Face Book and Freudian Projection: A Deadly Combination?

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One of the mysteries of human evil is how easy it is for a person to become the very embodyment of the thing they claim to oppose the most, so that for example those who are most vehement in their repudiation of intolerance become the most intolerent, those promoting love and opposing hate, the least loving and most hateful, those who oppose violence the most likely to become violent, those championing critical thinking the least thoughtful and most gullible, and those who proclaim themselves to be open minded the most closed minded of all, and so on.

I don't think anyone can deny the phenomenon exists. Probably everyone has suffered the brunt of it from some other person at some point or another. Freud tried to account for it with his concept of projection, in which we project on others the things we do ourselves, illustrated for example in the tendency of unfaithful husbands to unfairly suspect their wives of infidelity. C. G. Jung elaborates on Freud with his concept of Shadow projection.

As Anthony Steven's explains, "Shadow projection can function, therefore, as a major threat to both social and international peace, for it enables us to turn those whom we perceive as enemies into devils or vermin that it is legitimate to hate, attack, or exterminate." And unfortunately, as Jung himself says, "most people are content to be self-righteous and prefer mutual vilification (if nothing worse!) to the recognition of their projections.” One of the most conspicuous examples of this in our time is the deterioration of the use of the term Hate Speech to mean simply speech I disagree with which therefore causes me to feel hatred toward the speaker. Then, as Jung said, preferring being self-righteous to "the recognition of [my] projections," I then deny the hatred as being my own and project it back onto the speaker who enraged me by saying things I didn't like.

I don't view Freud's nor Jung's understanding as entirely adequate, but they are a step in the right direction.

I don't think there has ever been a time in my life when the country as a whole has been in the grip of this problem as much as it is now. The question is, how much has the fantasy world of Facebook contributed to the current situation?

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