Here’s my slightly insane comment, I hope you can excuse its length.. didn’t get a chance to email it in time I guess:

My prejudice is that it start’s internally, basically by saving our selves we save the world: Our inner world plays a huge roll in forming our experience of reality, and it is through this experience of reality that we interact with reality. On a sorta more surface level we all have our shadow sides, and if we fail to wrestle with these shadow sides we become vehicles of the darkness in the world. But that’s not to say the darkness is evil, the darkness is just that part of our self that hasn’t been integrated into our larger personality and for that reason is less developed, more child like. So the real challenge is not in throwing out demons, it’s in integrating the demons in such a way that they might find constructive expression in our lives.
The formation of the shadow is the formation of the Freudian unconscious: Morality / that social taboo system is a force of collective synchronization, and it exerts a significant effect on what part of our total human potential gets cultivated and what doesn’t. So the social taboo system is an expression of the challenges a society faces, as well as certain power relationships in that society. A modern challenge concerns the rate of change, where our value systems, by force of inertia, lag behind the current challenges.

Here’s a quote from Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, where in the labyrinth and minotaur is a symbol for the shadow world, and where Campbell addresses this problem:

‘Theseus, the hero-slayer of the Minotaur, entered Crete from without, as a symbol of the rising civilization of the Greeks. That was the new and living thing. But it is possible also for the principal of regeneration to be sought and found within the very walls of the tyrant’s empire itself. Professor Toynbee used the terms “detachment” and “transfiguration” to describe the crisis by which the higher spiritual dimension is attained that makes possible the resumption of the work of creation. The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourselves, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. We should tower in stature. Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boonbringer, the cultural hero of the day- a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to the causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called “the archetypal images.” This is the process know to Hindu and Buddhist Philosophy as viveka, “discrimination.”‘

Viveka is a process of discriminating between eternal ideas and there expression in time and space. Another words, you have the morality on God on one hand, and the morality of your society on the other. The morality of our society, at best, is an expression of those eternal ideas into the field of space and time, an expression of the eternal ideas on the current challenges society faces.

Nietzsche is perhaps a bad ass exemplar of the concept, for he questioned the foundations of all values more deeply then anyone, and some say this was a part of the insanity that would finally be his undoing.. well that and syphilis. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he writes:

“Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.
There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the strong reverent spirit that would bear much: but the difficult and the most difficult are what its strength demands.
What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded. What is most difficult, O heroes, asks the spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon myself and exult in my strength? Is it not humbling oneself to wound one’s haughtiness? Letting one’s folly shine to mock one’s wisdom?
Or is it this: parting from our cause when it triumphs? Climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter?
Or is it this: feeding on the acorns and grass of knowledge and, for the sake of the truth, suffering hunger in one’s soul?
Or is it this: being sick and sending home the comforters and making friends with the deaf, who never hear what you want?
Or is it this: stepping into filthy waters when they are the waters of truth, and not repulsing cold frogs and hot toads?
Or is it this: loving those who despise us and offering a hand to the ghost that would frighten us?
All these most difficult things the spirit that would bear much takes upon itself: like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert, thus the spirit speeds into its desert.
In the loneliest desert, however, the second metamorphosis occurs: here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. Here he seeks out his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for ultimate victory he wants to fight with the great dragon.
Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? Thou shalt is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, I will. Thou shalt lies in his way, sparkling like gold, an animal covered with scales; and on every scale shines a golden thou shalt.
Values, thousands of years old, shine on these scales; and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: All value of all things shines on me. All value has long been created, and I am all created value. Verily, there shall be no more

-