Amber Heard, Vladimir Putin and Darth Vader Walk Into A Bar

My goal as a writer is to shake people out of their thinky judgey left-brained way of putting everything into boxes (see my first article which covered this in detail… too much detail). I want to do this because life lived totally in our heads alienates us from ourselves, others and from the feeling of being alive.

Another side effect of this kind of rational arrogance is that people, groups and cultures also end up in categories. Fear plus black-and-white thinking can lead to snap judgments of others and prejudicial blanket statements that may give us an artificial security while preventing us from an honest and conscious relationship with the outside world.

These days may see less overt racism and sexism than 20 years back, but our tendency to draw lines and name call hasn’t changed much. Outright verbal assaults have just become more intellectual, now cloaked within modern values so that we feel justified in our certainty. We are more subtle, stealthy and self-righteous about it, if not just to defend ourselves against the wokeflakes, covidiots, nazis, fascists, neomarxists, virtue signallers, antivaxxers, white supremacists and tin foilers.

But Carson! Some of those people really are dangerous… at least obnoxious.

I’m not here to debate who owns human virtue. That discussion has been around at least since Aristotle and we aren’t going to solve it in my comments section. My point is instead that our emotional systems activate very rapidly under detection of threat, quickly recruiting our meaning making circuitry to explain—often with precise language—why our enemies are different from us.

Meanwhile, the last month has seen a battalion of armchair psychologists offering their observations of the Depp vs. Heard trial. What a perfect match for what I’m currently describing since the legal format pits one side against the other while leaning into the simplicity of right versus wrong.

If you’ve had any reactions in particular towards Amber Heard (and trust me—I’ve had my own), I’d like to propose something different. Let’s consider the role she plays as a magnet for our big emotions and even explore gratitude towards someone fulfilling such a function.

But first, let’s look at Roman history.

Gladiatorial Combat

In 80 AD, Roman Emperor Titus officially opened the Flavian Amphitheatre—more simply known just as the Roman Colosseum. While I don’t think Russell Crow had quite reached his height of fame at the time, a major part of what packed the 50,000 seats was gladiator combat.

While sporting events are just plain fun, there are a few psychological functions behind the thrill of competitive bloodshed. For one thing, humans benefit from acknowledging and expressing their shadow—the dark mental storage house for all the forbidden impulses that don’t fit with society. The sacrificial act of indulging the strange curiosity towards gore was thought to let the shadow breathe so it doesn’t ambush folks unconsciously.

Modern mainstream culture so often demonstrates the opposite. The intense pressure to ‘be good’ in the public forum binds us tightly to our personas—our performative social masks based on ideals, ‘shoulds,’ and ‘musts’ lest we be excluded from humanity. The toxic positivity-style rejection of our darker parts is a short term strategy, however, as the unseen shadow will always find a way to express its self.

You can see this is on folks who people-please without boundaries and eventually explode. Or in homophobic pastors caught in gay sex scandals. Or those who champion social justice while using stereotype and prejudice as part of their strategy. Or in the overwhelming anxiety of a generation striving for a ‘goodness’ that doesn’t include compassion towards the parts of them that don’t make the cut (hint: rejecting our dark impulses doesn’t make them go away—healing requires kind curiosity to all parts of us).

A second function of colosseum combat involved the deeply rooted primal and tribal satisfaction of the good team beating the bad team. Dualistic and binary left-brained thinking mingles with our deep mid-brain/limbic programming to bring to life good and evil archetypes (evolutionary patterns of behaviour that have existed for so long that they are wired into our most ancient orientation instincts). The lightning fast thalamus bypasses the slower cortex, meaning that the satisfaction of being on the good team will overpower the reasonable nuance that we are all just humans doing our best here.

In Vancouver 2010 we learned the dangers of indulging this brain circuitry without taking care to ground ourselves. High investment in the drama of us versus them meant that when the Boston Bruins defeated the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup Finals, citizens devolved into chaotic nihilism, destroying the downtown section of their own city. Primal tribalism and cortical categorizing (and 12 Budweisers) are a combo that can destroy cities if left unchecked.

…But it’s also one of our favourite pastimes.

Amber Heard, Vladimir Putin And Darth Vader Walk Into A Bar

No, I’m not saying that a traumatized woman entangled in a complicated and awful relationship is comparable to an aggressively deteriorating Russian war monger and a dark Jedi whose vengeful hatred drove him to destroy planets (although Heard’s legal team did have a lot in common with Storm Troopers).

Just as in the case of colosseum theatre, we need to look deeper into what these people come to represent. What is their psychological function? What emotions do we direct and express towards them? What parts of our own story do we project onto them? Can we see them in ourselves? Are we relieved we aren’t them?

If most of us are honest with ourselves, it feels great to have an obvious foe to direct our judgments towards.

But why?

Black-and-White Judgments Feel Safer

“Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other.” Alan Watts

When there are simple good and bad people we don’t have to deal with the overwhelmment of a complex, nuanced and ambiguous universe. We are protected from how relative and nebulous value systems really are. We don’t have to do the deeper work of acknowledging that very few people are overtly evil. Judging in the extremes gets around looking at how complicated people are, especially considering that nearly everyone is doing their best and believes they are in the right.

The problem however is that true polarities of good and evil are hard to come by, if they even exist at all. So long as we behold the world with dualistic consciousness, all manifest reality is a blend of opposites with neither truly winning out. And yet it is the mark of ordinary humans to both simultaneously fear and seek comfort in the idea that one side can ‘win.’

We could take the above Watts quotation further by saying our hope of defeating anxiety lies in belief that if we just invest enough in the good that evil will finally be vanquished.

It won’t.

Ultimately, our only choice is to accept both as part of our fabric and learn to sew patterns as beautifully as we can.

Amber Heard Helps Us Bypass Our Own Work

“Projection [of our own shadow] makes the whole world a replica of our own unknown face.” Carl Jung

When we call out ‘bad people’ through unquestioned judgements we are actually projecting outwards our own personal ‘badness’ that we aren’t yet ready to own. So long as there is a one-dimensionally evil Amber Heard out there we can preserve the self-protecting view of how good we are in contrast.

It’s scarier to consider that given the right circumstances any of us could be programmed to do hurtful things to each other (or develop a Cluster B type personality disorder). Jordan Peterson controversially posed many times that if we were born in Nazi Germany, the odds are overwhelmingly that we would have participated in anti-human monstrosities of genocidal cruelty.

Notice in this case, many folks tended to be so uncomfortable with the proposition their radar went up and said, “He’s talking about Nazis! It means he’s a Nazi sympathizer.” The rejection of his thought experiment turns him into boogie man, allowing people to feel righteous in their judgments. Things are very rarely as they seem.

But I’m not here to weigh in on controversial figures. I’m here to challenge us to look at what the so-called monsters of the world represent to us psychologically. If we can slow down a bit we can disengage a constant state of animal reactivity. If we don't look deeper at what made our fear/judgment circuitry switch on then we alienate ourselves from a safer curiosity towards our surroundings.

Alternatively, we could acknowledge that we all have nervous systems that can be shaped towards peace or traumatic disorganization depending on our circumstances and which set of values best serves us in which context. When we forgive our own flawed humanity we become compassionate to others who buckle under the immense pressure of navigating our increasingly complex world.

Bad Guys Unite Us

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Ancient Proverb

It may sound absurd to consider gratitude towards someone like Vladimir Putin. But can you understand what a relief it is to share a cut-and-dry bad guy? I know it sounds blasphemous, but think beyond just the overt world stage of geopolitics and economics. Think of our global psyche. We are a collective conscious (and unconscious) entity that needs certain things to stay healthy.

Politicians that drive a divide between individuals so that certain groups are viewed as subhuman create extraordinary stress on our collective mental health. The cultural costs of a pass/fail grade on our right to be treated well is extraordinary. While dismantling the unconscious bias of othering the marginalized is society’s project right now, let’s not lose sight of the overt encouragement we get to reject humans who don’t fit into our all-too-certain plans of what is best for everyone.

The atrocities of war are unreconcilable and you aren’t going to hear me defending global conflict, but when someone like Putin appears there is some relief from local political polarization. Unlike Trump or Trudeau—who both politicized events in a way that divided people and created lesser-than human classes—Putin is just simply a bad guy. So much less likely to create an argument at a bar or around the dinner table, the consolation prize to the tragedy in Ukraine was a common enemy.

A Grateful Conclusion

A decade of clinical work leads me to my own strong opinions on Amber Heard, but that’s not what this article is about. Instead I want to remind you, the path that created the planet-destroying Darth Vader was hatred and vengeance. Are we really so confident that angry retaliation is going to make us happy?

The legal system handles the reparations for slanderous defamation while social media algorithms let us know that Amber Heard is Satan incarnate. If it feels good to rage at her… or if it feels good to load her up with the world’s darkness to take a break from looking at our own… great, let’s do it. But let’s also be honest about what we’re doing here. The world has enough bad faith virtue.

So with gratitude:

Thank you, Amber Heard. To become a public pariah, you have sacrificed yourself to help unite folks in co-resonant scorn. You’re like when everyone sings the lyrics at a concert, but instead of worshiping the artist everyone here feels like they’re better than them.

Lies, defamation and false accusations are not OK—but consequences of the legal and public court help to restore balance. And no one can deny, it’s nice to have a good old fashioned bad guy.

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I write. I actually want to write a lot more, but right now I’m mostly invested in directing Thrive Downtown Counselling Centre—a space that has emerged in the international eye for its psychedelic integration therapies. We have a team of 18 diverse therapists offering everything from day-to-day counselling to the treatment of complex trauma.

You can hear more about my stance on life from my Callin Podcasts.

Thanks for reading.