I don’t think 99% of people’s shadows are really very important, on an individual basis. There’s no point romanticising it, or blaming it, or believing it gives you super powers. It’s a ‘talent’ - a subset of abilities and psychological drivers used in extremis. And we all have one, but nor do I think there is much value either way whether people accept or deny it is a part of of them.
What matters is how it manifests, which is something we can control, and under what circumstances it becomes manifest which is largely something we cannot.
I’ve read a few books on behaviour. One covered mob psychology. What turns a bunch of peaceful protesters into molotov cocktail throwing, window-smashing looters…? It’s nothing much. Everybody has a threshold for violence. Some lower than others. Think of them as empty glasses that fill, and errupt into violence when they overflow. Listening to a speech will fill them a little. What fills them the most is seeing other people become violent, especially if a context exists where that violence is even remotely justified. It’s dominoes. A protester with a low threshold tips, charges the police shields - if this was shopping he or she would be termed an ‘early adopter’. This is enough to tip a whole secondry tier of people into violent action. The actions of those will tip almost everyone else. It works with bees too.
We are basically lazy, some more than others, some less so. But we all see the logic of working just hard enough to achieve a given reward. Going against ingrained habits of thoughtfulness and non-violence is difficult. So we tend to count that into our subconscious formula of cost/gain - which is why we don’t usually let the shadow out very often. Cognitive dissonance - roughly equivalent to ‘acting out of character’ - kinda hurts.
There is 1% that does matter though. Psychopaths. People with very low thresholds, or no thresholds, for letting their shadows out. These people are almost always the early adopters of ‘evil’, whether physical, corporate, or institutional. 7.7 billion people last time I checked. That’s a whole lot of people with psychopathic tendencies. When a psychopath does a cost/gain analysis regarding a goal, they don’t have to figure in the cognitive dissonance of bad behaviour, to them instinctively, going to the shop and buying a chocolate bar is exactly the same as punching a kid in the face and taking theirs. The end is the same. They may learn not to eventually. In the same way someone dyslexic can learn to read. Difficult though.
But these guys, if they are in positions of power, can and will draw out other people’s shadows through (bad) example. Which is why you sometimes end up with your otherwise spectacularly normal Mum working at Auschwitz, planing to spend next month’s wages on kitchen appliances.
Research on psychopathy, and mandatory programs of early detection both wannabe parants and infants/children, would go a long way to solving some of our problems.