Jordan Peterson: Why Do We Enjoy Watching Anti-Heroes?

so part of the reason that people go watch anti-heroes and villains is because there's a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth and if you grow teeth then you realize that you're somewhat dangerous and or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous and then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing and so that doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel what it means is that being able to be cruel and then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naive and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control and you know a lot of martial arts concentrate on exactly that as part of their philosophy of training it's like we're not training you to fight we're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights but if you happen to have to get in one and i guess the philosophy also is is that if you're competent at fighting that actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence and with any luck and this is certainly the case with bullies with any luck a reasonable show of confidence which is very much equivalent to a show of dominance is going to be enough to make the bully back off and so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace and that's partly why jung believed that it was necessary for people to integrate their shadow and he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt because the human shadow which is all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize reaches all the way to hell and what he meant by that was it's through an analysis of your own shadow that you can come to understand why other people are capable and you as well of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterized let's say the 20th century and without that understanding there's no possibility of bringing it under control when you study nazi germany for example or you study the soviet union particularly under stalin and you're asking yourself well what are these perpetrators like forget about the victims let's talk about the perpetrators the answer is they're just like you and if you don't know that that just means that you don't know anything about people including yourself and then it also means that you have to discover why they're just like you and believe me that's no picnic so that's enough to traumatize people and that's partly why they don't do it and it's also partly why the path to enlightenment and wisdom is seldom trod upon because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and doing what made you happy then everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom but it's not that at all it's the it's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face and everyone has that old there's this old story in king arthur where the knights go off to look for the holy grail which is either the cup that christ drank out of it the last supper or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he was crucified the stories vary but it's it's basically a holy object like the phoenix in some sense that's representation a representation of transformation so it's a it's an ideal and so king arthur's knights who sit at a round table because they're all roughly equal go off to find the most valuable thing and they and where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don't know where it is well each of the knights looks at the forest surrounding the castle and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and that's a good thing to understand because the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of personality which is exactly the same thing is precisely through the porthole portal that you do not want to climb through and the reason for that is actually quite technical this is a union presupposition too is that well there's a bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped and a lot of those things are because there's things you've avoided looking at because you don't want to look at them and there's parts of you you've avoided developing because it's hard for you to develop those parts and so it's it's by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don't want to look because that's where you've kept it and so and that's why there's you know an idiosyncratic element of it for everyone your particular place of enlightenment and terror is not going to be the same as yours except that they're both places of enlightenment and terror so they're equivalent at one level of analysis and and different at another so anyways back to fiction and and and and what it does it it distills truth and it it produces characters that are composites and the more they become composites the more they approximate a mythological character and so they become more and more universally true and more and more approximating religious deities but the problem with that is they become more and more distant from individual experience and so with literature there's this very tight line where you need to make the character more than merely human but not so much of a god that you know one of the things that happened to superman in the 1980s superman started out he's got a heavenly set of parents by the way and an earthly set of parents and he's an orphan like harry potter very common theme is that when superman first emerged he could only jump over buildings you know and maybe he could stop a locomotive but by the time the 1980s rolled around like he could juggle planets and you know swallow hydrogen bombs and you know he could do anything well people stop buying the superman comics because how interesting is that it's like something horrible happens and superman deals with it and and something else horrible happens and superman deals with it and it's like that's dull he turned into such an archetype he was basically the omniscient omnipresent um omnipotent god and that's no fun it's like god wins and then god wins again and then again god wins and you know so then they had to weaken him in different ways with kryptonite you know so green kryptonite kind of made him sick and red kryptonite i think kind of mutated him if i remember correctly and anyways they had to introduce flaws into his character so that there could be some damn plot and that's something to think about you know there's a deep existential lesson in that in that your being is limited and and flawed and fragile you're like the genie which is genius in the little tiny in the little tiny uh lamp you know this immense potential but constrained in this tiny little living space as robin williams said when he played the genie in aladdin but the fact that you have limitations means that the plot of your life is the overcoming of those limitations and that if you didn't have limitations well there wouldn't be a plot and maybe there would be no life and so that's part of the reason why perhaps you have to accept the fact that you're flawed and insufficient and and live with it and consider it a precondition for being it's at least a reasonable it's a reasonable idea so anyways one of the main characters is the country the known the explored territory we went over that a bit and it always has two elements i mean your country is your greatest friend and your worst enemy you know because it squashes you into conformity and demands that you act in a certain manner and reduces your individuality to that element that's tolerated by everyone else and it it constrains your potential in a single direction and so it's really tyrannical but at the same time it provides you with a place to be and all of the benefits that have accrued as a result of the actions of your ancestors and all the other people that you're associated with so there's the good tyrant or the bad tyrant and the good king and those are archetypal figures and that's because they're always true and they're always true simultaneously you know which is partly why i object to the notion of the patriarchy because it's a mythology it's the it's the what do you call that it's the apprehension of a mythological trope which is that of the evil tyrant without any appreciation for the fact that the archetype actually has two parts and the other part is the wise king and you know you can tell an evil tyrant story about culture no problem but it's one-sided and that's very dangerous because you don't want to forget all the good things that you have while you're criticizing all the ways that things are in error that's a lack of gratitude and it's a lack of wisdom and it's it's founded in resentment and it's it's very dangerous both personally and socially

Channel: PhilosophyInsights

Views: 19,425

Keywords: anti-hero, hero, heroes, watch, tv, movie, Jordan Peterson, Confidence, bully, integrate shadow, Carl Jung, enlightenment, wisdom, personality, holy, transformation, truth, fiction, myth, mythology, flawed, limitation, life, human, psychology

Id: ez2-W21EHKs

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020