Collective shadows of liberals and conservatives

Last post touched upon Jungian shadows of liberals and conservatives. In this post we will expand on that topic.

A collective jungian shadow is often formed by collective trauma, such as genocide, plagues, war, or natural disasters. Rather than confronting the trauma and processing it through grief or understanding, it is repressed into a collective subconscious, whose fundamental nature need not concern us here (it could be cultural memory through stories, rituals and technology, epigenetic, a morphic field, or something else). But then it comes out in projection onto others, and inconsistency in one's own actions with one's values (aka hypocrisy). 
It is also possible that a collective shadow is formed on an individual basis by trauma in early childhood, and that the collective pattern comes from how different people respond to these traumas. 

Some shadows are classifiable in terms of a single value from the 5 values that distinguish liberals from conservatives (see previous posts and Jonathan Haidt's work), while others are a compound of several values. Most of the ones below are "mono-shadows"

As someone once said: "the opposite of a bad idea is usually also a bad idea". Scoring high on any of these values can mean one is semi-conscious to what happens when one takes that value to positive extremes. Scoring low can mean one is semi-conscious to what happens when one takes these values to negative extremes. This explains the different shadows of liberals and conservatives, but the situation can be more complex. Alternatively, one can score high on a value because one is partially driven by a shadow that is the opposite of the value one scores high on. The shadow could have been created by a traumatic experience that has not been fully processed and integrated. An example below is liberals who score high on care and compassion because they are repressing hatred, having been punished for expressing it as children. Or conservatives who score high on group solidarity because they had a traumatic experience being ostracized and are trying to repress that experience.The converse can also be true: one can score low on a value because one is repressing an experience of the positive manifestation of that value. An example is liberals scoring low on purity/sanctity because they tried to mix their poop with their food as a child, were punished and shamed, and repressed that experience. I only elaborated a bit about liberal hatred, but for completeness I listed these possibilities as 1-5, c and d below.

Caveat: these are all hypotheses, waiting to be tested by social scientists.

1a. Care and compassion, liberal shadow: The caring and compassionate Christians were crucified and sent to the lions by the Romans and later were killed by the Muslims. The caring and compassionate communists were shot by firing squad, beheaded, sent to gulags by Stalin and the less compassionate communists. These contributed to a collective liberal shadow, but also we can see this shadow operating when individual liberal people who try to be caring and compassionate are taken advantage of by others. Just as importantly, liberals are afraid to recognize that they can act badly towards others (especially when they have the opportunity to seize resources at someone else's expense, or get into positions of power) too and 
1b. they can have feelings of hatred towards others. Repressing the hatred shadow works for liberals as well as repressing sexuality has worked for victorians. Part of lashing out against the "deplorables/ Trump supporters", is the projection of this shadow onto them.

Also, liberals sometimes forget (or repress into a shadow) that humans evolved to be omnivores, and sometimes need meat, and that involves killing animals, which seems uncaring and un-compassionate. Or else that it takes huge machines and a brutal industrial process to produce the field crops that nourish vegetarians. Or that dairy requires reproduction, which requires killing male progeny and excess unproductive females, in order to be economic. Or that predation is part of nature.

1c. Care and compassion, conservative shadow: conservative Christians are consciously afraid of going to hell if they are not kind enough (among other things).

They make themselves feel better by contributing to charity, but this is only the conscious tip of an unconscious iceberg. The mass of the iceberg lies in a way of looking at the world:

The way of looking at the word as a chest of resources or machines is one that lacks compassion and care for life in general, not just humans. It leads to a shadow of burned-alive healer women (aka witches), torture (starting with the roman/christian cross, but morphing into all kinds of catholic medieval torture machines), destroying forests, oceans, atmosphere, mountaintops for short-term resource acquisition; turning diverse, natural beauty into monolithic, concrete ugliness; the brutality of factory farms; the economic destruction of human villages by more efficient factories, the objectification of rape and molestation (mostly of women). All these are opaque to conservatives, part of their collective shadow, which they project onto liberals and "snowflakes".

2a. Justice and equity, liberal shadow: Liberals are unconsciously afraid of hierarchies, because hierarchies can have various levels of domination, power abuses, unearned privilege, and cut-throat competition. However, they can also get things done efficiently, reward talent and hard work, and weed out incompetence. Hierarchies exist and have evolved to manage complexity, not just with human social systems, but at all levels of life, from gene networks to cells, to organs, to eusocial insects, to primate groups. Liberals are afraid to embrace the positive aspects of hierarchies, and project these fears onto various "isms" and "archys" (e.g. capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy).

Liberals are also blind to injustices that contradict their ideology. For example, the injustice against working class men who have their jobs offshored to third world counties with laxer labor and environmental laws, (hence cheaper goods) or taken by illegal immigrants who work for less than minimum wage, or who subject themselves to danger and bodily harm with certain kinds of physical labor, or who have their children taken away from them after being made into debt slaves. The whole male privilege trope is an attempt to cover up and silence these glaring injustices, with dubious claims of injustices towards women (e.g. the wage gap, which has more to do with biologically wired choices than with discrimination). Sometimes there are true injustices towards women in modern western countries but they pale in comparison with the injustices towards working class men, divorced fathers and third world women. These are all shoved under the shadow of a collective rug.

2b. Justice and Equity, conservative shadow: Conservatives are only dimly aware that their wealth and comfort is not all due to intelligence and hard work, but comes partially at the expense of third world people who are currently producing most of our goods under bad environmental and labor conditions, past generations of african slaves, and future generations who will be left with a much poorer and harsher world. Liberals have picked up on this shadow in the form of white privilege. It hits conservative below the belt, in the shadowy parts of their anatomy.

3a. In-group solidarity, liberal shadow: Liberals would love to be able to have more community, but they can't do it, primarily because they are too obsessed with their self-esteem or family, have no sense of the sacred (see below) and are afraid of hierarchy. They are jealous of conservatives who seem to have better communities, often under the umbrella of a church, and more stable families. They don't see that there are conflicts between the needs of the individual, the family and the community. Still, they attempt some in-group solidarity by uniting against various systems and groups, and virtue signaling.

3b. In-group solidarity, conservative shadow: Conservatives have taken the human tactic of achieving in-group solidarity by uniting against the out-group to the level of disdain or even hatred. They project their failure to achieve Dionysian bliss and ego-transcendence through group solidarity onto liberals, who seem to be able to achieve ecstatic states even without group solidarity. They seem to forget the excesses of 20th century fascism, lost in the misty shadows of time.

3c. Both liberals and conservatives are unconsciously afraid of the decline and death of our civilization. Liberals are afraid of barbarian hordes from in the form of deplorables, while conservative are afraid of barbarian hordes in the form of muslims, LGBT SJWs, and zombies.

4a. Respect for authority, liberal shadow: Liberals become obsessed with their children and try to be their friends instead of acting as authorities towards them, becoming unable to get certain kinds of work (that require precision, concentration and/or dangerous environments) done, and becoming unable to have adult conversations because the children are the center of attention (and grow up to be narcissists).

Liberals tend to bring leaders down, even if they are competent leaders that serve the group. They might first fall in love with leaders who promise love, connection, community abundance, and ego-transcendence, but eventually they discover these leaders have all too human qualities and the honeymoon is over. The shadow is a subconscious fear that incompetence and abusive (though seemingly benevolent) leaders exist.

4b. Respect for authority, conservative shadow: If the authority is corrupt, it could lead to nasty results like molesting children by the catholic church, condoning by priests of oppression of women by their husbands in isolated pre-industrial villages, etc. This is part of the compound shadow of fascism, whose other parts are 3b and 5b. When the shadow is driving the conservative person, they will double down in their faith in the authority when confronted with the abuse of power by the authority.

5a. Purity/sanctity, liberal shadow: Liberals do not like boundaries much, especially when it comes to mental categories. They do not like to be put into mental boxes, whether these are gender, religion, political affiliation, except when they seek group solidarity through virtue signaling or out-group disdain. However, boundaries can be useful. This is obvious in the case of hygiene, where mixing rats with domestic scenes, or poop with food can lead to plagues. It is less obvious in cases where divisions of labor according to biological sex or other pre-existing propensities can give groups selective advantage over other groups.

5b. Purity/sanctity, conservative shadow: Grimness, or the inability to laugh at oneself is no fun and maladaptive to boot. It's maladaptive because it is not allowing new information to flow across boundaries. Boundaries need to be porous to some degree to optimize fitness. Also, racism is partially about purity, not mixing categories of race or culture

Early childhood traumas turned shadows:

1b. liberal hating
1c. conservative loving
2c. liberal being treated unjustly
2d. conservative trying to be fair
3c. conservative being ostracized
3d. liberal not fitting in to religious philosophy, lifestyle, or gender
4c. conservative disobeying authority
4d. liberal trusting parent (and having bad consequence)
5c. conservative childhood mixing of boundaries: e.g. playing with poop and gender. But also possibly mixing of one's own immediate needs with another human being's long term mental health, as in what happens when young girls are molested by men. I don't know if anyone has tried to get stats on whether most child molestors are conservative, and whether sexually repressive countries (and hence more conservative) have higher incidence of girl molestation by sexually repressed men.
5d. liberal trying to keep a toy for oneself and being forced by parent to share.