"Shadow-boxing"

Yesterday evening, I attended a football match in Skopje, between the national teams of Macedonia and Iceland, and I was seated alongside many, truly committed, Macedonian football fans. One of them was particularly passionate about the game, and was continuously shouting and swearing at the referees and at the players of the opposing team. At one point, a bald-headed player on the Iceland team committed a flagrant foul, after which this Macedonian fan (who was equally bald to the skin) yelled at him: “You bald-headed prick!” At first, I thought he was joking, but after seeing the angry expression on his face, I realized that he was dead serious – the fan was actually belittling someone for a physical characteristic he had himself, without being aware at all of the absurdity of his action.

In his recent book titled Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber claims that “90% of the things in the world that most disturb and upset us about others are actually our own shadow qualities”, which we unconsciously disown (because we can’t accept them as part of us) and then project them in others. Although Wilber doesn’t quote any evidence for the 90% claim, he is right to claim that we tend to ascribe our own “faults” to others. He does refer to some very interesting research in support of this phenomenon:

“You might have seen the recent studies where men who were anti-gay-pornography crusaders, and who had dedicated a large portion of their lives to aggressively fighting homosexual porn, were tested for their levels of sexual arousal when shown photos of gay sexual scenes. The crusaders evidenced substantially more sexual arousal than other males. In other words, they themselves were attracted to gay sex but, finding that unacceptable in themselves, spent their lives trying to eradicate it in others, while claiming they had no such nasty desires themselves. Yet all they were really doing was projecting their own despised shadows onto others, then scapegoating them. (p.120-121)”.

It’s amazing just how often we act like this ourselves, being completely unaware of it…