When he was forced to retire early due to ill health he had to give back his uniform.
He would have continued to work for free if they would have let him. I know this because, even though he was no longer getting paid, even though he no longer got to wear the uniform, that is really what he was; he was the uniform – or rather he was what the uniform represented – and, on the inside at least, he never stopped wearing it. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t let it go. He was his job and his job made him who he thought he was.
At one level you could say that he just continued to uphold the same principles as the institution he had served, but it was more than that. It was also more than just the fact that he didn’t know what else to do with himself. Some people get so used to the job they do they end up continuing to do it because if they don’t know what else they would be if they stopped. They would be lost. It was more than that with him. For him, his whole identity was founded on his former role and the entire world, his whole experience of being, had been shaped around it.
A Job for Life
Perhaps it would have been fine if his role had been to watch and record, or to carve, or shape, or fix, or heal, but he his role had been to enforce; to exercise the power of the institution to which he had dedicated his life. Without the uniform, without the office he once held, any potential to enact that role that might be available to him he sought, and took. In the society in which he lived, such potential was available to anyone who was willing to support the established system and structures that helped it to maintain the power it exercised so freely. Therefore, for him, anyone who stood against the structures or institutions or acts of that established system – anyone who expressed any value, or shared any perspective or sentiment that was in contravention to the established order was a presence to be opposed, and if possible, silenced.
He was of course, doing it for the good of all, and no amount of discussion or evidence would convince him otherwise.
He came to embody the ideology of what he saw as the state, and he exercises its power as though it were his own.
Except it wasn’t his own.
The Persona and the Shadow
The more rigid and narrow the persona the more powerful the projections of the unconscious will be; the more power is taken up by the shadow.
When people who have identified with their personas are separated from the means of expressing them, of living out the masks that they have taken to present as their true selves, their identity can fracture, fragment, and fall apart. They can break down.
IF there is sufficient awareness in the individual, or IF sufficient awareness is bought to bear on the individual, the ensuing crisis can force a level of integration to occur. They are bought face to face with certain truths about themselves, often uncomfortable ones.
When these truths can be accepted then self knowledge occurs and the individual can move on, wiser for the experience.
Being Conscious
If conscious awareness is NOT sufficient then people can, in desperation, scramble to identify with whatever fragments of their persona remain coherent to them. In search of compensation for the diminishment they have suffered, they can be drawn to identify with groups who promise to return to them those qualities they have lost.
The individuals, using those fragments of their shattered persona that remain, can use them like lenses to channel the concentrated collective psyche through.
At the same time their libidos are subsumed by the collective and disposed to whatever ideology, however fanciful or precarious, such groups espouse.
These energies can build like a wave that rushes through the collective, absorbing libidinous energy into it’s body, like a collective persona threatening to reshape the world in it’s own image.
Behind it, a collective shadow threatens at any moment to cast itself out into the world.
Conclusion
A healthy persona is a filter of your true nature, a way of being in the world that is an accurate expression of who you are without exposing all that makes you vulnerable. When personas become masks that get identified with, because they either represent an ideal of our own construction, or an ideal – read ideology – that we may have adopted from outside ourselves, then this is not a true expression of our life. In doing so we give over our life to a set of principles that run us like a program. We become instruments of an ideology rather than expression of the truth of our experience. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I shall leave the reader to decide.
Join The Creative Instinct Course
Book A Consultation with Clive
©Live Creative on social media:
Youtube | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram