Corruption Starts Inside You: Why Malignant Certainty Makes You Dangerous!
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2026
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
DREAM WITH US, and we’ll teach you how to interpret them!
In this episode, Joseph, Lisa, and Deb explain why Corruption is not only a political problem, but a human one, why Power breaks trust long before it breaks laws, and why the most dangerous people are often the most certain. They reveal the core mechanism behind Corruption and Inflation: when unconscious drives flood the ego, making someone feel exceptional, entitled, and above ordinary rules. They unpack how Corruption escalates quietly, from small rationalisations and moral distortions to full-blown abuse of entrusted Power that destroys relationships, organisations, and communities. Joseph brings decades of clinical experience, including high-stakes psychiatric hospital work, where he has seen how quickly people can become less reflective while feeling more “right.” Lisa and Deborah add decades of analytic practice and teaching, connecting leadership research, brain science, mythology, and Jung’s warnings about the will to Power, certainty, and the loss of love and conscience.
We explain how:
• Power amplifies certainty, and certainty is the earliest warning sign that something is going wrong
• Fear narrows perception, creates straw-enemies, and locks groups into “us vs them.”
• The fantasy of purity forces splitting, supercharges the shadow, and drives scapegoating
• The real antidotes are conscious constructive Power, humility, feedback, and systems of checks and balances
If you think Corruption belongs only to bad people, this conversation is a wake-up call. Corruption grows through small compromises, it spreads through groups, and it accelerates when leaders cannot tolerate doubt, accountability, or the lived experience of the people beneath them.
Read along with the dream HERE.
LOOK & GROW
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We can fantasize that purity is any number of things. |
| 0:03.7 | The difficulty is that it's an illusion, particularly in the realm of the human psyche, |
| 0:10.0 | that we try to attain purity by disavowing all kinds of realities inside of us. |
| 0:19.1 | And once we decide that the pure person never desires sex or never desires money |
| 0:24.7 | or the pure person always does this and never does that, |
| 0:28.9 | then purity depends on splitting. |
| 0:32.9 | And as soon as we become overly excited about splitting off everything that doesn't meet my fantasy of purity, |
| 0:42.8 | then the shadow becomes incredibly powerful. It takes enormous energy to suppress the shadow, |
| 0:50.1 | and then that can become institutionalized in as much as the leader reassures us, your purity will be protected, |
| 0:57.6 | and I too will go to any lengths to make sure that that shadow is destroyed. |
| 1:06.3 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 1:08.8 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, |
| 1:14.3 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective |
| 1:20.2 | to important issues of the day. |
| 1:23.9 | I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 1:28.0 | I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 1:32.9 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, on Cape Cod. This week, we are going to wind our way into the topic and reality of corruption. |
| 1:58.9 | Very often, when we think about corruption, we think of it as being out there. |
| 2:05.5 | It's out there in public life or groups, but it's somewhat embedded in a cultural context. |
| 2:14.6 | But of course, as you can well expect, there is internal corruption as well. So there |
| 2:22.5 | are social effects and there are mythological examples. There's some research and we will |
| 2:31.5 | just dive in and take you along with us, I hope. |
... |
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