The Sacrificial Hero Ancient and Modern

Recently I've been writing a long piece, that I submitted to the edgy conservative site American Mind, entitled "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than Leftism." Don't know if they'll publish it, but I've been thinking about what I wrote.

Because what I wrote about is trying to answer the question: what should educated scions of the educated Gentry aspire to? What should be the vision of the good life for an educated person?

My point is that the old culture of responsibility, of obeying the law, going to work, following the rules of God's divine law no longer resonates with the educated class.

The problem is that the highest and noblest vision of the good life for educated people, ever since Marx, has been to be an activist, nobly bending the arc of history towards justice for the oppressed and the marginalized. And I believe this is a monumental error.

Of course, I have developed a comprehensive and mandatory critique of the left, in my Great Reaction concept that experiences the left as a gigantic lurch back to the primitive. This has become understandable to me since I took a serious look at Jung through his adepts like Jordan B. Peterson. The point of Jung's "collective unconscious" and "archetypes" is to advance the notion that a lot of what we think and do and believe is imprinted in us through eons of evolution as "instincts" or "emotions," etc.

I use quotes because I am suggesting that we really don't have a clue what the so-called "collective unconscious" is. Nor yet an "archetype." Or "instincts" and "emotions." Obviously we have something that influences our actions, and that something is something other than our conscious mind. For instance, as I walked briskly up the hill on N 60th St this morning my breathing "automatically" became deeper and deeper as I struggled up the hill. I wasn't consciously doing that; but something was triggering it. Yes, Sherlock, just what was it?

So, when the educated elite decides that God is Dead, they embark upon a long and perilous journey, as Nietzsche argues, through decadence, nihilism, and the endless hell of the eternal recurrence. Until they find a new god to worship in the revaluation of all values. And that god is themselves.

But, obviously, there will be many mistakes and false turns and disasters on the Journey to a new faith and a new god. And I think that "activism" is one such false start.

My brilliant vision of the good life better than leftism is that the goal for an educated sprout should not be to become an activist, because activists are "Ego Heros." Activism is not really about saving the oppressed. It is about the educated activist feeling good about himself, massaging his Ego, making himself into a kind of Homeric god that orders the world around, not from Mr. Olympus but from Activist Central.

And I developed the notion that this notion of activism is an echo of the knight-errants of medieval romance. I first set this up a while back and now I am reading The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga which deals with the whole question of the cult of the knight and the knight's love for his chosen loved-one whose scarf he carried on his knightly quest. Bologna and balderdash: that is what Huizinga says. The real knights of the Middle Ages were thugs, and life back then was nasty, brutish and short. There was no time for courtly love and damsels in distress, just the brutal game of political and military power. The medieval romances were fantasy, escape-from-reality. Nothing wrong with that: we all like our fantasy literature for breakfast.

But I am saying that the Activism Culture is a fantasy culture, and it probably does more harm than good, because the way to get on in the modern world is to become a responsible citizen that takes responsibility for looking after him and his, and does not expect some medieval lord or activist to do the heavy lifting.

As an example, today Christopher DeGroot this morning writes appreciatively about James Q. Wilson's 1990s proposal that "we" should put single black mothers in group homes if they get welfare, to get them out of the poisonous culture of the ghetto, in at attempt to deal with the poison of children growing up in a world where they "never see a married man working for a living at a legitimate job and supporting his family."

Yes, but. The problem begins with the fact that today we have abandoned the old rule that a woman needs a husband if she is going to be a mother and expect to raise her child to adulthood. The whole paraphernalia of chastity, of not having sex with a man unless he commits to raising his child, of marriage, of middle-class morality, of bourgeois respectability, of stigmatizing a woman having a child outside marriage as in Les Miserables, and so on is that if a woman does not ensure that her child has a father, and if society -- i.e., the neighborhood women -- turns a blind eye towards single parenthood, then you got trouble with a capital T. And group homes ain't gonna solve it.

But it sure feels good being an activist protesting against middle-class morality.

So what I came up with is the notion of the Sacrificial Hero. Yes, I know! Talk about reinventing the wheel, especially since the whole of Christianity amounts to a cult of Jesus Christ, the Sacrificial Hero!

But that is the point. The great truths are timeless, but they need to be reimagined in every age and for every culture, and for every level in the culture.

The question for our time is how the Sacrificial Hero can be experienced in our time and especially by the Gentry class of educated people that very often live and work in cloistered monasteries, like government bureaucracies, university faculties, and corporate headquarters.

This kind of person thinks themself a couple of cuts above an ordinary middle-class Commoner. You can tell this because of the genius of the political idiot Hillary Clinton who coined the notion of the "basket of deplorables" to signify ordinary middle-class Americans that aren't quite into the creative culture of the educated Übermenschen.

The point is that it in my lordly and reductive Three Peoples philosophy, it is perfectly understandable that ordinary middle-class people are not really into creative treatments of race, sex, and gender. People like that just follow the rules, without questioning them. And guess what: it is probably a good thing, because if everyone was determined to "question everything" well... Actually, our liberal friends are clear about that. They get to question everything, but not ordinary "deplorables." No siree.

So, if you follow my notion, you judge people that aspire to creativehood by whether they aspire to be an Ego Hero or submit to being a Sacrificial Hero.

Of course, the ancient form of the Sacrificial Hero that the gods sacrificed as a result of their power games on Mt. Olympus. That is how Sacrificial Hero works for the People of the Subordinate Self. But with Axial Age religions, God provides the Sacrificial Hero in the person of the Son of God, and all humans have to do is venerate God's example and try to live like Jesus.

But for the People of the Creative Self it is each one of them that must try out for the Sacrificial Hero. And so, for those that choose it, the Sacrificial Hero's Journey is incredibly hard and challenging. No wonder most of them choose the easy way out, as Ego Heroes.

I think that the two most obvious Sacrificial Heroes out there right now are Donald Trump and LTG Michael Flynn. The Deep State is throwing everything it can against these two men, and they are baring their chests and taking the incoming rounds. And for what?

Yeah, I know. To a great extent they had no choice. Not for them the convenient leak in the media, the helpful unmasking, the special prosecutor to cover their tracks. They must travel their own via dolorosa and try to keep faith that it will all come right in the end.

And if it doesn't come right in the end, at least they died honorably.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous: Donald Trump the blowhard publicity hound becoming a Sacrificial Hero. Who woulda thunk it? But the truth is that Donald Trump has accepted his destiny with unimaginable courage and seems to get up every day determined to do the best he can.

And if Donald Trump wins the November election he is still not out of the woods, because he will be dealing with the aftermath of the shutdown with its gigantic increase in federal debt, and then the inflation that will follow the monetization of a lot of the debt, and the recession that will come as a result of having to fight inflation.

I doubt if Donald Trump will leave office as a glorious hero. I expect that he will leave as the scapegoat for all our troubles, a sacrifice to our national dignity.

Or some sort of Sacrificial Hero.