The Only War You Will Not Win

Source: The Only War You Will Not Win, Horses, 35:35, uploaded 2025-08-30, playlist index 205.

Horses opens with a familiar moral picture. A person is torn between good and bad, so the task seems to be the removal of foul impulses and the victory of goodness. The video asks what happens when those impulses contain information and energy that a person needs. Its answer uses Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of the shadow to describe a war that cannot be won because the opposing side is part of the self.

Persona, ego, and shadow

The video gives a deliberately simplified account of Jung’s persona, ego, and shadow. The persona is the role a person presents to the world. It forms through a compromise between personal wishes and the demands of a group. Someone who agrees to see a film with friends despite having no interest in it is using the persona to keep the social situation intact.

The ego contains a fuller conscious account of the person. It includes memories, opinions, thoughts, and desires that may never appear in the public role. In the film example, the ego is the private thought that the film holds no interest.

The shadow contains the unconscious parts of the personality, including traits and desires that a person or a culture has judged unacceptable. The video names laziness, cruelty, manipulation, greed, and selfishness. A shadow response to the film might call the friends stupid for wanting to see it. That response can be so heavily repressed that the person struggles to admit it exists.

The problem begins when the shadow becomes a foreign enemy. A person treats an impulse as proof of moral failure and tries to erase it. The video uses a contemporary argument about empathy as an example. Horses describes some Christian conservatives as treating empathy as a vice that makes people accept false ideas, whilst progressive voices continue to treat it as central to Jesus’s teaching. Horses finds the conservative position strange, yet uses the dispute to show how quickly a quality can move between the categories of virtue and vice.

The qualities a culture puts away

The shadow begins in childhood, when a person learns which feelings and behaviours a culture accepts. Robert A. Johnson’s Owning Your Own Shadow, one of the books named in the video description, supplies the account that Horses follows. The sorting process depends on place and time. A culture may praise individualism whilst another places greater value on fitting in. One may honour artists and another may honour scientists. The process makes culture possible, yet its judgments remain contingent.

Once a quality enters the shadow, the person treats it as worthless and therefore unworthy of study. The video accepts that some impulses cause harm. It would be pleasant if cruelty and evil had no place in human life, but the argument begins from their persistence. Everyone carries selfish thoughts, cruel ideas, and hard feelings. Virtues carry their own risks as well. Johnson writes that humility can become obedience, resentment, or a performance of moral superiority. Pride can push a person to achieve more, and it can tell someone facing cruelty that they deserve better treatment.

Every action also leaves something outside its reach. A baby needs food and disturbs a room by crying. Work can produce something useful whilst taking time from family, friendship, or rest. Loving one person reduces the time available for other people who may also need love. A donation to protect the rainforest leaves less money for feeding hungry children. An artist who makes dark work may add pain to the world, whilst an artist who makes cheerful work may leave painful truths unspoken. Horses treats these choices as proportional rather than pure. The more energy a person gives to one good, the more they leave elsewhere.

Inaction carries the same problem. Someone might spend an entire life staring at a white wall to avoid the harm that any action could cause. That person still casts a shadow because the world loses the kindness and ability they could have offered. The collective version is visible in social progress. Technology brings real benefits whilst consuming resources and distracting attention from other needs. A period of peace can coincide with economic dominance and large differences in wealth between nations. A society also has a shadow, and it cannot remove the consequences of its gains by declaring them good.

Repression and projection

The most common response to the shadow is repression. A person tries to leave undesirable qualities unattended, as though refusal could make them disappear. The rejected material then seeks an outlet through projection. Instead of recognising an impulse in oneself, a person places it onto another person or group and reacts to the other as its owner.

The video describes the private form through violent media and news. A person may consume scenes of suffering to give their shadow somewhere to go, yet the quick exposure to pain leaves the underlying impulse untouched. Repression can also break through as rage, an attack that the person regrets, or words that they did not mean to say. Parents can place their shadow onto children through emotional or physical abuse, passing the same pattern into the child’s adult life.

Conflict between two adults often contains this exchange. One person’s unresolved aggression activates the other person’s, and each then receives evidence that the other is unreasonable. The shadow also appears in the qualities that a person hates most in someone else. A small disliked trait can end a promising relationship because it reminds the observer of a similar trait hidden in themselves. Expelling the reminder is easier than investigating the source.

Groups project shadows as well. The video names Nazis and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, white people and black people, and men and women as examples of populations that have placed unwanted qualities onto other populations. These examples compress different histories into one psychological pattern, and the video gives no historical evidence for the comparison. Its point is that individuals usually understand that causing suffering is wrong, whilst collective projection can override that knowledge. A population finds an external group to convict instead of examining the harm attached to its own ideals and actions.

Repression therefore leaves a person with less responsibility for their own character and gives a group permission to inflict its unwanted qualities on someone else. The good-versus-bad story promises that the bad side can eventually be defeated. Since the shadow consists of qualities that cannot be removed, the story produces a permanent war.

The gold inside contradiction

Johnson’s alternative begins with a different kind of dragon. The medieval hero can kill the dragon in the cave. A modern person cannot kill the shadow because the shadow belongs to the person. The first task is to recognise that it exists, then to care for it in a way that makes life possible.

Horses describes the shadow as a source of truth because it reveals what the conscious self has refused to see. The video calls this its gold. A person who considers themselves kind may still have cruel thoughts. Kindness, in this account, comes from choosing kind action whilst the capacity for cruelty remains available. Goodness has meaning because a person could act otherwise.

The video asks the listener to treat these pairs as paradoxes rather than contradictions. Day gives night its meaning, happiness depends on the possibility of its absence, and work requires leisure as a counterpart. The examples are broad and philosophical rather than empirical. They support the video’s claim that a person becomes whole through the relation between opposing qualities.

That relation changes the moral task. Losing can have value alongside winning. Giving resources away can have value alongside accumulating them. Laziness can have a place alongside hard work. Horses is not recommending each impulse in every situation. It is asking the listener to stop assigning one permanent moral rank to every feeling before understanding what the feeling does.

Love as an unconscious projection

The early Jungian shadow includes everything held in the unconscious, so the idea reaches beyond traits that a person calls bad. Horses uses love as the strongest example. Romantic love belongs here, although the same process can involve a hobby, a job, or a place. When a person falls in love, they project an ideal image onto the object of their love. The video calls this a God image, meaning the most perfect version of a person, place, or thing that the unconscious can imagine.

The projection gives the loved object a burden it cannot carry. A person may visit a Caribbean island, fall in love with it within days, and decide to move there. The first weeks sustain the fantasy. Then the heat becomes oppressive, groceries and basic goods cost far more than they did at home, weak infrastructure turns errands into ordeals, and small emergencies become dangerous. The island stops functioning as a source of inspiration and becomes a source of irritation.

Horses follows Johnson in treating this collapse as a failure of projection. The person has placed spiritual meaning and responsibility into a place that cannot provide either. A lover can receive the same burden, which makes idealisation cruel when the real person fails to match the image. The love was directed at an interpretation rather than at the full subject.

The proposed correction is sustained attention. A person can keep the love whilst examining what they have placed inside it. The loved object has an actual identity, limits, and demands. A durable relationship has to meet that reality. The video does not present this as a way to preserve every romance. It presents it as a way to let love survive contact with the thing it claims to love.

Individuation and the false life

Jung’s larger term for this work is individuation. Horses defines it as the synthesis of the mind’s many aspects into a complete, balanced, honest person. Individuation does not mean rejecting outside influence, and it does not mean obeying every impulse. It means understanding the forces that shape a person and deciding how to live with them. Bud Harris, whose Becoming Whole appears in the source description, frames it as a lifelong transformation rather than a set of positive thoughts or a quick self-help repair.

The process starts with a problem in childhood. A person forms values and decisions about the life they should lead before they have lived enough to test those decisions. The video compares this with being told to pack for a hike without being told the destination, weather, or terrain. A person might prepare for the mountains of Appalachia, the forests of Sweden, or an African savannah, yet each requires different equipment. Adult dissatisfaction can arise from having followed a childhood answer into conditions that the child could not have imagined.

The result may look like a midlife crisis, profound unhappiness inside a comfortable life, or the disappointment of a university graduate who enters the approved career and finds it empty. Horses removes blame from these examples. The person made the best choices available to them, then reached a life that exposed the limits of the old map.

Individuation has an anatomy rather than a sequence. One part is full engagement with life, including defeat, suffering, and failure. The ego and persona tend to choose activities that reduce strife or satisfy inherited expectations. Harris calls the hollow pursuit of those activities “false doing”. Leisure remains worthwhile, yet false doing describes achievements that only repeat what parents, culture, or an earlier version of the self said should produce happiness.

The video places this false doing inside a wider control-based culture. Self-help books, gurus, and ideas such as manifestation can teach that a person should control emotions, moods, and circumstances through coherent choices. Horses argues that life exceeds that control. Acceptance gives a person a way to work with feelings and circumstances rather than keep fighting them. The phrase “return home” names a turn towards the original self from which a person grows, although the video admits that this remains abstract and subjective.

The work then requires a person to examine their inherited parents and their cultural parents. Parents may give useful values with good intentions, yet they belong to another generation and have lived a different life. Culture supplies its own desires and standards, and those standards may fit a person poorly. The desire for happiness and love can also lead a person away from experience when it turns defeat, terror, hurt, and suffering into evidence that life has gone wrong.

Pain can also show what a person has already survived. The video says that people often reach the other side of a dark period with help from others and with abilities they did not know they possessed. The support matters, yet another person cannot live through the difficulty in their place. Even the impulses that seem hardest to accept may contain a direction: revenge can carry self-defence, cruelty can become the force to stand up for oneself, and greed can express the wish to improve one’s life.

The video gives difficult impulses a possible use without calling them harmless. The wish to be loved can become dependence on acceptance, which is an ideal of love rather than love’s full reality. A person who knows their own qualities can build relationships in which rejection remains possible. Horses places a plain value on being loved for the person one is instead of for a performance.

Balance without a method

Johnson’s final image is a seesaw. Every quality remains on it, so the task is to distribute and tend to them until the whole stays in equilibrium. The ideal is a moving balance rather than an immovable moral victory. Conversation, meditation, and attention to the shadow can help, yet the video refuses to turn these into a numbered programme.

That refusal shapes the closing argument. Horses often makes work about darkness and melancholy, and it rejects the idea that these subjects are defects in an otherwise proper human life. A hammer is useful when someone has a nail and useless when the task requires a screw. The video applies the same test to pain. Suffering does not become good in every circumstance, and the rejection of pain as a human possibility can create greater harm than examining it.

The source ends with an admission of limited authority. No one can tell another person how to find balance in a fixed sequence because the problem depends on a life’s history, values, and circumstances. Horses says that its own balance remains far away. The available guidance is smaller: people often accept the flaws of those they love, so they can extend some of that patience towards themselves.

Further reading / references

The video description names these books as its sources. It gives no editions, publication details, or links beyond the video itself.

• Murray Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul.
• Jolande Szekacs Jacobi, The Way of Individuation.
• Bud Harris, Becoming Whole.
• Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow.
• Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, Meeting the Shadow.