Ancient Myth and My Three Peoples Theory

My reductive Three Peoples theory, as I am sure you know, proposes three kinds of humans: There are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants that experience life as if they were feudal peasants. There are the People of the Responsible Self, responsible individuals that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. You need to be a Person of the Responsible Self in order to function competently in the modern market economy of the city. Then there are People of the Creative Self, artists and writers.

I think this theory brilliantly illuminates the modern world and its political and cultural wars. But now I am reading Jordan B. Peterson, with his distillation of scholarship on myth and post-Jungian psychology. And I have a problem.

The problem is that, in the mythological framework, you have the Great Mother, the Great Father, and the Son as Hero.

The Great Mother represents the axis of creation / destruction. She is mystery, with unknown and unfathomable things happening within her mysterious body. She is the source of life, and yet also the author of destruction. Frankly this is shocking to me, carefully taught to think of women as lovers and helpless carers and helpless victims of the patriarchy, and not to think about Mean Girls, and goddesses like the furious Kali, not at all. But we deplorables can understand the affinity between creation and destruction in the famous concept of Joseph Schumpeter, that capitalism is "creative destruction."

The Great Father represents the axis of order / <->tyranny. This is easy to swallow, because it isn't that different from our patriarchal states that protect us from enemies, foreign and domestic. But there is always the danger that too much protection and government can slide from the beneficial establishment of order into the cruel and unjust imposition of tyranny. We know all about that, we sons of the 20th century.

The Son is the Hero that stands at the border between order and chaos. It is his job to explore the chaos of the time, to understand and tame it, and lead the people into the Promised Land where the dangerous and unknown chaos can be brought into the light and understood and mastered. Yes: Marduk, Horus, Jesus Christ: those chaps. And actually, I think that the liberal idea of the "activist" partakes of this notion.

I tell you what bothers me. It is the notion that creation/destruction is a feminine trait of the Great Mother. Because I think that the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries, when real per capita income has grown by 30 times, is mostly a male thing of creative destruction. So where does that connect with the Great Mother theme of creation and destruction? It's a problem!

Now here is one way to think about it. We can say that in the modern world the roles of Great Mother, Great Father, and Hero Son have become blurred and blended. If men are no longer needed to guarantee order by standing on the border and keeping the barbarians out then that reduces the role of Great Father protectors. So maybe the solution is for men to get into the creation business, not by gestating babies, but by gestating start-up businesses. Needless to say, the business startup game also partakes of the Hero myth, for every businessman that starts a new business is going down into hell, confronting the great unknown, and trying to explore a new technology or business idea and make it habitable and productive for his fellow humans. He clearly sacrifices himself for the potential good of all.

So also for women. If women are not longer needed to devote their entire lives to the creation of babies, maybe they can partake of the Father role of maintaining order and become politicians. I think we can say that Margaret Thatcher did that successfully, and Hillary Clinton did not. Hey, maybe women can even harden themselves and become Heroes, going down into hell and bringing back a great boon to mankind.

But you know what? I think that the road for women to partake of Great Father and Hero roles is much harder than the road for men to partake of feminine creativeness. Anyone that has looked at the life of Margaret Thatcher understands that. It took her ten years to find a constituency and get into Parliament; yet she never whined about the Tory patriarchy that would not have her for a candidate. And I think that we are seeing this difficulty right now with the whole cultural froo-fra from women in STEM to "hate speech" in social media and the feminization of education with the drugging of boys and the attack of the open-outcry culture of debate with the concerns about microaggressions and safe spaces.

The point is that if you want to be the guarantor of order, then you can't be demanding that someone else protects you from the brickbats of the public square. If you want to go down into the underworld where there be dragons you can't be worrying about the pinpricks of microaggressions. Ain't no safe spaces down in the underworld, old girl.

So that's why I think that, when the votes are finally counted, women will choose to return to the domestic sphere, the family and the neighborhood, which indeed badly needs their care and attention. Men may be able to soften themselves from warrior-warriors into road-warriors, but they ain't gonna be no good raising babies and interacting with the ladies of the neighborhood, not nohow.