Damn near every human on the planet fails at the kind of self examination necessary to see themselves as flawed. Even the best efforts can fail because it’s just so damn hard to look at yourself and divorce that view from your own inner thoughts and motivations. Being objective about the self is hard. Even when someone knows all of that, actually pulling off that objectivity is a long road filled with potholes. I know I sure as fuck fail at it often.

Not to make light of a very serious subject, but Jungian shadow work is a thing, and not rare. I don’t want to talk much about this publicly or with any specific detail, but as universal human truth, we only see what we want to see. That is why perfect self-objectivity will always fail, because the self is still the self, both observer and observed – and the gatekeeper to both. If a person were instead to shift their introspective goals to complete self-acceptance and self-love, those are far better at opening the inner doors to seeing oneself as one is. Objectivity is indeed hard, especially when it is intellectual and clinical and cold and self-distancing, and you already believe somewhere deep down that you have every reason to accept that the peripheries are the whole.

Jann Wenner is a perfect example of a person who has these inner demons, and a great deal of not-love toward the self, as if he has come to accept what he is as an openly gay man, for example, but still resents himself for making him fight that battle. Underneath narcissism you will always find profound wounds, and the longer someone doesn’t deal with them, or makes a habit of outsourcing their inner life (like mistreating others out of self-loathing) the more entrenched and immutable they become.

However, in terms of his statements and actions, the far more important point is that he has, and has always had, choices. It is the choices he has made in regard to other people that I really just can’t stand.

If you are interested in introspection, the kind that truly opens your inner doors to yourself, you will only ever dance around the periphery until you decide (not feel, decide) actively and as a goal, to love and accept yourself exactly as you are. No one likes to be met with anger, hatred, criticism, and contempt, but that is often what we have in ourselves for ourselves. Looking into self as the strangers we are to it and expecting clarity and openness with that level of disdain and contempt just doesn’t work.

But looking into self with the active determination to accept, understand, and love whatever you find there DOES work, and there are many of us who do that work daily. If you can do that too, your entire world will change, because the ugliness and the darkness you see – whatever it is – will be met with love and compassion, and it is that compassionate understanding which will embrace it as the solution or misapplied trait it started off as in life, and make it pliant and open to transformation.

On the other hand, your inner self well knows its own self-loathing even if your cognitive mind does not, and without accepting the fact and even the need for that self-loathing, your less known self “parts” will slam those introspective doors in your cognitive mind before you’ve ever even had a chance to open them. The human brain has an amazing facility for redirection and obfuscation: to see it clearly, to get past your own gatekeeping, you first have to accept and understand why you hate and hide what you do, and in time, love even that.

If you want to continue this via pm feel free; I’ve been at it for decades. But in the meantime, no, I don’t hate Jann Wenner, just his actions. Having met many like him I dislike the idea of his character intensely. He is absolutely a complete prick – but a prick who now, having been freed from his heavy RRHoF duties, has time to reflect on how he got to this place of opprobrium he has achieved in life, at the point of what was supposed to be the pinnacle of his success. How’d that happen, Jann?