00:00You might say that someone who is incapable of cruelty
00:03is a higher moral being than someone who is capable of cruelty,
00:07and I would say, and this follows Jung as well,
00:09that that's incorrect, and it's dangerously incorrect,
00:12because if you are not capable of cruelty,
00:15you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is.
00:19And so part of the reason that people go watch antiheroes and villains
00:24is because there's a part of them crying out
00:27for the incorporation of the monster within them,
00:30which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect,
00:33because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth.
00:37And if you grow teeth, then you realize that you're somewhat dangerous,
00:41or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous,
00:43and then you might be more willing to demand
00:46that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing.
00:50And so that doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel.
00:54What it means is that being able to be cruel
00:57and then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel.
01:02Because in the first case, you're nothing but weak and naive,
01:05and in the second case, you're dangerous,
01:07but you have it under control.
01:10And, you know, a lot of martial arts concentrate on exactly that
01:13as part of their philosophy of training.
01:15It's like, we're not training you to fight.
01:18We're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights.
01:23But if you happen to have to get in one,
01:26and I guess the philosophy also is,
01:28is that if you're competent at fighting,
01:31that actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight,
01:36because when someone pushes you,
01:37you'll be able to respond with confidence,
01:40and with any luck, and this is certainly the case with bullies,
01:42with any luck, a reasonable show of confidence,
01:45which is very much equivalent to a show of dominance,
01:48is going to be enough to make the bully back off.
01:50And so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness
01:54is actually the best guarantee of peace.
01:57And that's partly why Jung believed that it was necessary
02:00for people to integrate their shadow.
02:02And he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt,
02:05because the human shadow,
02:07which is all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize,
02:10reaches all the way to hell.
02:12And what he meant by that was,
02:14it's through an analysis of your own shadow
02:16that you can come to understand
02:18why other people are capable, and you as well,
02:21of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterized,
02:24let's say, the 20th century.
02:25And without that understanding,
02:27there's no possibility of bringing it under control.
02:30And it's also partly why the path to enlightenment and wisdom
02:33is seldom trod upon,
02:36because if it was all a matter of following your bliss
02:39and doing what made you happy,
02:40then everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom.
02:43But it's not that at all.
02:44It's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face.
02:49And everyone has that old...
02:50There's this old story in King Arthur
02:52where the knights go off to look for the Holy Grail,
02:55which is either the cup that Christ drank out of at the Last Supper,
03:00or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side
03:03was poured when he was crucified.
03:05The stories vary.
03:06But it's basically a holy object,
03:08like the phoenix in some sense,
03:10that's a representation of transformation.
03:14So it's an ideal.
03:16And so King Arthur's knights,
03:17who sit at a round table,
03:19because they're all roughly equal,
03:20go off to find the most valuable thing.
03:23And where do you look for the most valuable thing
03:26when you don't know where it is?
03:28Well, each of the knights looks at the forest surrounding the castle
03:32and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him.
03:37And that's a good thing to understand,
03:38because the gateway to wisdom
03:40and the gateway to the development of personality,
03:42which is exactly the same thing,
03:44is precisely through the portal
03:46that you do not want to climb through.
03:49And the reason for that is actually quite technical.
03:51This is a Jungian presupposition too,
03:53is that, well, there's a bunch of things about you
03:56that are underdeveloped,
03:57and a lot of those things are
03:58because there's things you've avoided looking at
04:00because you don't want to look at them,
04:02and there's parts of you you've avoided developing
04:04because it's hard for you to develop those parts.
04:07And so it's by virtual necessity
04:09that what you need is where you don't want to look
04:12because that's where you've kept it.
04:14And so, and that's why there's, you know,
04:17an idiosyncratic element of it for everyone.
04:19Your particular place of enlightenment and terror
04:22is not going to be the same as yours,
04:24except that they're both places of enlightenment and terror.
04:27So they're equivalent at one level of analysis
04:30and different at another.
04:32So anyways, back to fiction and what it does.
04:36It distills truth,
04:38and it produces characters that are composites.
04:42And the more they become composites,
04:44the more they approximate a mythological character.
04:47And so they become more and more universally true
04:51and more and more approximating religious deities.
04:55But the problem with that is they become more and more distant
04:57from individual experience.
04:59And so with literature, there's this very tight line
05:04where you need to make the character more than merely human,
05:09but not so much of a god that, you know,
05:12one of the things that happened to Superman in the 1980s,
05:15Superman started out, he's got a heavenly set of parents,
05:18by the way, and an earthly set of parents.
05:19And he's an orphan like Harry Potter.
05:21Another very common theme is that when Superman first emerged,
05:25he could only jump over buildings, you know,
05:27and maybe he could stop a locomotive.
05:29But by the time the 1980s rolled around,
05:31like he could juggle planets and, you know,
05:33swallow hydrogen bombs and, you know, he could do anything.
05:36Well, people stopped buying the Superman comics
05:39because how interesting is that?
05:41It's like something horrible happens and Superman deals with it.
05:44And something else horrible happens and Superman deals with it.
05:48And it's like, that's dull.
05:51He turned into such an archetype.
05:52He was basically the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God.
05:57And that's no fun.
05:59It's like God wins and then God wins again.
06:01And then again, God wins.
06:03And, you know, so then they had to weaken him
06:05in different ways with kryptonite, you know,
06:07so green kryptonite kind of made him sick
06:09and red kryptonite, I think, kind of mutated him,
06:12if I remember correctly.
06:13And anyways, they had to introduce flaws into his character
06:16so that there could be some damn plot.
06:18And that's something to think about, you know.
06:20There's a deep existential lesson in that,
06:23in that your being is limited and flawed and fragile.
06:28You're like the genie,
06:30which is genius in the little tiny lamp, you know,
06:35this immense potential,
06:36but constrained in this tiny little living space,
06:39as Robin Williams said when he played the genie in Aladdin.
06:42But the fact that you have limitations
06:45means that the plot of your life
06:47is the overcoming of those limitations.
06:49And that if you didn't have limitations,
06:51well, there wouldn't be a plot
06:53and maybe there would be no life.
06:55And so that's part of the reason
06:56why perhaps you have to accept the fact
06:58that you're flawed and insufficient
07:00and live with it
07:02and consider it a precondition for being.
07:04It's at least a reasonable,
07:08it's a reasonable idea.
07:09So anyways, it always has two elements.
07:12I mean, there's the good tyrant
07:14or the bad tyrant and the good king
07:16and those are archetypal figures
07:19and that's because they're always true
07:20and they're always true simultaneously,
07:23you know, which is partly why I object
07:24to the notion of the patriarchy
07:26because it's the apprehension of a mythological trope,
07:30which is that of the evil tyrant,
07:31without any appreciation for the fact
07:33that the archetype actually has two parts
07:36and the other part is the wise king.
07:37And, you know, you can tell an evil tyrant story
07:40about culture, no problem,
07:41but it's one-sided and that's very dangerous
07:45because you don't want to forget
07:47all the good things that you have
07:50while you're criticizing all the ways
07:51that things are in error.
07:53That's a lack of gratitude
07:54and it's a lack of wisdom
07:55and it's founded in resentment
07:58and it's very dangerous.
08:01both personally and socially.
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