CHAPTER 10 The Ethics of the Journey: The Code

Nor should it be forgotten that moral law is not just something imposed upon man from outside…. On the contrary, it expresses a psychic fact. As the regulator of action, it corresponds to a preformed image, a pattern of behavior which is archetypal and deeply imbedded in human nature.

—Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic

The crisis of values in our culture today is the shadow side of an advance in consciousness. Unless we recognize this character revolution and articulate its rules to the young, the moral life of the culture will continue to be chaotic. In the past, most people have just followed the rules—or at least gave them lip service. They saw themselves as moral if they did what their parents, teachers, ministers/rabbis, or government officials said they should. Now we expect fulfillment from life. Most of us are resistant to moral codes that do not allow for the journey.

Joseph Campbell was fond of warning people that they can climb the ladder of success only to find that it is leaning against the wrong wall. The very fact that we understand this statement tells us that the moral rules of the road have changed. When character meant following the path laid down by someone else, people did not expect to feel fulfilled by their lives. That is likely why they had to be frightened into doing what was right—by fear of hellfire, social ostracism, imprisonment, or even torture. Moreover, virtue was defined as doing what authorities told you to do. Today, our very notions of character as well as of success require self-knowledge. If we never learn who we really are inside, we never will achieve true fulfillment. We find ourselves against the wrong wall anytime we are living by standards not our own.

In today’s pluralistic world, which brings together people from very different cultures and religions, it often is impossible to gain consensus on what rules we should be following. Even if we think we know what others should do, they are decidedly reluctant to follow our dictums—no matter how benevolent our intentions. In fact, others want their heroic uniqueness respected, just as we do. The result is a revolution in what we mean by character and what we define as success.

It is easy to hang on to your own standards and become increasingly judgmental of those who do not adhere to them. However, over time, this may lead to anger and bitterness, especially if you seem to be the only one taking the high road and others succeed at your expense. You may want to throw in the towel and essentially relinquish having any standards at all. Then one day you wake up and realize that you no longer can face yourself in the mirror.

Those of us who are wise will allow all this moral confusion to thrust them on their journeys. If no one can tell us how to live, we need to find our own way. In doing so, we not only sort out our ethical principles, we also develop the inner resources required for a genuinely heroic life. Heroes always have a sense of social and historical responsibility—to leave the world better than they found it. Thus, individuals who take their journeys build healthier relationships, families, organizations, and communities. This does not, however, mean that we can foist our standards on to others.

In a diverse society, moreover, it is important to learn tolerance. People often judge one another across lines of age, race, and culture, applying their own standards to others who are operating by different, but still moral, precepts. Certainly there are times and places where people act shamefully. I am not suggesting here that anything goes. Virtually all cultures agree that it is not good to cheat or lie or murder. Most also agree that it is virtuous to be loving and wise and to pursue spiritual truths.

People’s values differ not only because of their cultural and religious backgrounds but also because of their dominant archetypes:

Inner Ally	Success Is Being	Character Is
Innocent	Happy	Being positive
Orphan	Safe and secure	Protecting yourself from being hurt
Wanderer	Yourself	Acting authentically
Warrior	Triumphant	Doing right, avoiding wrong
Altruist	Good	Caring for others
Magician	Transformative	Living consciously

It is essential to understand that all of us do not necessarily mean the same thing when we talk about living ethically, yet each perspective contributes to the greater good of society.

Archetypes by their very nature transcend culture. Therefore, they give us a way to talk about ethics and values that is not based on any one religion. They provide a way to combine cultural sensitivity with a common commitment to integrity. In your life, you may choose to be faithful to the principles you have learned from your own cultural and religious heritage. However, when we come together across such traditional boundaries, we can find common moral ground in the deep structure of the psyche.

The Warrior helps defend the boundaries against practices that harm us and others. Warriors tend to see moral issues in a clear-cut way. To the Warrior, there is right and there is wrong. The ethical imperative is to do right.

Therefore, it is important to the Warrior within us all that we clarify our values and be true to them. The Warrior knows how easy it is for individuals and groups to rationalize the morality of whatever serves their own interests, and therefore demands that we check our ethical decisions not only against our own honor codes, but also against fundamental principles of morality.

The Orphan, however, understands that none of us is perfect. It helps us see where we have been too weak to be true to our best selves, and to empathize when others fail. While the Warrior might kill, harshly punish, or shame wrongdoers, the Orphan looks to see what caused them to mess up so badly. The Orphan then would try to heal that flaw, helping them to be better next time. In our own lives, it is the Orphan that helps us admit when we have done wrong and try to make amends.

The Wanderer is less interested in general questions of morality than in fine tuning his or her own personal code of honor. The Wanderer also loves to explore difference, so this archetype helps us to learn from others with different values. The Wanderer can be tolerant of differing values as long as people are true to what they believe.

The Altruist prompts us to test our ethical ideals to see if they help or harm us and others. If our thinking is out of touch with human reality, we might subscribe to a belief that seems right abstractly, but in practice creates suffering. If so, the Altruist says it is not moral. In addition, Altruists encourage groups to come together to clarify their common values and seek common ground.

The Innocent finds morality through religious teachings, personal revelation, or divine inspiration. Using Jungian principles, it may see dreams as letters from the soul telling us what it is right to do.

The Magician helps us develop mindfulness, so that in addition to making moral decisions, we pay close attention to their results. In this way, the Magician brings a scientific approach to ethics, seeing life as a moral “laboratory.” If the consequences of one approach are negative, the Magician goes inward to reconsider what to do. Magicians also know that ethics are an inside job. If you want to be a positive force in the world, you always must begin by raising your own consciousness.

The archetypes also help us develop the inner strength required to live by a moral code:

• The Orphan helps us process our pain and disappointment when others betray or mistreat us, so that we do not lash out in anger or use addictions to numb ourselves;

• The Wanderer prods us to stay the course of our own values rather than go along with the crowd;

• The Warrior gives us the discipline and moral courage not to succumb to temptation;

• The Altruist requires us to show compassion for ourselves and others, so that we do not want to do harmful things;

• The Innocent provides us with the faith and optimism to believe that we do not need to compromise our integrity to succeed; and

• The Magician helps us see that what we put out into the world always will come back to us, often in magnified form.

Each of the six archetypal perspectives in this book also presides over an important stage of character development. If you have not experienced each stage, you will not yet have the virtue that is its gift. You can achieve that virtue only by overcoming a predictable fear. Thus, if we want people to develop character, we must encourage them to take their journeys. Briefly, the six inner allies described in this book see the world in terms of the following plot structures, which result in the completion of six developmental tasks.

Exercise A: Write your own code of ethics and share it with a friend or colleague. Then examine any ways in which you have trouble living up to that code. In those cases, identify the archetype that might help you maintain your own standards.

THE HERO WITHIN MORAL CODE

A moral code also goes with the approach described in this book. Essentially, it comes down to one basic premise: honor everyone’s heroic journey. In doing so, you should follow five major rules of ethical conduct:

See everyone as a hero on a journey.
Free yourself from prejudices and stereotypes about others.
Recognize the positive potential in negative situations.
Model right action by staying true to your own path.
Respect interdependence.

Rule 1: See everyone as a hero on a journey . The essential rule of the road for working with this material is to honor yourself as well as others, seeing everyone as a hero or potential hero. These theories should be used with respect for the individual journey, whether it is yours or someone else’s. They never should be used to put someone else down for being at the “wrong” place on the journey. It would be better for you not even to have read this book than to use it as more ammunition with which to clobber yourself or others. While this book provides a map to follow, it is the individual journey, not the map, that is important.

Every person in the world has a reason for being here. Each journey is unique, and in that way it is a mystery. It also is useful in working with the material to let go of any sense that we know the next step in the journey—for ourselves or for others.

Respect for the hero’s journey requires us never to succumb to the arrogance of thinking that we know what someone can and cannot do. These theories never should be used to pigeonhole someone, as if they always embodied only one archetype. For example, after the first edition of this book came out, I sometimes would encounter readers who believed they could predict other people’s behavior based on their archetypes. However, most of us have access to several archetypes simultaneously, and these archetypes shift and change over time. Therefore, it is reductive to imagine that you have someone pegged!

The archetypal progression I have written about in this book is a description—not a prescription. It should not be used to design experiences that try to get people to move lockstep through the same stages. Although the patterns, I believe, hold up in general, individual psyches are very diverse, and their autonomy and uniqueness should be respected. These patterns can help you along by naming the experiences that you or others are going through and can hasten learning and make it less threatening. However, the patterns never should be seen as normative—as stages one must go through or be forever inadequate.

In short, as long as you remember that what is important is the individual journey—and not any theories about it—you can feel free to be as creative as you like in devising ways to use the ideas in this book. They are meant to give people comfort on their journeys and to remind us all that questing is a sacred function. The journey can be described and encouraged but should not be unduly contained and certainly not manipulated, forced, or rushed. Often, the best path may be a winding one, and we may appear to be heading quite the opposite way from where we ultimately will perch. Journeys are not efficient or predictable.

Rule 2: Free yourself from prejudices and stereotypes about others . A number of my colleagues and students read this book in manuscript form and questioned whether taking one’s journey might be a realistic expectation for privileged people but possibly irrelevant to the less fortunate. I would ask readers to recognize such a bias as anti-heroic.

I know people with more money, privilege, and access to education and career success than most of us ever will have, but their spiritual poverty is so great that they do not develop. Even in the poorest, most depressed African-American or Latino neighborhoods and on American Indian reservations you will come across old men and women who are as wise and fully developed as can be found anywhere. My claim is not only that individuals can triumph over odds or resist growth in the best of circumstances; it is also that real prosperity is not just a matter of wealth and power. White middle class people have a tendency to see the worth of their own materialistic culture but not of the many subcultures in their midst, especially those that are not materially successful.

Alternately, we sometimes romanticize minority cultures and thereby avoid having to acknowledge the genuine barriers to growth that result from crippling poverty, dependency, and lack of respect from society at large. This is true most blatantly for Native Americans, but it also is true in varying degrees for all groups that are disadvantaged because of their race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, or class.

It is equally important to avoid romanticizing privilege. Members of advantaged groups—males, Caucasians, heterosexuals, able-bodied persons—often overlook the way the system is biased to their advantage. As a result, their growth is arrested, as they tacitly assume that others should, and will, serve them. Unless we understand that some advantages are won at the expense of other people, our journeys can be limited by the shadow Innocent’s unconscious attitude of entitlement.

Rule 3: Recognize the positive potential in negative situations . Anytime we meet the shadow of an archetype in another person, its positive pole has the potential to be expressed. While we must recognize and protect ourselves from anyone who would harm us, it also is important that we mentally hold to a vision of that person living out the positive pole of the archetype associated with his or her current shadow behavior. Consider this a form of prayer—that the positive side can and will emerge over time. If you are embattled in some way—politically, legally, interpersonally—remember that the outcome you want is for your higher self and the other individual’s higher self to work things out in a high-minded way. This can immunize you against any desire to use excessive force or push an unfair advantage.

M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie defines as evil those who would rather harm another than see the truth about themselves. People also tend to do evil things when they avoid their journeys. Some of them think so little of themselves and feel so needy, they will do anything to gain a competitive advantage over others. If we think of “sin” as being off the mark (which is what the word really means), then they simply have strayed from their own path. If and when they return, they can become a positive force in the world.

The following chart describes the immoral pole of each archetype. Generally, these are expressed when someone has not taken the journey of that archetype. James Hillman tells us that “all our pathologies are calls from the gods.” Morality is like homeopathic medicine. The antidote for the illness is from the same archetype—only in its more positive form. In each instance, individuals might do something illegal or immoral, but their attitude about it is different: they may lie, steal, deal drugs, or be emotionally or physically abusive, but they rationalize their behavior differently. If others can recognize the deep structure of these rationalizations, they may be able to help the wrongdoer identify the archetype seeking expression and rectify his or her behavior.

Archetype	Motivation for Wrongdoing
Orphans	Feel they have to do it to survive or protect themselves
Warriors	Take immoral action to get greater power or a competitive advantage
Wanderers	Think they are above ordinary laws and don’t allow anyone to tell them what to do
Altruists	Lash out in anger after they have sacrificed too much; shame others and make them feel guilty
Innocents	Use the excuse that everyone does it, or just don’t think about what they are doing
Magicians	Manipulate others to get them to do what they want

It is important to hold the boundaries and not let others harm you or anyone else. However, you can help others become more moral by seeing their negative behavior as a symptom and calling them to find the positive pole of that archetypal journey. Understanding this can keep us from writing people off.

Exercise B: Do you know people or groups who are doing things that really are wrong? If so, what are they doing and why? Which archetype is calling to them (and possibly also to you) through that behavior?

Rule 4: Model right action by staying true to your own path . Most true liberation is caught, not taught. If you truly want to help others, you must model fidelity to your own path. Then recognize that what can be taught is the process. The content of your path will not necessarily be similar to that of others’, and vice versa. I am sure you know people who have had a major impact on your life—less because of what they did than who they were. Every time you are true to the hero within, you help transform the world.

Exercise C: Think back over your life to any times you strayed from your authentic path. What did that feel like to you? What were the results? How did you get back on course? What was the most helpful thing anyone else did (or could have done) to help you?

Rule 5: Respect interdependence . Most people think of individuals as isolated entities, separate from the communities of which they are a part. This failure to think systemically causes us to conceive of people as the problem when the real issues are structural. I was talking recently with a management consultant who expressed a fear that teaching executives about archetypes might lead them to want to hire or retain only people who evidenced the “right” archetypal qualities. I replied by explaining that no one who actually understood the archetypal dimension of life would engage in such unethical and inhumane applications of this theory.

Archetypes emerge from the collective unconscious and strive for balance in organizational and family systems, just as they do in the individual psyche. A college president who attended one of my workshops explained this phenomenon with reference to her personal experience. Like many strong leaders, she found the Orphan annoying and kept getting rid of staff who whined or found fault with everything. Eventually she discovered that this did no good, because soon someone else would begin reciting a litany of complaints. In other words, she realized that in any system, someone has to express the Orphan. If such voices are silenced or devalued, the result will be an increase in low-level (or shadow) expressions of the archetype. The leadership issue is not to get rid of the Orphan, but to create an environment that encourages its more positive expression.

In utilizing archetypal theory ethically, it is important to remember that we all are radically interdependent—with our families, our friends, our co-workers, our communities, and the natural world. If an archetype is active around us, we are issued an invitation to enter its story. Generally, we cannot refuse to do so unless we leave the situation altogether. For example, if anyone in our vicinity is oppressed, we will have to deal with the Orphan archetype. We may feel too far along on our own journeys to need to do so, but the truth is that life is a communal experience.

Individually and collectively, we eventually have to pick up the pieces if our own actions harm others. If a business pollutes the environment, someone has to clean up the mess. If the cleanup falls to government, corporate taxes may increase and businesses may discover that the bottom line is, in fact, affected by their ethics. When groups demonstrate an overabundance of one archetype, someone suffers the consequences. Too much Warrior, for example, and we run the risk of wiping out whole species (to whom we feel superior), oppressing people who do not measure up to our standards, and increasing economic disparities between the rich (winners) and the poor (losers). Such outcomes set in motion a process that begins to awaken the archetypes needed for an appropriate response. The individual and collective psyches are inherently self-correcting. For example, the Altruist and Magician archetypes now are emerging into human consciousness to help us explore ways to value interconnection as much as we do competition. The more conscious we become about our own imbalances, the less time we spend creating problems we then have to solve.

When we think archetypally, we also can recognize the deep structure behind ideas in different fields that predominate in any historical period. When the Warrior archetype was dominant in Western culture, theology focused on the struggle between good and evil, biology emphasized the survival of the fittest, meetings were run along authoritarian lines by majority rule, and organizations took on hierarchical structures, like the military. As the Magician archetype emerges into consciousness, we see theologies emphasizing oneness, biology stressing ecological interdependence, meetings run according to rules of consensual decision making, and organizations becoming flatter and more egalitarian in structure. When archetypes are strong in the culture around us, we must be open to them or risk becoming irrelevant.

Moreover, unless an archetype is expressed outside us in some way, it is very difficult for that archetype to be active in our lives. The hero within always is in dialogue with the hero without. Although the great majority of us are limited in what we can achieve by what is happening in the collective, any advance we do make affects the world way beyond ourselves.

The journey may feel very lonely at times, but the truth is that we all are traveling in a caravan together. Whatever you are thinking or feeling, you have company. Archetypes do not emerge only in one person; they come first to a number of societal pioneers and more slowly to cultural leaders and others. Knowing this can give us courage. We live in a round world. It is not possible to step off the edge.

Most of our social systems lag behind human consciousness. As a result, they often can be transformed as quickly and unexpectedly as the falling of the Berlin Wall. All that is required is for us to stop censoring ourselves, to let go of our fears that others are not ready to hear what we know. For example, the gay pride movement showed how breaking silence often is all that is necessary to change attitudes. Many people questioned their stereotyped views of gays and lesbians only after they realized that they knew some!

Recently I have heard some people complain about the lack of spirituality in the workplace. There is, of course, no lack of spirituality in our organizations. They are full of people with highly developed spiritual lives. It is just that to be taken seriously, most workers believe that from nine to five they have to pretend this is not so. All we need to bring spirituality back to the workplace is to break the ban on talking from our hearts, souls, and spirits. We stop being complicit with “Holdfast the keeper of the past” when we are open about the truth of our own lives.

If you have awakened all six archetypes in this book, you are ready to be an agent of change in the world. Taking a leadership role in your family, school, workplace, or community may not seem so daunting if you remember that no single one of us needs to do it all.

If we let go of grandiosity and recognize that we all are partial and thus necessarily interdependent with others, we can share the diversity of our gifts and voices. You learn from me and I learn from you. That is how we grow, and that is how we can solve the great problems of our time. Your individual life is one stream pouring into a river of humanity. You never can know exactly how much difference your life makes, but you can know that you do matter, immeasurably.

We all do.