective darkness helplessly ensnares individuals. This desperate and expedient death wish, expressed toward humanity as a whole, is in fact the very heart and soul of what I call the Armageddon Paradigm.

The explosion of mass communications and the relentless reporting of the state of global affairs, with an emphasis on aberrant, lurid, and destructive world behavior, have amplified our awareness of collective evil to unheard of magnitudes. There is little or no parallel emphasis placed on the constructive and wholesome life activities of the overwhelming global majority of people. Very scanty press is given to the recognition that the heart of humanity is basically decent and sound. Such phenomena are considered un-newsworthy, except perhaps in times of crisis.

Parallel to the recognition of collective evil, expansion of every kind is accelerating. We must find ways to cope, not only with globalization, but also with the burgeoning of knowledge and information and the expansion of human consciousness, with all its attendant new demands and expectations. This poses a terrible crisis for many, which cannot remain unanswered. Some response or adaptation must be forthcoming in order to survive this onslaught psychologically. These combined phenomena have set the stage for a feverish and sometimes wild-eyed pursuit of empowerment. Consequently, human beings are actively calling upon and interacting with the Destroyer archetype as never before -- both in its loving, life-affirming aspect and in its dark and soul-killing aspect.

Perhaps one of the most blatant and exaggerated examples of the dark side of the Destroyer urge resides with the many doomsday groups extant today. This trend of modern millennialism has arisen as a group or collective reaction of fear, defensiveness and desperate bewilderment toward humanity, owing largely to the stark and terrifying revelation of the collective shadow that characterized the 20th Century.

Subscribers to the Armageddon Paradigm have, by and large, given up on humanity totally. In their minds, collective evil so completely saturates all social phenomena, that the human condition seems categorically non-negotiable. They see no available avenues to make an impact on the course of events, no way to exert an influence to bring good out of bad: the world in toto is pronounced hopeless and must be destroyed. Human society -- taken wholesale -- becomes the target for the Destroyer urge. Members of these groups derive an enormous and highly inflated sense of empowerment from taking this position. By immersing themselves in apocalyptic imagery and purpose, they appropriate a sense of power, which is assumed to be completely unavailable to them otherwise.

In the fundamentalist Christian version of this phenomenon, otherwise powerless followers seat themselves on the jury of the Last Judgment, allegedly on the very Right Hand of God. Often, they participate imaginatively in a profoundly exhilarating vicarious infliction of the annihilation, scourges, plagues and pestilences described in the Book of Revelations. Presumably in league with God, they fantasize beating the living daylights out of their oppressors -- the wicked and unredeemed human race. Then, in the private recesses of their imaginations, they gleefully burn, savage and nuke the globe, which has been for them such an all-imprisoning vale of tears. Tremendously heady passion and excitement can be derived from these fantasies, a thrill of cataclysmic drama and a vivid pinnacle of aliveness otherwise considered unattainable. Witness the almost sexual ecstasies demonstrated by David Koresh of the Branch Davidians when he preached about the end of the world.

These orgiastic flights of fancy, however thrilling, amount to a hate-fest of the human race and a vivid urge to witness its destruction. Utterly no distinction is made between humanity per se and the collective evil we struggle with. There is neither identification with nor participation in, the grueling, patient day-to-day effort to lift human expression and living to a higher level of betterment. And there is no sane, down-to-earth realization of the price of pain and suffering the massive cataclysms millenarians imagine and delight in, would actually exact on human victims. There is no remorse involved in fantasizing the equivalent of millions of 9-11 disasters; only a heartless -- but exhilarating -- voyeuristic satisfaction -- and a vicarious appropriation of "spiritual" power.

This disorder, couched in Christian symbolism, has nothing to do with the Will of God, nor with the Love of Christ: it is hatred, pure and simple. The Armageddon Paradigm refuses to traffic with or make any personal investment in the spirit, the principle and the process of human redemption, which is the central and abiding theme of Christ's teaching. Followers of apocalyptic Christianity ignore the entire process and historical dimension, which will eventually embody the unfoldment and flourishing of the human soul globally. Instead, they skip to the last chapter in which Creation is "destroyed" rather than consummated. I find it ironic that a subculture, which is so violently opposed to abortion of individual human pregnancies, would yet have such a strong investment in aborting the entire process of human unfoldment in historical epochs yet to come.

Furthermore, although Christ embodied quintessential love of humanity as a totality, in the view-finder of this paradigm, only the few "true believers" are redeemed, never humanity, from whom they have divorced themselves completely and in whom they perceive no redeeming qualities.

Though we may wish to relegate this kind of internal fantasy to the category of a minimal fringe, it is important to observe, for example, that there is currently a small sub-set of U.S. Senators who violently oppose environmental regulation on the grounds that, imminently, the earth will be consumed by the Apocalypse. And historically, Joseph Stalin, who was originally a Russian Orthodox seminary student, came hair-raisingly close to a nuclear assault upon the U.S. just before his death, bolstered by his private belief that America was the Third Beast in the Book of Revelations.

On a less dramatic level, and in pursuit of theocratic empowerment, the Christian Right has deftly insinuated itself into thousands of school boards, state legislatures and federal posts, with the intent to impose their brand of Christian dogma as the ultimate panacea for collective evil. Entire political campaigns now solicit public endorsement on the grounds that "God's" candidates should be installed to manage national affairs until the Second Coming is accomplished.

We see a similar rise of apocalyptic fundamentalism in the Muslim world. While the Christian view of collective evil is global ("the world, the flesh and the Devil"), the Muslim view is largely regional, if not clannish. This means that some fundamentalist Muslims tend to view collective evil as a phenomenon generated mainly by Israel and the Anglo West. Their solution to this scourge lies in the doctrine of Jihad, or Holy War. Holy warriors feel themselves invested with God's will to destroy the "Great Satan." There is no greater honor and no greater thrill than to offer one's life to the Mother of All Wars. In the Middle East, as in the West, militant fundamentalism is gaining political inroads, based largely upon the highly charged numinosity of the Destroyer archetype and the uniquely dynamic sense of righteous empowerment it can confer, when twisted into the funnel of religious dogma and regional hatreds.

When we venture off the beaten track of familiar religious views, similar aggregations of millennialists can be found within the New Age movement. These groups are often centered around a self-made prophet of some kind, who forecasts an imminent end to the world. Especially in America, there is an entire subculture of rural communities formed around nuclei of psychic channels and gurus, who claim to have the inside track on the bleak prospects for human futurity. Members of these groups feel certain that they will be spared the agonies soon to befall humanity at large, provided they cleave devoutly to the community. Meanwhile, the group bides its time while waiting for the end of the world.

During this prolonged waiting game, constant diversions must be generated to offset members' natural inclinations to leave and get on with their lives. The instinct to self-preservation (or the wish to survive Armageddon) bonds followers to the community, and so it must be kept at a fever pitch of vigilance in order to maintain the bond. This is accomplished by generating ever more baroque scenarios about the battle between good and evil and the "pivotal" role members of the community shall play in the final outcome.

This is irony at its best. Though most of these followers are not yet self-actualized enough to effectively create change within the humble bounds of human civilization, they have miraculously become great and trusted warriors in the cosmic dimension of the battle between good and evil! Whole sectors of the galaxy allegedly rely on their wisdom and leadership at the helm. Meanwhile, they haven't the patience, the talent, the attention span, or the common sense necessary to effectively manage perfectly mundane affairs. To argue at a city council meeting for the installation of a traffic light in their own earthbound communities would be impossibly "out of the box."

Parallel to the religiously impassioned and inflated search for empowerment by visions of global destruction, a secular version of the same phenomenon is on the rise in the form of garden-variety survivalism. Secular survivalists presume that, through extraordinary economic and political savvy, they have hoodwinked and outsmarted those forces and trends they assume are irreversibly poised to devour the rest of humankind. They alone will survive and thrive once their lessers have been eliminated.

Similarly, little compassion for humanity can be found in the Nihilist paradigm. A select stratum of intellectuals, who embrace a pronounced atheism, seizes upon this construct. Nihilists presuppose themselves to be superior to the rest of humanity by virtue of a scintillating mentality, and because they abstain from the "opiate of the masses," namely religion and spirituality. Consequently, they simultaneously shut the door to conscious integration with the collective psyche, with society, and with the transpersonal domains of awareness. They are routinely forced by their own separateness and aloofness to demonize the species in order to stand out as superior.

The generic platform of Nihilism is that human society is rotten to the core, and should be torn down by any means available -- preferably by violence. This philosophy categorically denies the existence of soul or any higher power, and relegates to sentimental obsolescence any ideals based on beauty, goodness or truth. And although it propounds a scientific materialism, this philosophy is unable to offer any scientific premises or constructive economic proposals to ensure a thriving future. The vision of the Nihilist stops with a chaotic or an outright bloody downfall of society -- with nothing constructive to offer on the other side of "the Revolution" -- primarily because the Nihilist has forsworn every form of psychological integration, which would provide a legitimate basis for such a positive collective vision.

These are just a few examples of the many groups that subscribe to Armageddon Paradigm as a means of empowerment in the face of globalization and when confronted with a recognition of collective evil. Common components of this cluster of assumptions include spiritual or intellectual inflation, the presumed hopelessness of the human condition, and the indiscriminate focus of the Destroyer urge upon human society as a whole. In each case, an extreme sense of power and aliveness is derived from embracing the life context that the End of the World is imminent. A profoundly moving liberation from the burden of life creeping by at its petty pace is achieved. Each day is greeted as if this very day will be the one wherein eternity will finally ravish and conquer temporality. There is an urgent demand for, and fervent expectation of, immediate and catastrophic destruction of everything and everyone...except themselves.

By embracing this global crisis mentality, the details and hard work necessary to help guarantee a wholesome and thriving human futurity are kept entirely at bay. No interim or gradient principle of continuity is operative. No relationship with humanity is permissible. No compromise is possible and no options are acceptable, because relinquishing a rigid focus of the Destroyer urge upon society at large would strip adherents to this paradigm of a sense of power and heightened ecstasy. Letting go of the grip of this paradigm would mean deflating once again into the despised, time-bound mainstream, being judged by its standards and prodded along by its demands. Likewise, when there is a strong religious component to this perspective, relinquishment of the Destroyer urge can be interpreted to be a betrayal of God, since the God idea and the potent sense of numinosity are so completely entangled with the experience of millennialism. Once people wholeheartedly embrace the Armageddon Paradigm, to the exclusion of any internal questioning or conflict, most would rather die than give it up. Thus, we have the unbelievable tragedies of the massacre at Waco, the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and 9-11. The Armageddon Paradigm can easily escalate into lust for martyrdom.

We should ask ourselves: what is the difference between the extreme sense of elation and empowerment people derive from the Armageddon Paradigm, and the sense of power and aggrandizement people derive from cold-blooded torture and murder? I would argue that although the details may differ, the motive and the psychological pay-off are the same.

In each case, a long-nurtured misanthropy and a frustrated sense of power are conditioning factors. And in each case, perpetrators have crossed a certain threshold whereby an indiscriminate devotion to the Destroyer archetype in its most dark and ominous aspect has been embraced, to the utter exclusion of any constructive balance within their own psyches. This paradigm is totally devoid of love. It places no value on the creative and redemptive process of life itself and nurtures no identification or relationship with humanity. Likewise, it lacks the sanctity, solemnity, self-examination, self-purification and humility that accompanies the genuine experience of death when it is up close, personal and physical, as it is when we sincerely contemplate our own personal demise. The Armageddon Paradigm is an attempt to cull the empowerment surrounding the Destroyer archetype, without being personally subject to either its destructive or its transformative effects.

Why is it important to understand these trends and subcultures? Why not just ignore them and get on with our lives? These groups are the collective equivalent of the miner's canary in the cage. They are unmistakable indicators of a psychic toxin and threat we have not quite got our senses around. Moreover, doomsdayism is extremely contagious these days. Our psychological immunities have been lowered by long periods of war, economic stress and the daunting demands of adapting to globalization -- the three great collective themes of the new 21^st Century. Bewilderment, stress, compassion fatigue and social frustration are everywhere to be found. These are ideal conditions in which the virus of doomsdayism could spread to epidemic proportions, leading to a pandemic expression of the Destroyer urge in its most dark and chaotic aspect. Already, the press burgeons with news of explosions and attacks perpetrated worldwide by individual terrorists subsumed by some facet of the Armageddon Paradigm. And finally, collectively speaking, our backs are up against the wall because of a variety of global challenges requiring immediate attention. In this posture, it is an unavoidable reflex to call upon the Destroyer archetype. Consequently, a crash-course in the constructive application of this innate urge would seem to be in order.

We need to understand that humanity itself is calling in the Destroyer archetype, as a means of contending with its recognition of collective evil -- which is real, not imagined. The shadow side of human nature has captured our attention and imaginations as never before. Like a global hot potato, we toss this darkness around the corridors of civilization because it is too hot to handle. People are desperate to invest some one group or another with the totality of human darkness, in order to have a finite and manageable target for the Destroyer urge, which rises in their gorges when they witness global dimensions of evil.

Consequently, fanatical projection of this darkness onto others has become increasingly common practice for political groups, ideological groups, religious groups and indeed, entire nations. For example, in the religious arena, demonization of others is second nature for many. Notwithstanding vast exceptions: Christians invest the blackness of panhuman darkness in the "heathens;" Muslims militate against the "infidels;" Hindus ostracize the "untouchables" and Jews blame the "goyem." Meanwhile, each group of accusers holds itself utterly blameless. In the political venue, we see the hysterical growth of conspiracy theory and rabid distrust of all forms of government. In social circles, there is massive demonization of the poor and an effort to scapegoat them, just as Hitler did the Jews, for all the economic ills plaguing society. And the poor respond in kind, framing the rich as verily the Anti-Christ. I have even overheard conversations wherein vegetarians blamed the totality of the world's ills on meat-eaters!

In each of these examples, people attempt to make one group or social class the specified repository for the sum-total of human evil, in order to have a clear target for the Destroyer urge. This effort will always be a distortion of reality, which only increases the volume and volatility of these reservoirs of human darkness, because realistically, human evil has been generated non-stop since the very conception of humanity. Every single person who ever lived has contributed some drop to this gargantuan bucket of anthropocentric evil. In the light of fairness, accuracy and sanity, it is impossible to assign total responsibility for the creation of this vast cloud of darkness to any one group, regardless of how corrupt they may be. Furthermore, none of the major reservoirs of collective evil constitute the Anti-Christ, as the fanatics would like us to believe. There is a vast distinction between normal human evil and cosmic, archetypal dimensions of darkness.

Injustice and ineffectuality begin with exaggerating and inflating the order of magnitude of a given wrongdoing to hyperbolic proportions. Thus, simple graft becomes the Pillage of the People. Routine levels of ruthless political maneuvering become an Anti-Christic Global Conspiracy. Selfish exploitation of personal or national interests becomes Satanic. And immoral human behavior becomes Demonic and wholly immune to redemption.

These gross distortions of the orders of magnitude of world phenomena make it increasingly difficult to negotiate a resolution to our problems and thus to help diffuse the reservoirs of evil by which we are all oppressed. With this hyperbolic distortion, difficult but normal human problems are soon elevated to a realm wherein only God can manage a solution. Simple wrongdoing and selfish ignorance are manageable, negotiable and redeemable, given hard work, patience, education, political resolve and goodwill. Legendary dimensions of evil are, by definition, out of our league and entirely unmanageable. Part of the current popular fear that human affairs are careening out of control can be laid at the doorstep of our human addiction to exaggeration. We are entirely capable of scaring ourselves to death in this exercise of confusing levels and bloating the orders of magnitude of the phenomena we witness.

Let's look at an oversimplified example. Suppose my next-door neighbor is blasting a particularly offensive selection of Rock music while I am trying to sleep. My outrage builds with each hideous moment. In scenario number one, I knock on his door and scream: "This is unforgivable! Your music is satanic! You must be possessed by the Devil to listen to such odious garbage. Turn it off!" Most likely the neighbor, now outraged himself, will slam the door and turn up the volume, escalating a simple conflict into an all-out battle of wills. In scenario number two, I knock on the door and say: "Look, it's midnight and I have to be up early tomorrow morning. I can't sleep because your music is too loud. I think it's really inconsiderate of you to have the volume up so loud. If you want my goodwill as your neighbor, I would strongly suggest you turn it down." Obviously, scenario number two has better odds of achieving results, because accepting responsibility for being "inconsiderate" is much easier than accepting the accusation of being "satanic": one is a manageable unit of darkness for the neighbor to clean up, while the other is not. It is equally impossible for heads of State and their respective citizens to negotiate a resolution to being "The Evil Empire," the "Great Satan," or the "Terrorist."

This brings us to a crucial point. Within the confines of the Armageddon Paradigm, people no longer want to clean up and resolve the problems that plague us. They do not want harmony and renewed understanding to be derived from the turbulence of conflict: they want an END, which is dramatic and categorical, and which will vindicate their righteousness in the eyes of the world or the eyes of God. Millennialists have little or no investment in those thrilling, budding resolutions of world problems, which will diffuse world hostilities and generate renewed possibilities and reinvigorated mutual interplay. In the last analysis, subscribers to the Armageddon Paradigm do not want to be party to the difficult, protracted and yet joyous process of human evolution and unfoldment. Such a process is painful and heart wrenching, and will invariably expose our own personal darkness and shortcomings to the light of day, together with that of other fellow human beings. Better to end it all now with an archetypal war in which "God is on our side," than to subject ourselves to the lengthy, yet lovely and supremely alive, rigors of a global community in the uncharted jungles of the collective human psyche.

This brings us to another particular facet of human nature, which provides a central underpinning for the crude and expedient death wish informing the Armageddon Paradigm. Whether we view human nature from the wide-angle lens of the collective psyche, or from the close-up shot of the individual, either way, if taken to the extreme, we would rather die or wage war than take a good hard look at our own darkness. Especially in Judeo-Christian cultures, nothing is more miserable and gruesome for a person to endure than the hot, shaming, stinging, crawling, God-awful mortification of having our own particular weaknesses exposed to the light. Particularly in the West, we will often do anything, deny everything, justify anything to avoid this onerous revelation of "sin:" he, she or it made me be this way. It was surely the Devil, not I. If it were not for this system, that adversary, this episode of victimization, that Svengali, I would be beyond reproach.

And in Oriental cultures, people can be so honor-bound and tradition-bound, so culturally driven to save face, the mere suggestion of error or dishonor is an affront to one's family and very cultural history. If error is "proven in court," it is cause to fall upon one's sword. Currently, whether because of squeamishness about "sin" or "loss of face," the better part of the six and a half billion people on this planet are in strident denial they had anything to do with co-generating collective darkness. Meanwhile, this Godzilla is stomping toward the city limits of each person's perceptions and something must be done.

Our situation is made all the more difficult for one other reason. While we may have purchased Gucci blinders to shield us from our own particular darkness, we are simultaneously endowed with X-ray vision and a doctoral-level grasp of realities when it comes to the evil side of others. Each of us is an expert about someone else's darkness, which makes it all the more humiliating and unthinkable to personally squirm in the well-lit petri dish of someone else's perceptual laboratory.

These characteristics hold true whether they occur within the confines of inter-personal relations or within the broader realms of international relations. Invariably, each disputant has a better grasp of the others' darkness than the subject entangled in it himself. For example, in the current round of Sino-American tensions, the U.S. position is: "Look how you treat your people! Look at Tiannanmen Square. See what you've done to the Tibetans. Look how you dishonor our copyrights. Look how you bully Taiwan and torture political prisoners. When are you going to join the real world?"

And China replies: "We are an ancient and wise culture, who reached pinnacles of civilization while you still dwelled in caves! You are young and upstart and think you have all the answers. You don't even have a history to speak of. There is nothing "real" about your world. Look how you soil yourselves with the grime of capitalism. Look at that chaos of license you call democracy. See how your freedom is a commodity only the rich can afford to purchase. See how your own prisons overflow. You have a military base in every port. You have repeatedly brought your armies and navies to my very doorstep, hoping to interfere in my affairs. And you dare to call me a bully?!"

Arguments such as these resound the world over, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, whether they ring out from the bedrooms of married couples, scream from the headlines in daily newspapers, or reverberate in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Each of us wants to be exclusively on the side of right, with our adversaries exclusively on the side of wrong but, realistically, that is almost never the case.

The unwillingness to even acknowledge, much less clean up, our personal, cultural and national contributions to collective evil creates an impasse in which tensions build and finally explode in destructive behavior of some kind, whether in domestic violence or war between nations. The unwillingness to acknowledge the specific wound we have inflicted upon another, whether personally or as a nation, consigns that wound to an indefinite duration of festering and trouble. And whether this denial is rooted in pride, shame, obliviousness, face-saving, or the intractable sense that we cannot trust the other party with such a confession of culpability, we are a long way indeed from considering another's relatively clear grasp of our own darkness as an asset rather than a liability. And yet, ultimately, diffusing the reservoir of human evil, and healing the pan-human psyche veritably crushed beneath it will require a collective commitment to healing and an active, even enthusiastic, inquiry into the causes of the disturbances in which we all malinger.

It is interesting to notice the difference in our attitudes toward the subject of healing when we compare the physical/medical model with the psychological or sociological angles of recovery. When we suffer from a physical malady, we immediately seek the help of a physician. We rely on his or her skill to diagnose the problem and prescribe a remedy. We depend on the physician's explanation of the causes of our distress, the anatomy of the situation and the steps that need to be taken to achieve healing. Our relative trust in doctors derives from the very context of healing, from the fact that he or she has taken the Hippocratic Oath and therefore proceeds from the intention to serve our well being and our process of recovery. Physicians are bound by elaborate ethical guidelines and more often than not have a highly compassionate point of view. Generally, too, physicians see a real distinction between the malady that plagues us and our clear and present humanity. To them, we are not less human, less of a person, because we have an ailment.

Comparatively speaking, we are wholly disinclined to rely with the same confidence in another party's analysis and diagnosis of our personal, cultural and national darkness, because it is currently lacking in the same context of goodwill, the studied commitment to healing and the ethical framework, which characterizes the medical community. We have yet to create a Hippocratic Oath to govern our perceptions and reactions to societal, cultural and international maladies. As yet, we have very few ground rules in place to govern constructive dialogue, and precious few safe arenas and forums in which to conduct such interactions. Therefore, we have few reliable guarantees that the other party will not use our confessions against us, even if we were willing to make such acknowledgments.

Nevertheless, many individuals and some leaders, with or without these safety nets and guarantees, are setting precedents. These are the daring pioneers who are willing to take the risk and unilaterally acknowledge their own group's contribution to human evil, and then to follow with corrective measures. One sterling example was then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in his 1988 address to the United Nations. At one point in his speech, he addressed the crippling burden of foreign debt servicing now plaguing developing countries, which in some cases exceeds fifty percent of their Gross National Product. To this, he said:

"Let us not forget that in the age of colonialism the developing world, at the cost of countless losses and sacrifices, financed the prosperity of a large portion of the world community. The time has come to make up for the losses that accompanied its historic and tragic contribution to the world's material progress..."

In other words, the First World countries achieved their wealth and ascendancy at the expense of colonial victims and their abundant resources. He went on to propose a program of debt-forgiveness for developing nations, to which he unilaterally committed Russia. He invited other nations to follow suit. Simultaneous with Gorbachev's proposal, U.S. Senator Bill Bradley was bringing to fruition his long-standing effort to achieve debt relief through the alliances he forged with certain bankers, the U.N. Association and Nicholas Brady, then-Secretary of the Treasury. The result of his efforts was the Brady Plan, unveiled in March 1989.

This points to the fact that moral daring in acknowledging past error, combined with intelligent corrective steps, is a powerfully magnetic and constructively regenerating hallmark of true leadership. It releases dynamic healing potencies that restore human dignity across the boards. This is a powerful example of the right use of the Destroyer archetype. By acknowledging and putting an end to one's own dark practices, and by constructively expanding new and life-affirming behaviors, healing is fostered, and the beneficent aspect of the Destroyer urge is revealed.

Another remarkable example of using the Destroyer archetype to strike a deathblow to the errors of the past was portrayed on "20/20," the television news magazine, on December 1, 1989. This particular segment was entitled, "Children of Yesterday." This report chronicled an amazing episode of healing that had just taken place in the German town of Monchengladbach. Prior to World War II, this town had been a bastion of Nazi strength, conferring upon Hitler's party one of its earliest political victories in 1933. After that mandate, reportedly all cultural activities and celebrations in this town had been used for Nazi indoctrination.

In the story, the contemporary citizens of this town decided to take their dark history into their own hands and try to redeem it. They researched and located every Holocaust survivor they could find who had originally lived in this town and invited them all to return for a visit at the town's expense. One hundred seventy survivors accepted the invitation. When they returned to the scene of their tragic youth, they found an open public exhibit of old posters, photographs, newspapers and other positive evidence of Nazi propaganda, together with a chart showing the route of every Jewish citizen who was deported from Monchengladbach into the ghettos and concentration camps. These expressed the town's positive commitment to "take an unflinching look at their past."

At a reception for the returnees, over which a sign hung reading, "Welcome to your home town," the current Mayor spoke to the assembled group on behalf of the town:

"You have returned here to a place where, under the National Socialist rulers, you have been humiliated, persecuted and banished, where the road to suffering began for you, your relatives and friends and which led to such tragedy..."

During his address, the Mayor wept openly, as did many of the survivors. Half a century of frozen grief and shame thawed and drained off. One of the returnees had this to say about the experience, "He touched me, really touched me. That was, I think, the turning point in all our feelings because I've never heard a speech where any German admitted that he was ashamed of what had happened. See, that was the whole point about after the war, that nobody, nobody admitted anything. Nobody admitted it happened. Nobody admitted that he was a Nazi. Nobody admitted that they knew. And it had to be -- six million people couldn't have been eliminated without anybody knowing. A person can disappear, two people can disappear, but not six million without anybody knowing."

The students in Monchengladbach also echoed frustration with this comprehensive denial when their extraordinary guests were invited to speak in all the high schools. The students expressed amazement and chagrin that their grandparents denied knowing anything about the concentration camps and the details of Nazi practices. And the same icy rigidity of denial encases episodes of wrong worldwide.

The townspeople of Monchengladbach knew from the beginning that nothing they could do would ever make up for the total horror of the Holocaust. But through their daring, combined with the fortitude and courage of those who returned, a joint commitment to healing was forged. A potent demonstration of the power and creativity of simple goodwill and honest face-to-face dialogue succeeded in sounding a note of renewal in the lives of those who participated. Despite the fact they had no guarantees for the way events would turn out, each put himself at risk for the sake of healing. Each committed himself and herself to an uncertain process, knowing it would be painful. Each went through a minor death to the past and emerged more alive and more confirmed in their dignity and their humanity.

This, too, is the power of our mortality. It is the power to choose and to create what kinds of little deaths we will undergo in the interests of expanded livingness. This is the power to deliberately and creatively transform our lives and our civilization, by choosing to bring about the little deaths to pride, egotism, power plays, greed, xenophobia, and denial, so that we can truly live before Death actually overtakes us. Perhaps Saint Paul had something like this in mind when he said, "I die daily."

Is it possible for us consensually to create the global atmosphere in which we are safe to reveal ourselves and to begin the process of healing in earnest? Is there a social equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath we could craft together, to become one another's' healers and teachers, instead of one another's' adversaries and tormentors? If so, it would be possible to jointly focus the Destroyer urge on the oppressive Beast of our collective past, and thus liberate our underlying humanity from the heavy chains of our own darkness. We require the honest perceptions of others to further this unveiling of the intricate and poignant beauty of our essential humanity. For often, without others, we cannot see our own darkness, cannot name our own pain, nor embrace the fullest dimensions of our human potential. We are sick to the heart with the consequences of our own error and the physician is We.

We are at a crossroads at this point in human history. We are now confronted by our collective evil at every turn, in every community. There is no turning away from the fact that we are invoking the Destroyer with an unprecedented spiritual fervor. There remains the question of how we will actually employ this power when it answers us, because it will answer us. Will we use it in the context of love and healing for all, as did the participants in the Monchengladbach event? Or will we use it to target other people or groups in whom we have invested the totality of responsibility for mutually self-generated ills, combined with archetypal levels of darkness?

Such choices, and such spiritual dilemmas, underlie all the major tensions threatening our species today to the extent that, even our spiritual biases must be examined in order to ensure we do not turn the Destroyer unwittingly upon ourselves. This crisis of unity reverberates clear up to our perceptions of God. This is exemplified not only in the examples cited earlier in this article, but also in the intractable conflict victimizing the Middle East. To illustrate, here are two invocations to God. The one is the prayer used five times daily by Muslims in answer to the muezzin's call; the other a familiar Psalm of King David:

Muslim Prayer Jewish Psalm

Praise belongs to Allah, Arise, O Lord, in thy anger,

the Lord of all Being rouse thyself in wrath

the All-Merciful, against my foes.

the All-Compassionate, Awake, my God who has ordered

the Master of the Day of Doom. justice to be done;

Thee only we serve; let the peoples assemble

to Thee alone we pray for succor. around thee, and take thou

Guide us in the straight path, thy seat on high above them.

the path of those O Lord, thou who dost pass

whom Thou hast blessed, sentence upon the nations,

not those against whom O Lord, judge me as

Thou are wrathful, my righteousness deserves,

nor of those who are gone astray. for I am clearly innocent.

-- the Koran -- Psalms 7:6-8

With all due respect to the sanctity of each person's religion, how are these parties going to resolve their conflict, given the above spiritual paradigm? Is it possible that they are praying to the same God? These two prayers were chosen because they embody identical properties. Each one invokes a day of reckoning: the Day of Doom, and the day the Lord passes judgment on the nations, thus vindicating the faithful. Each prayer invokes the Destroyer archetype -- God's wrath -- ostensibly to destroy the other party. Each holds the position that they alone are the ones who are both blessed by God and innocent of any wrongdoing. And yet, by reading the newspapers, people the world over know for a fact that neither party is innocent of all wrongdoing, and that each side harbors a vast inventory of abuses perpetrated by the other side, none of which are acknowledged to the other. And, finally, each side has access to weapons of mass destruction, together with strong political alliances, with other governments and with followers throughout the world. These facts should give us pause to soberly consider the vast destructive potential inherent in the Armageddon Paradigm. If taken to the extreme and encouraged by people everywhere to escalate, this conflict is entirely capable of precipitating an untimely and ghastly self-fulfilling prophecy! If there were to be a Third World War, it would very likely spark to its devastating and fiery outcome based on the religious fanaticism saturating all parties to the Middle East conflict. And I include Christians in this prediction, because a wide variety of Christian millennialists have a strong investment in continuing conflict in the Middle East to prove their prophetic theories. To them, there must absolutely be a final war in the Middle East in order for the Second Coming to occur!

It is important to understand that this choice to opt for an end rather than the on-going -- and poignantly beautiful -- process of life is really the obvious bottom line of the Armageddon Paradigm. Regardless of the fact that people arrive at this choice because of real and understandable horror and unendurable oppression, once this paradigm is wholeheartedly embraced, its victims become part of the problem to which they were originally reacting.

Once our vote is cast in favor of an end, we must by definition, militate against any resolution that might prolong the process of human unfoldment throughout time. We must then maintain the focus of the Destroyer urge uncompromisingly upon humanity at large, or upon a specially selected adversary, and take no prisoners. We must continuously elevate the magnitude of collective evil to numinous and unreachable heights wherein only God, or superhuman Powers and Principalities, can address the problem. Otherwise, we just might get stuck with the job ourselves. At that juncture, we will also come face to face with our own darkness and inertia, and acknowledge that we derive a personal payoff of twisted empowerment from fantasizing world destruction.

The attitude of rolling up our sleeves and working shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow human beings to clean up the global landfill we have mutually co-generated is characteristic of those who are developing a conscious and wholesome relationship with humanity. Here we are partners, both in the crimes and ignorance of the past, and in present and future efforts

Mediate before you litigate. Mediation/Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)

The Power of Our Mortality

The Power of Our Mortality:

Understanding the Destroyer Archetype and the Armageddon Paradigm

Debra Oliver

--The Destroyer

Mediate before you litigate.
Mediation/Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)