Archetypal Thinking

Hello, Internet. My name is John Wessel.

Have you ever had an argument where you just fight and finally, after being so exhausted - or really, it's the next day - and you talk about it more calmly and you find out that you and your partner don't actually disagree? It was just that you were using a word that your partner thought you meant something different by and when your partner was using that word, you thought they meant a different idea than they really did? So, all you really had was a confusion in language and not a confusion in ideas or beliefs? It's funny after the fact but that fight really isn't very fun at all, is it?

So, I find myself, that - I wish that I could just sometimes jump into someone else's head, just go in there for an hour or a day and just hang out and just hang out in someone else's brain, seeing the world through their eyes. Walking a mile in their shoes is how people usually say it. I would like to feel how they feel.

Maybe, that's too much to ask. It's too Star Trek, right? Like a Vulcan mind meld? So maybe, I'll ask for something a little smaller. What if we could just have thought bubbles above our heads, like in the comic strips and so when people were thinking, you could see the picture of what they were thinking about. I would love that whenever I used a charged word like abortion or capitalism or poverty that I could have a thought bubble so everyone could see exactly what I was thinking and at the same time they would have a picture above their head so I could see what they're thinking about. When I use a word like capitalism, the image that I get above my head looks like SimCity. It looks like a million people all working together voluntarily to just live their lives. This is very different than someone who gets a picture of a Monopoly Man or a corrupt banker who is just sitting on this pile of money, like Scrooge, and has an attitude like, "I've got mine so screw you." It might be pretty clear that when it comes to the ideas of what we want, we don't actually disagree about very much. The only argument would be what words do we use to refer to which ideas and that's easy. I don't care. Other people can pick the words that they think sound the best. I'll learn Greek; I'll learn a new language if I have to.

I think intellectuals have lost much of the art of talking and arguing with each other. I think it dates 300 and some odd years to a period that historians call the enlightenment. The enlightenment was the time that empiricism and rationality and science were really discovered and especially formalized. The benefits of scientific thought are of course all around us. Just the amount of technology required to listen to this podcast is staggering. So, when it comes to science, I'm a huge fan. That was really what lifted humanity out of the muck that we had lived in for really all of our history. Math and science and statistics and empiricism are the best way to listen and, in a way, talk to nature. The problem I think is that we have developed an attitude that that's the way we should talk to each other. But, people really don't think in these ways. People think in terms of stories or archetypes or memes or parables, if you're reading The Bible. Jesus didn't come and say, "I have the latest statistics on the way you should behave. I've been to God and He has given me the study which I think you should all peruse and I feel at the end of it you will come to a new appreciation that 93% of the time, getting into heaven is as simple as following this procedure." No, of course not. Jesus didn't speak that way. What Jesus did is he told stories.

The advantage of telling a story rather than delivering a rational argument with statistics and such is that a story is illustrative. Telling a story is like putting a thought bubble above your head so everyone can see exactly what you're thinking. One of my favorite parables is Matthew 9:16 and 9:17 where Jesus says:

No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse.

Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins and both are preserved.

Now, if you literally interpret The Bible and you believe that Jesus was sent down to earth to give us sewing advice and wine-making advice then, I'm sorry but the last couple of brain cells in your head are in need of a therapy beyond what I can give you. No, to anyone who is just a little bit alert, will realize that Jesus isn't just giving mundane advice. He is making an argument.

Now, just to note because some of these analogies may have grown stale, what he's talking about with the unshrunk cloth is that a new piece of cloth which has not shrunk will shrink once it does get wet. So, if you take new unshrunk cloth and put it as a patch on an old garment, well as soon as it gets wet it's going to shrink and create new rips in the garment. So, that would not be a good idea. You don't want to put new with the old. You want to put old with the old.

The matter with the wineskins is a similar idea. When wine ferments, it creates gas and that gas expands and stretches the wineskin. If you put new or fresh wine that hasn't finished fermenting into an old wineskin, it's going to generate gas but that old wineskin can't stretch anymore and the wineskin will burst.

This story is Jesus' very clever way of expressing his opinion that you should not waste your time trying to teach new ideas to old people who are set in their ways. If you try to take some new paradigm and force that into someone's head who's just really set in their ways it's not going to do any good. In fact, it's going to be counterproductive. You're going to rip what's already there. You're going to burst what's already there. So, you should focus your teaching of new ideas on the young.

The same idea is expressed through a very different story in the movie The Matrix. In case you don't instantly remember, that was the action movie in the not-too-distant future where machines had taken over the world and imprisoned mankind in a virtual reality. Morpheus is explaining to Neo what the Matrix is. He says:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. The system is our enemy. But, when you're inside, you look around. What do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters - the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But, until we do, these people are still a part of the system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Totally different story, same exact idea: the idea that you should not focus your attention on putting new ideas into old minds. The old minds are actually going to protect themselves against new ideas and fight against you.

Expressing an idea in terms of a narrative with archetypes may seem long-winded and yet I don't think it is because the image of the idea you are trying to express comes across so clearly.

To be precise, let's setup a couple of definitions. A system of thought is known as a paradigm. The elements of a paradigm are known as archetypes. An archetype is a perfect example of an idea. An archetype is such a perfect example that you don't have to refer to the idea itself. Instead, you can refer to the archetype which perfectly exemplifies that idea.

The advantage is that you can think by telling a story in your mind which may be a lot more intuitive than telling a rational argument. And, if the person you are talking to also knows the story then they'll understand what you're trying to talk about very clearly. For example, instead of trying to explain all the facets of the corrupting influence of power, you might refer to Bilbo Baggins or Frodo Baggins carrying Sauron's ring in The Lord of the Rings. Instantly, everyone's going to be on pretty much the same page.

Archetypes can come from a shared religion. The Greek mythology is very rich with characters like Zeus and Poseidon, Aphrodite, Cronus, Gaea, Uranus, Athena, Odysseus, of course. Mentioning any of these characters to people familiar with Greek mythology is going to communicate what would take a long time to do so through rational argument.

In Christian mythology we have ideas like the trinity with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; Mary, mother of Jesus; heaven or hell; the devil; Gabriel; the apostles. These are all characters that can be used as archetypes.

In modern entertainment, we have fictional characters like House M.D. or Forest Gump or Frodo Baggins again, with Gandalf. There are people from real life like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Oprah. When you use these archetypes to communicate, both inside your own mind and with others, it sets up a very vivid picture. This is actually the way we think in our minds. We tell stories and we see our ideas. The use of statistics and so on can be learned but it's never going to be exactly as intuitive.

The danger of archetypal thinking is that it's not rigorous. It's easy to argue by analogy and have it seem like a point is very true and then have someone set up an opposite analogy and all of a sudden the argument seems very false. It's hard to verify which analogy is really the correct one. For example, you might think of your country as the fatherland where the government is the father and the citizenry are the children and it is the job of the father to discipline the children. Or, you might think of your country as a motherland where the government is the mother and its job is to nurture the children who are the citizens. Still others might try to synthesize these ideas and say that the government is the parents whose job is both to discipline and provide for the children. These are all very compelling stories and, as I'll go over in future podcasts, all very wrong. So, if you think archetypally you have to be very, very careful how you pick your archetypes. They can be a powerful tool for communicating inside your own mind and with others who are familiar with those archetypes but you just have to be so rigorous before you trust them.

In the next few podcasts, maybe quite a few, I'm going to be taking one archetype at a time and deconstructing it: seeing what's good, seeing what needs to be tightened up and seeing which archetypes are really false, the products of propagandists and need to be thrown away completely. I hope that you'll join me. Thank you for listening.