What is the Bully Archetype?
Planetary destruction of ecosystems, environmental collapse, war, famine, racial and sexual inequality and violence, the maldistribution of resources, lack of access to subsistence needs, and all manifestations of oppression stem from a malformed state of human consciousness called the Bully Archetype. This state of consciousness, faced with radical thanatophobia, emerged and evolved as a survival capacity in human evolution. It expresses itself through acts of control and dominance in order to gain power and experience a sense of conquering death. Unaware of its self-destructive processes, the Bully Archetype will destroy us all if we do not take steps to face it, satisfy its need (through confronting death), and transform its power into life-affirming expressions of human being.
To the extent that we are living on Earth in a way that is destroying the planet and all living systems on it, we must ask, “how did we get here and what are we going to do about it?” What has created this dystopian reality?
The Bully Archetype project is an investigation into the origins and nature of this manifestation of a malformed consciousness with a lens focused on methods of healing and transformation. Looking at theories of the evolution of and types of consciousness from Tibetan Buddhism, Carl Jung, James Hillman, Jean Gebser, Hannah Arendt, Allan Leslie Combs, Richard Tarnas, Iain McGilchrist and others, I map patterns and expressions of the Bully Archetype throughout human history in cultural, socio-economic, religious, and political movements and organizations, and seek for key wisdom points toward processes of transformation.
