Couldn’t we compare Christian Yahweh to a dictator? We have absolutely no choice or eternal punishment. Your good works are only to avoid Hell. You either on the inside or outside with this religion and there’s no way around it. You love your brother not the unsaved and you protect the unsaved not the heathen or heretics. Many religions had a similar ‘fear-based scenario’ going on like the Greeks, The Nordics and the Egyptians and many world religions had to battle the idea of Hell and morals since the beginning of humanity.

I don’t see how Joseph Campbell was doing anything more than compiling mythology and how we developed. The human mind pretty much has been scientifically proven to conjure the same thoughts, beliefs, archetypes, and experiences because we are the same. As much as people hate facing this, there is no special person or group or any special intellectual or religious savior since we really all think the same and develop in patterns much like animals.

Cultures historically have had to deal with things yet they still embrace the positive and dark sides of their past and show strength and wisdom through suffering. Did America ever suffer ? I am American but we barely had to strengthen the way the cultures of old had to and yet they do not complain, they are humble and have calmed down to embrace their identity they have developed.

I am sure we are either Saved or or Unsaved from before we came here too. I guess we are either in Heaven or Hell, right now. I guess we are either chosen or useless to G_d. We are only pro-life or pro-choice too…

Don’t get me onto racism either….

Being a kid when the movies came out was one thing, but after studying religion i went back (for a grad seminar paper) and analyzed the films from a comparative religion standpoint…and before reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces (my least favorite Campbell book).

Regardless of Brinn, i’m still intrigued by your original question/statement because it’s an angle i’ve never thought about. I also never bothered with what Lucas was trying to say, personally. Maybe he was telling us that a benevolent dictator would be easier. If so, he’s missing a huge point. The easy way is never the hero’s path. Maybe he’s too caught up in Heroes rather than heroes. We all have the possibility of becoming heroes, but it requires us choosing the difficult way…to enter the forest where there is no path. Heroes (with the big H) are just there to show us that it can be done.

In other words, Lex would probably do well to take up meditation again. I would have said the same things in that comment, but i probably should have said them a little less vigorously. So part of me wants to apologize for being a jackass…

But part of me reads Nietzsche’s “ubermensch” differently than Brinn (or Hitler). It’s not about being superior, per se. It is the philosophical man who recognizes that life is suffering and says, “Yes!” to it anyway. It is the being willing to do it all over again, without changing anything…the heartbreak, the sorrow, the loss, the anger.

It’s based on the knowledge that is common to everywhere except the West: that good and evil are inseparable and that one cannot defeat the other. Hence the high Indian tradition of removing one’s self from the whole field of binary opposites, or the more Oriental position to see that state of affairs as perfection already and participate “as a ball bouncing in a mountain stream”. The ubermensch leans decidedly towards the latter, and it is just as difficult as removing one’s self completely…maybe more.

I don’t know which way is right, though i feel sure that the Western interpretation is wrong. But i’m not a guru by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t have the answers for myself much less others, but i do know where to find the answers. They’re internal. There won’t be any fixing of the world without individual, internal fixing. Myth and religion are tools, but they require the fixer (who’s the same as the fixee) to open the hood and get wrenching.

Still, my apologies for letting the anger get the better of me.

That said, the core argument here is based in some fact. The structure of the world’s ideology is more or less what he suggests, it seems. I’m not trying to discredit Lucas or Campbell (certainly not Campbell, whose writing literally changed my life in ways that I feel and benefit from every single day). I’ve just always found Lucas’s expression of the inspiration to have a couple of curious quirks, is all.

“Let’s see if I get this right. Fear makes you angry and anger makes you evil, right?” Wrong, jackass. The original quote, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” And using the actual quote makes his following diatribe pointless.

Then there’s his sentence about Obi Wan, Yoda and Vader appearing because they’re in Jedi heaven. Seriously, Brinn can’t conceptualize a world without “heaven”? He’s not thoughtful enough to imagine that maybe the dead communicate with the living because they left an imprint on the living (for good or ill) and that the whole manifestation is internal?

Or there’s this “Imagine Achilles refusing to accept his ordained destiny, taking up his sword and hunting down the Fates, demanding that they give him both a long life and a glorious one!” Yeah, that will help us all tremendously, believing that we’re entitled to everything because, well, just because. I’ll go one step further and say that the sort of belief Brinn advocates with statements like that is the reason we live in such a fucked up world.

He’s right that kings and tyrants and despots have always co-opted myth. In fact, Campbell discusses that at length in The Masks of God. It’s the moment when kings gave up actual regicide for pantomime versions, and they did it because it suited their political and ego desires. But the direction Brinn faces us in puts us in the same quandary. How many times have we heard our politicians tell us that we can have it all, without sacrificing anything to attain it?

He complains that Star Wars is too one-dimensional and then writes a one-dimensional analysis to prove it. Beautiful.

I’ve never read anything that Brinn’s written until that essay, but i have a feeling that he and i disagree fundamentally on the biggest issue. He believes that we’re special and that we can get better and all that other crap that history (right up to this minute) proves categorically false. There isn’t going to be any wonderful Star Trek world because at the end of the day we’re just fucking monkeys. We will continue to bash each other over the head with sticks, just like we have for at least the last 5 million years.

As to his distaste for Lucas, that’s fine. I hate George Lucas too. And while he may have sketched all of the Star Wars stories, he certainly did not have finished screenplays and scripts ready in the 70′s for Episodes I, II and III. The big difference between the first trilogy and the second is that for the first he hired writers and directors; for the second he mostly did it all himself…and that’s why they’re so bloody terrible.

And yes, there are non-Jedi characters. All of them are what we’d call “sidekicks,” for the most part.

I tracked down David Brin’s essay on the subject – have a look.

So yes, the Jedi are very elitist. But the entirety of the heroic side of the rebellion? Nope.

I wonder if there isn’t a motif that runs directly counter to the critique. The bad guys (the Empire) had real people who were undoubtedly fascist, but we mostly see the stormtroopers who were clones. The Rebellion is a pretty rag-tag bunch. Could we read that rebellion (which is good) is to not be like everyone else and a social commentary about cultural/intellectual homogenization?

Myths are tales of the extraordinary. It is our job to incorporate them into the ordinary.

(The pre-trilogy is what i’d imagine the original set would have looked like without Campbell. And it’s in those that we hear about countable blood thingies that make one a Jedi and other such bullshit.)

You’re either born special or you’re born a drone. Fascinating worldview, that.

Star Wars proved a lot of the Freud-Jung-Campbell hypothesis, imo. It was/is way bigger than a movie. Listen to people talk about it…even discounting the people who declare themselves Jedis on census surveys. I don’t think it could have done that if it didn’t speak to and awaken something deeper in people.

Campbell certainly noticed the heading that put us where we are today, and he was dismayed by it. I don’t know what to do about, especially without an engaging, deeply knowledgeable person like Campbell to bring myth to people’s attention.

It is still out there, but it’s hard to find. Sita Sings the Blues is a wonderful movie that i’m sure would have gotten Joe tremendously excited in his “That’s it!” way.

The whole question of what we need myths for continues to be a compelling one–especially as we move to a society that is more and more governed by the media. There was a time when everyone wanted to be a baseball player or something (guys, anyway)–that’s what a hero was (and often still is); now everyone wants to be on a reality show. Something has changed that would probably alarm Campbell. And Jung–he had many of the same interests and concerns. As did Freud, for that matter. I was at the Freud Museum a month ago and was again surprised by his fascination , indeed obsession, with Egyptian mythology. If anything, Campbell understates the importance of myth–it’s one thing to recognize the importance of myth to a satisfying and fulfilling life; it’s another to conduct the kind of cultural experiment we’re undergoing at the moment, when we let our myths be created and sustained by a media with a fifteen minute attention span.