MARK JUDGE: The World’s Worst Self-Help Guru.
Saying this honestly is what makes Hollis’ work [James Hollis, author of Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times] so bracing. Hollis would understand why he was one of the first people I sought out in the fall of 2018, after becoming he target of one off the most vicious and evil political hits in recent history. I was tossed into a maelstrom of false accusations, rumors and lies involving a claim that I witnessed a sexual assault, a story that no one who was apparently involved with was able to corroborate.
Soon after the fiasco ended, Hollis was giving a series of lectures at the Jung Society of Washington. I knew that Hollis would understand what I was enduring. I’d survived, as a friend said, “the entire world projecting its shadow onto you.” According to Jung, the work of our lives is not accolades or sunny happiness, but finding our destiny while “integrating the shadow”—i.e., confronting and accepting our dark sides. If we don’t, we wind up projecting our shadow onto others. For several weeks, the media, political activists, and anyone with anger or psychological issues transposed their shadow onto me.
Still, it seemed the culmination of something I’d been preparing for. I’d gotten sober in 1990, a change that forced me to listen to my soul as well as see the evil in the world with clear eyes. I abandoned a promising freelancer position at The Washington Post because I could see the censorious, totalitarian direction that the media and its liberal cheerleaders were going in. Better to live freely and die poor.
By the time the enemy arrived at Helm’s Deep in 2018, I’d no illusions of what I was up against, or what was about to happen. It was to be a Maoist-style mauling. Faced with extortion, career ruin, a shame storm and the threat that my lifelong friends would be destroyed if didn’t lie, I answered with the words Aragorn offered as the orcs approached and he was told his people were about to get wiped out: I will stay and die as one of them.
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