Introducing the Namas-hole Project

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.  – Carl Gustav Jung

Greetings friend! Namas-hole! The asshole in me bows deeply to the asshole in you!

The Namas-hole project is intended to spark conversation, thought and awareness around what seems to me to be a fundamental truth: Humans try to save ourselves the discomfort of knowing all of ourselves as we really are - and that causes trouble!

All of us have more or less unconscious aspects of ourselves that we don’t or can’t acknowledge. Carl Jung called this unconscious aspect the shadow. Our conscious selves work hard to show up in the world as good. Meanwhile, out of sight and out of mind, in the shadow, all the stuff that we think of as wrong, bad, or undesirable percolates.

“Asshole” is another word for the darker side of the shadow, a playful shorthand for those inner aspects of ourselves that we repress, deny, or disown.

Why should I care about my shadow or anybody else’s? Because humans tend to project what’s in the shadow onto other people.

Have you ever experienced this? Someone accuses you of a “bad” behavior, and it is clear to you that they themselves are doing the very thing of which they accuse you. That is a kind of projection.

Here are a couple of examples. "A married man is attracted to a female coworker, but rather than admit this to himself, he might accuse her of flirting with him. Another would be a woman wrestling with the urge to steal, who comes to believe that her neighbors are trying to break into her home." https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/projection

Making someone else wrong, that coworker or those neighbors, is a common way to manage our assholes. In ordinary life, I turn away from what disturbs me. Generally, this is a perfectly honorable strategy for a happy life! Sometimes though, it’s worth a look to see what’s going on inside me. Am I projecting? Unless we’re consciously working at it, most of us do project our stuff onto other people. Couples have fun with this. Even lawmakers seem to crawl into the weeds this way.

Mostly, in our individual lives, it might not matter; the consequences seem largely harmless. After all, we don’t have to like everyone. It gets dicey, though, when individuals band together in their judgment or rejection of individuals or groups, and then publicize the judgment on social media where the magic algorithms herd us into more and more highly differentiated tribes. Voila. We get what we’ve got: this zeitgeist of political and social polarization.

Taken to its extreme, one can imagine great social turmoil growing out of this kind of polarization. At the time of the Cold War, Carl Jung was asked if he thought there would be a nuclear war. He answered that humans might avoid nuclear holocaust if enough people “can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves.” In short, he thought it necessary that individuals learn to be with both the angel and the asshole in themselves.

How can we "stand the tension of the opposites" if we don’t even see them in there?

The Namas-hole Project invites us to consider that it may be better for us, and for the world, if we can learn to see and embrace our own asshole! As Jung said it, “The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”