Every human needs a way to cope with the experience of suffering, in other words a religion.
Now, I will tell you a mystery. Each of the three layers of people that we have described, with their three layers of culture, has a different religion. Of course they do. Each lives in a different world, and and each different world is experienced a different meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." The Subordinates or Clients tend to have a pre-Axial Age religion, with vengeful gods. The Responsibles or Commoners believe in a God that made the world, enacted his divine law and directed them to get on with it. There is a tendency among these folk to get beyond vengeance, as George Eliot taught her venerable Commoner Adam Bede to do with the help of that veritable saint, Dinah Morris.
Two Kinds of Hero’s Journeys
But what about the religion of the Creatives, the educated Gentry? That, of course, is the question before us.
The Creative class, the Gentry, the Somebodies, just know that they must have some vitally important role to play upon the stage of society. God, or rather Gaia, has decreed it. But what? This is where the brilliance of rich-kid Karl Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier, comes in. If you are a rich kid looking around for something meaningful to do why not gussie up a quick-and-dirty meaning of life, the universe and everything that explains the world as a sub-lunar battle between Us and Them: the capitalists vs. the workers, and then organize the workers and lead them to justice against the mean-spirited bourgeoisie? Or the minorities against the racists? Or the women against the patriarchy? Or the gays against the haters? Was Marx a genius, or what?
And what does it mean to make your religion about other peoples' suffering? Did Marx not feel suffering himself? Or was he sublimating his own sufferings onto others?
I find myself asking a question: Is this a rising to peaks beyond the “heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx,” or is it a lurch back to the primitive, to re-imagine that all suffering arises from a social or economic fault or from a “hater?” And that vengeance is the answer?
For in the primitive world-view Mircea Eliade teaches us that there “is always a fault at the bottom of it.” Really, if Marx hadn’t come up with this cunning plan, what else could the scions of the Gentry do with their primitive hate, poor things?
These Creatives sound to me like der Übermensch on stilts. But how can that be? Was not Nietzsche “the Nazis’ favorite intellectual?” How come our lefty friends are singing his song?
They are singing his song because the Nietzschean hero is an egoistic hero. That’s what our modern artists and writers and activistes and revolutionaries are all about: Ego Heroism. You solve the problems of the world in your creative manifesto or work of art or activist agenda and then demand the right to implement it, as activiste, or revolutionary, or expert, or Minister of the Department of Silly Walks, because the arc of history. And never mind the butcher's bill.
But whatabout yourself? Shouldn't the activiste heal himself before he heals the world? But that raises an agonizing problem: if the Egoistic Hero is not the answer, then what is?
The answer is as old as the hills and as new as yesterday: the Sacrificial Hero. We all know something about him because we all know about the iconic Sacrificial Hero, Jesus Christ, who died on the Roman cross, not to mention Moses who died before the Israelites reached the Promised Land. But the Sacrificial Hero is an archetype that shows up everywhere, and has been an especial interest of the followers of Carl Jung, including Joseph Campbell and recently Jordan B. Peterson. The whole idea of the Jungian archetype is that each archetype is encoded in our DNA, in our unconscious minds -- and has been, for aeons.
Earth to lefties: your activist, your Gramscian marcher through the institutions, your politician is not the Hero that will save the world. He is the monster, the dragon in the underworld, that sacrifices others to his fantastic dream of personal immortality.
The Hero’s Journey has been criticized: by academics that regard it as too general or too vague, by feminists that regard it as too masculine and privileged. But against them is George Lucas’s Star Wars phenomenon that was openly based on the Hero myth and struck a mystic chord that is still echoing. So the Hero myth clearly resonates with young men; Jungians might say that Star Wars activates certain archetypes in the male collective unconscious.
Perhaps the best place to start is to check off what the Hero is not. He is not the fanciful knight of the medieval romance, pace Wagner, the feudal princely raider dressed up as the servant of Christ. He is not the lefty activiste living the fantasy of revolution. He is not the leader of the nation, feted by battalions of flatterers or serviced by a 2,000 woman “Pleasure Squad.” He is not the ethnic leader warring against hate with an agenda of hate. He is not the peacocking journalist truckling to the powerful while imagining himself speaking truth to power.
And here is something else he, or she, is not, that I blogged about recently. He is not the expert that decides that a teenager is “psychosomatic” and should be taken away from her parents and confined in a hospital’s psychiatric unit. Nor is she the Harvard academic who believes that she ought to decide how other peoples’ children should be educated. This sort of thing is a plunge back into the past. This is what the Olympian gods were up to in The Iliad, deciding who would win and lose in each battle on the plains of Troy -- as the mood took them -- because they were gods. Surely, Mao, we are better than that.
The Hero is instead the mediator between Order and Chaos, and will probably die, a Sacrificial Hero, on that fateful border. But that is where the creative life must be lived, for life cannot long thrive in the arid safety and often the cruel hierarchy of Order and the experts. And life is unendurable as unmitigated Chaos.
So the Hero, privileged and masculine and Sacrificial, must descend from the safety of privilege and learn to navigate the dark realms of Chaos in a generalized and vaguely constructed archetypical journey into the underworld of the unconscious. For here be dragons.
But, what does the Hero's Journey mean, exactly?
Next: The Hero's Journey in Each of Us
Modern educated people are called on a creative life journey
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