The Hero (Myth): Against Jordan Peterson & ComicPop.

I do realize that this shirt has now
become a recognizable staple of my videos I've made so many videos wearing the same mustard yellow shirt this is not entirely because my wardrobe is small my wardrobe is small and humble as it may be what you will realize dear viewer if you start making youtube videos is that even fewer of your clothes look decent on camera so anything a lot of menswear has little lines cross-hatching little little fine patterns like blue and white stripes it doesn't work on camera or there's just something about the color so the which which doesn't work on camera just talking to my girlfriend off camera for a second where you have her with me live-streaming when I was live-streaming talking to the audience and someone came on angry the one of the main ways people would insult me was by claiming that I was rich and they'd be like oh that's a really nice $2,000 watch slamming me for being uh sorry my girlfriend seen on my watches I the most expensive watch it I own is the one you gave me but I don't I don't even think that's $200 yeah okay anyway whatever cheap she bought me a nice watch as a gift for anyway um and and you know I remember once also so but the thing the thing was funny was this happened often enough that regular members of my audience would respond to these people instead of me and they knew they've been watching my channel already for years I have over a thousand videos so you get a response like uh no he's had that watch for three years like know he had that watch already before he left Canada to live in [ __ ] like you know specific events or something and I remember I remember once maybe that's only happen once someone came in it was insulting me you like wow that's a really great suit jacket you're wearing like that's you know a suit jacket and I still have that it was the gray no it's actually older than that no one in it so it just needs to know it's an old gray gray suit jacket I wore it the first time I talked to your dad actually yes it's a european-style suit jacket and and a whole bunch of people know it's like no he's made like 300 videos like we were insulting with is a brand-new thousand so it's as few articles of clothing as I may own and as mutually similar as he may be a lot of my clothes are identical anyway it looks even smaller when you're when you're coming on camera to to do these things so if you if you start a YouTube channel I think people who work in news broadcasting or something they're also aware of this probably news broadcasters go no no I could only buy a solid color and I can only do this I can't I can't do anything with pinstripes or whatever you know and we can start shopping for for YouTube that could be a hit video series menswear vegan menswear clothes shopping for YouTube okay so I turn now to the the reason for making this video this is a video that I have actually wanted to make for years this deals with some themes that have him on my desk or on my docket for over three years that I really wanted to make a video discussing and then there's the cause of the moment to spark the political context for why it's being made now in the first few days of October of 2018 and that spark is as you will have gathered the current political philosophy of Jordan V Peterson let's start with the crumbs here people let's start with some tangible small fragments of the the story or the the big issue of want to tell in Southeast Asia I used to live in Laos Cambodia Thailand um and you'd keep crossing paths with Christian missionaries out there I was there doing humanitarian work and studying Buddhism and history and politics I was doing all kinds of things humanitarian research-based but a significant percentage of the other people who could speak English whether they were white or Asia where they are trying to convert people to Christianity or to Mormonism or some other Western religion and sometimes they'd admit it to you sometimes they would try to keep it concealed and sometimes it would be revealed in other peculiar ways so there was this one family living out there in a fairly remote part of Southeast Asia and I remember they had the books out they left the books out on a coffee table that they were using to try to I think convert people to Christianity or I don't know I persuade them or what have you and the one I picked up and looked at they were all kind of very simple story books because of the language barrier the one that I picked up was a retelling of the story of the prophet Elijah okay so babe you grew up Christian you you my girlfriend in church nod not deeply but you know you were you were dragged to church from time to time and your mother's still I think identify this as strongly religious can you can you from memory tell me the story of the prophet Elijah do don't do it just do you have any memory of this so it's an interesting one because it's really it's interesting because it's forgotten I think it's an example of how embarrassed many Christians are by the the brutal simplicity of their own religious tradition I mean I think I think you know cutting the foreskin off the penis circumcision I think many of these things are embarrassing and the in their brutality and their simplicity but you know how does Elijah prove that the God of Israel is the one true God he has a fire-making competition and the miracle is that the God the God of the Jews the god of the Christians Yahweh he makes a real big fireball it's miracle and the other the other tribe their God you can't do that it's so awful and it's such an awful story and I would feel if it were my religion if I believe this or I wanted to invite other people believe it if you're in a context in Southeast Asia where the religion you're competing with is reasonably philosophically sophisticated something like Buddhism Buddhism Confucianism Taoism all these traditions are out there whatever religion it is you're you're competing with to have to stand up and hold up this pamphlet or this book and read the story of Elisha the Prophet and say oh the reason why you should believe in our religion or support our tradition or or our cultural values is because of this story of a man who lit some fire some wood on fire magically and it made a really big fireball and some other God couldn't do that not that we can date not that we today can can produce this miracle not that we can stack up the wood and act out the same script no and you know um you know it's such a kind of sad and sobering contrast to the type of you know area di't debates about atheism versus religion that we see here on YouTube that we see dr. Jordan Peterson engaged in and so on this is the brutal Stone Age simplicity that all monotheism is built on this tribal notion that one person's God is better than another so I mean the other example I just throw out there I saw this textbook that was being promoted by Christians in Laos so Laos at that time was still a communist country it still is today so it's ruled and controlled by the by a communist party and the status of different Christian missionary groups can be suppressed or controlled to to varying extents it varies from from case to case but there was a Christian group there who set themselves up as an educational charity so they were claiming that they weren't Christian missionaries right that they were just there to teach science and math and English that they were benefiting the poor people and not converting to Christianity and they had a book that was um natural science I think was was the title something like that it's not just nature something like that the natural world maybe and you open to page one and the book read it's all in very simple English with illustrations what is the ocean God made the ocean next page like what what is the jungle what is the forest God created Joe the whole book wasn't just creationism it wasn't like a scientific area dite form of creationism it was just this kind of like unbelievably caveman simple argument that whatever question you wanted to ask about natural screams of the natural world the answer was allegedly that this is how God created the universe now again you know when you look at it when you pick up and look at a document like that as embarrassed as you may feel just as a human being like you just think wow this is so stupid I would feel so much more embarrassed if this were my religion or if this maybe if I were a Christian who donated money to this charity thinking it was really helping people then you look at these these these embarrassing and empathetic materials so the reality of missionary Christianity the reality of biblical Christianity and the reality of the fact that any religion in the 21st century is still dragging with it the ancient legacy of things like circumcision general mutilation slavery you know excuses for the brutality of war racism or what have you it varies from religion to religion a cosmology that makes no sense I mean I'm sorry I've read the Old Testament of study these texts the pillars of the earth holding up an adamantine crystal vault of the sky the idea of separating two oceans one ocean above the sky and below the actual cosmology the belief in the shape of the earth and what the earth is the promises about the end of the world all of this must inevitably shock modern sensibilities and it's shocking even to people in Cambodia who are not literate in any language it's shocking even in communist Laos Laos a country that's communist yes but a country that also has a long history of involvement with Buddhism other fairly sophisticated traditions in terms of literate literature written philosophy and and what have you how now do we cope with this sense of of shock and and discomfort jordan vbeaute ursin is now getting a lot of public interest but basically offering a sort of Jungian analysis and trying to rescue the value of the narrative the value of the the the feeble as something quite independent from the existence or non-existence of God Jordan B Peterson's position is in effect that mythology is part of the scaffolding of civilization and if we take away the scaffolding civilization will collapse so do all right normally guys I do these videos absolutely no handwritten notes because there was such a delay in making this video I should have a couple of things noted down um yeah so the way I wrote this earlier was Jordan Peterson is inviting us to imagine that the mythology that sustains a good society must be ineffably good so what is so great about a story about elijah the prophet lighting a fire and his fire he magically has this great big fire the proof sees what's great about that story what is great or good or moral or important or profound or significant or meaningful or even interesting about that story what is interesting about a story here here's one that Jordan Peterson likes to quote and allude to quite often what's interesting in me for what a story about a man being swallowed by a whale the story of Jonah and the Whale what's meaningful or interesting about Noah and his ark and this is leaving aside you know the more troubling questions of justifications for slavery you know obviously the unequal status of women whatever other topical issue you want to pick a bone within the Bible but just even accepting his kind of Jungian hero narrative approach why would those stories be meaningful now again I've already given you join me Peterson's answer although some are smellin Wars the idea is that these are myths that have sustained court I think you would say created and sustained a morally good Society and therefore in some ineffable sense the myths themselves are good they're morally good they create and sustain ethical values now one was there to respond to this one I have seen others making the internet and one I have not yet seen others make one response to this is to say well why why this tradition why this society what what gives Authority moral authority or just salience or importance or interest what gives priority and precedence to the Christian tradition in contrast to the Buddhist tradition and as I've indicated to you with my opening salvo my opening set of crumbs my opening set of examples this is a question that's unfolding in the real world right now will Buddhism still exist a hundred years from now the Communists tried very very hard to destroy Buddhism some of the Communists are still trying and Aries have tried very very hard to destroy Buddhism and I think it's fair to say they are still trying and they're gonna try all the harder Muslims the Islamic faith is trying very hard to destroy Buddhism now I am NOT a Buddhist I can tell you many things that are wrong and bad about Buddhism but I do not know anyone who sincerely thinks the world would be a better place if the nation of Thailand converted to Islam on mass if Thailand with all of its troubles cease to be a culturally Buddhist country and instead became a dominant predominantly Muslim country like Indonesia I don't know anyone who really thinks that would be a net benefit it's needless to say I don't hang out with Muslim fundamentalists obviously someone who sincerely believed that converting to Islam is the difference between going to hell and not going to hell they would believe that but of course at the same time even when you talk to Muslims if you ask them where they would rather go on vacation oh where they could have a better life and so on a lot of them are going to admit to you pretty readily that these these Buddhist countries is imperfect as they may be in many ways present a much more appealing society than the Muslim hunters they may have grown up in themselves or they may they may be returning to at the end of their their vacation so this is not a purely hypothetical question when we ask why why would it be this story about a whale from the Bible as opposed to a set of stories taken from from Buddhism now I notice it's because of who Jordan Pearson's audience is normally the example they give is Japan they say well if you think Canada is a good Society and the role of Christianity in Canadian society has been good well what about Japan and the role of Buddhism in creating a sustaining Japanese society in Japanese public values and Jordan B Peterson's answers to that question whether or not Japan is specified whenever I've seen him pressed on the issue of Buddhism he immediately responds by saying that he believes that the Buddha was some kind of magical figure equal to Jesus Christ he gives a completely mystical and baffling answer that he he grudges to Buddhism some kind of status equal to Oceania now that answer is bizarre in many ways because it actually undercuts the first premise that began this this discussion I presented the fact that Jordan Peterson is claiming a unique and indeed salvific significance for these stories that neither stands nor falls with the claim that the judeo-christian god is real it doesn't stand or fall with the claim that Jesus Christ was an historically real person it doesn't stand or fall with the claim that Jesus could work nearer coal's are come back from the dead and so to hear this answer indicate you know the person of Jesus and the person of the Buddha as vindicating these traditions the the actual compliments of these people rather than more of a kind of Jungian analysis some kind of you know I don't know some kind of statement about these these myths so these these bodies of literature or the social world they've played it is it is unsettling to hear him say this so that leg of the argument I have heard before I've heard people raising the question of why Christianity why not put ISM but if we're asking this question sincerely I think we also say why Christianity and why not Batman why would there be a special emphasis on a set of texts that most people only find interesting when they are forced to study them whether that's forced in a classroom or forced in a convent or forced in a system of education that that rewards them for their assiduity why is it that the stories the narratives the hero myths that people actually voluntarily line up and pay money to see and hear in our time are being ignored - instead valorize as having this unique moral purpose in creating sustaining our society - instead valorize the stories that are told if we're being honest in empty empty church pews empty empty cathedrals you know there isn't an outpouring of public interest for the story of Elijah the Prophet there isn't an outpouring of public interest in the story of Jonah and the Whale nor Noah and Noah's Ark and all of these stories have been adapted into children's books cartoons video games and movies and none of them reach the audience nor the the level of interest and engagement that are reached by spider-man Batman Superman and so on so this raises another you know I don't know at least interesting possibility that even if someone did sincerely embrace the ethic and political philosophy of Jordan Peterson this would not lead to a revival of Christianity but might lead to reinvigorated pop culture discourse because you'd look anew at you know these kinds of symbols and hero myths in our culture and say hey if we're really being honest about it these stories these stories that we tell to children these stories that children sit in their bed and read with a flashlight I mean you know the immediacy of the experience of reading a comic book like Batman or x-men these stories that for many of us was how we learned how to read in the first place and confronted us with the first images we'd ever seen of war and violence and questions of life and death and love and mourning that the hero myth as its encountered in comic books and and this type of this type of movie this type of movie that in some ways is overtly designed to be children's entertainment but of course in some ways always strangely adults-only whether it's in the darkness of the themes the you know the presence of murder and violence and what-have-you it's it's a very very strange tightrope that this particular form of heroic pop culture tries to walk and create a dramatic tension and presenting these people's heroes you know who indeed is the Hercules of our time and so in this video I'm mostly going to say Heracles not Hercules they're two two ways of pronouncing the same name in modern English who indeed is is Heracles in our culture is it in fact you know the Jesus Christ of of Jordan Peterson is it Jordan Peterson's ludicrous semiotic reinterpretation of the Bible whether that's Moses or Jesus or the you know Elijah or the man swallowed by a whale or can we say no you know the the Hercules figures of our time in their moral function as well as in this narrative function that Jordan Peterson talk as much very clearly that role has to be recognized in Batman Superman spider-man and I say this like it or not we may not like it maybe all of us would feel more comfortable if our children were growing up reading Hamlet reading Shakespeare reading something we recognized as high literature as being edifying or educational but the reality may be that the education they're getting is instead from from pop culture sources so more than three years ago I really wanted to make a video talking about the difference between the hero and the hero myth in popular culture in the 20th century 21st century etc although it may have changed then within this period of over a hundred years um you know in contrast to mythological heroes including you know Heracles Theseus Gilgamesh and and what-have-you and this is partly in response to another YouTube video a YouTube video I can't find online anymore from the channel comic pop comic pops a fairly popular channel and they had somebody in with a legitimate university degree discussing with a regular host basically the contrast between hero mythology in antiquity pre-modern hero myths and the hero myths today and I really felt that that video of that discussion which is quite lengthy I remembered being over an hour long I felt that they actually missed every every crucial important point that I felt separated the myths of antiquity of the pre-modern world from from mythology today obvious maybe that was just because they wanted to focus on the similarities um very few people today even when I spend time with people with PhDs very few people seem to know about the death of Herakles and I think it's significant to just point out that the heroes of ancient times here heroes of medieval times of all pre-modern times their stories didn't just have an origin they also had an ending they had a death and and from the audience's perspective right from the beginning you know the death is known the death is part of the package of the story of this hero it's part of the moral of the story you know if you like and the death of Heracles is tremendously dramatic and tremendously agonizing and it contains elements of betrayal and revenge and despite the fact that Heracles is physically invincible or seemingly so he's this tremendously strong powerful mountain of a man he's poisoned by his own wife and he's poisoned through a man or the poison enters through his skin so we call it contact poison and it is a long slow agonizing poison and the pain is so terrible that he is weeping and begging and whimpering to be put onto the funeral pyre while he's still alive while he's still talking to be put out of his misery he would prefer to be burned alive than to endure the pain of the poison any longer even though obviously that's maybe there's some possibility that he will recover from that poison now why does the wife of Heracles poison him I'm not telling the whole myth here obviously but I think this is enough the purpose of this video because he cheated on her because he found a new younger perhaps more beautiful woman whom he brought back after going on a typical heroic adventure to another Kingdom and performing various miraculous acts and again it is it it is a kind of prototypical hero myth he wins the the hand of the princess in marriage so the daughter the king in this exotic foreign kingdom becomes his bride and he brings her back to his hometown where he already has a wife who then out of jealousy poisons him and he dies if you guys know the myth you'll know I'm leaving out some of the details here of where she gets the poison and what her motives are and so on and so forth but hey now again it's interesting that in our times most people do not know this if you just raise the issue of the the death of Heracles they're often kind of [ __ ] when I don't know what he died yeah before the modern era of serialized commercialized fiction all heroes died their death was a part of their life and it's really significant to say that the construction of the modern hero and modern episodic fiction is completely fixated on an origin and on an impossible never-ending mission so Batman has an origin story and you know very often not always the issues or the story arcs can be read in any order because Batman's character is never gonna change his mission what he's never going to accomplish trying to accomplish is never going to change there are actually exceptions to this so Batman may not be the best example but Batman is never gonna die he's never gonna get older he's never gonna fall in love get married and have children no again I hesitated saying this because in reality what I've just said as a generalization it was true for many decades of the Batman franchise but finally the writers and the corporation they did run out of ideas and some of you may know Batman Nell has had a child and then the child was killed and brought back from the dead I mean it's you know it's ridiculous but ultimately Batman did did have a kid because the writer material a struggle that might be a better example has been the long editorial struggle with spider-man spider-man at Marvel Comics he kept getting older and he kept getting married and settling down and then one excuse or another would be come up with try to get spider-man to revert to his situation where he was kind of just a recent college graduate where he was single and young one way or another the editorial board at the corporation of Marvel Comics basically wanted to be going back to the same status quo spider-man like Batman is completely defined by an origin story but there's no destination there's no end point and again with someone like Heracles he's really the old standard Heracles you know basically becomes the king you know he isn't just here he doesn't just keep fighting crime forever on the streets he ascends to a higher level of power the modern heroes aren't don't ascend Heracles falls in love he gets married he gets women pregnant he has children and the children grow up again all of this is actually part and parcel of the the death of Heracles all these things you know come up and this can never happen with the modern hero right um sex and death and murder I mean people really being killed these are all kind of crucial elements of any real hero mythology pre-modern mythology and they were exactly what's deleted or obfuscated in constructing commercialized episodic hero myths okay now this does not exhaust the observations I could offer you here as I already mentioned I mean I'm also familiar with with Buddhist literature and Buddhist history you could get into other contrasts in other cultures and you could just say more about the peculiar educational value or lack thereof of having generations raised with really Batman Superman and spider-man being the major mythological heroes in their lives which I think even if you grew up Christian for most Christians that is what they are I recently taught a series of courses in China my students were Chinese and I had a unit in the course so for several different classes where I challenge them to answer this question is this a good story for adults to be teaching children and each student was assigned a different story so one would be given Batman one spider-man Iron Man and I gave them in both Chinese in English some information about these comic book characters not all of them were superheroes one student was given the spongebob spongebob squarepants that cartoon character but I mean it boiled down to a two-point question one look in the United States of America almost all children are raised being taught this story again and again being shown it in different forms again and again cartoons movies comic books video games this is a powerful message encoded into them again again it must mean something so first question is why why do parents teach this to their children in the Western world in the United States of America in particular why and then the second question is do you think that schools here in China should teach this story you know why or why not should people here in China be teaching their children this story and then the third question is in effect so draw some conclusions here is this a good story is this a good story to be told what are we teaching our children now you guys will have already guessed I think that any sincere reflection and examination of the significance of the Bible stories is going to come to very very negative conclusions on those stories about why why do we teach these to our children should we be teaching their children is it a good thing to teach a child to blindly believe in whichever God can make a bigger fireball to believe in miracles and magic that you can compare to religions at a magic ceremony of trying to make a big fireball I don't think any Christian even a devout Christian doesn't want their child's faith to be based on on this kind frankly this kind of witchcraft what Christians for vilas witchcraft but it's within the Bible of course there's material on human sacrifice in the Old Testament slavery selling your own children into slavery all kinds of terrible stuff but leaving that aside we know that people are gonna cherry-pick and focus on a few stories I don't think that the story of Moses or Noah and the Ark or you know Jonah and the Whale these stories if we're really looking at them and even this detached way what what is the lesson that children are supposed to to draw from this and I think you know it's no less chilling and it's it's even more important to look it this way honestly at again frankly whether it's Batman spider-man or Santa Claus you know the story of the so-called secular Christmas you know what is it that we're teaching children here and why and what is the ideological function of this mythology in modern society there is a sense in which all of us agree with Jordan Peterson even if we don't want to even we hate to there is a sense in which stories and narratives form the scaffolding of our culture there's a sense in which they they inculcate and sustain and maintain and hold up cultural values or at least a common vocabulary of cultural values that you know all of us to some extent rely upon just in communicating just in communicating our feelings and so on you know they provide a kind of palette of colors that we may take to to paint their own picture express their own meanings and our own concerns but what's so peculiar to me is that Jordan Pearson celebrates this he celebrates this as something positive and you know I don't see how any thinking human being can look at this as anything other than than tragic what we're looking at in the Bible are the excuses that people told themselves for why they'd cut off part of their penis circumcision they had this totally irrational custom in their culture and they made up excuses for it and those excuses turned into stories myths and fables um you know when you look in the Bible at the material there that's on slavery you look in the material the the Bible they're about so many it's a picture of the Bible but so many things these are excuses that I mean it's it's not enough to say that the modern world can and should live without such excuses I think the reality is that we already are living without those excuses so why would we now - eyes them and valorize them as having some some ineffable moral value in just being repeated in repeating these old and outmoded excuses when the things being excused are no longer even ours no longer even meaningful or salient for for us to be making those excuses for them now you know why was the Batman story first told what were we making excuses for the ideological function of those stories changed a lot from decade to decade in the history of these characters at one time Batman was an idle millionaire who helped the poor because there was a cultural notion at that time that that was what Idol millionaires did he was an idle millionaire playboy who went to social functions and solved mysteries is an amateur detective and who sometimes dressed up in a cape to fight supernatural villains I mean you know it's it's somewhat silly it is what it is but you can actually kind of construct what were the cultural concerns of the time just the very first year of the Batman comic and then we can talk about and chart how this changed how the themes really change today I mean everyone knows the the major theme in Batman is that this is somebody trying to take revenge trying to take revenge for the fact that his parents were were killed and it's a very very strange thing for a parent to put that story into the hand of a child and to say you know in this world the police are corrupt and there is no justice and you know the people you love can be killed in the blink of an eye that crime is everywhere and so on but that you know the way to solve that is with your fists is by by punching people by fighting it not metaphorically and then that that fight never ends that you never settle down you never fall in love and never have kids and never like Hercules never become the the king as opposed to the the wandering hero or wandering warrior there's no progression there's no crescendo there's no end there's just this grief and need for revenge so on spider-man it's actually a pretty fundamentally similar sense of trauma and reflection no point repeating it but it's not his parents who are killed it's another relative who's killed and he's left with the sense of remorse and regret and resentment and his fuels him to go on his mission pursuing quote-unquote justice but again justice in a sense that's very hard to construe you know even in the eyes of a child okay how is this how is this period going to be remembered when we look back on Jordan Peterson and what he managed to do in in politics in this era I've got to tell you my suspicion is that ten years from now Jordan Peterson will not really be remembered at all I don't I don't mean he'll completely disappear but the one sense in which Jordan Pearson is is really making himself radicular is that I don't think he sets goals I don't think he sets aspirations for what he's trying to accomplish not even to the same you know limited extent that figures like Bernie Sanders do Bernie Sanders in some way a typical leftist Bernie Sanders won't be happy until there's free tuition for poor people that poor people can go to college and get a college education for free let's just leave it at that of course he has other goals to deal with health care for the poor what have you it's very likely Bernie Sanders will fail I think I mean he's very old man it's quite possible Bernie Sanders will not be alive ten years from now just just due to old age but it's it's very clear how Bernie Sanders will be remembered even if all of those attempts end in failure with Jordan Peterson ten years from now and even today all that people will be left with is a sense of confusion of what was it that he was trying to accomplish and then it will be ineffable for anyone to say to what extent he succeeded and to what extent he failed it's very clear that he is telling his audience they can be better people and they can raise better children by reviving their interest in the church and the Bible and my position is at the opposite extreme I think that you can be a better person and you can raise better put children by replacing the Bible by replacing Christmas with the celebration of something more meaningful but the reason why I've spoken at such length in this video is that as soon as we start thinking about these things in a level-headed open-minded and critical way I think it becomes very clear that it's not just the Christian Bible we after a place there's a tremendous creative burden on us in the 21st century to replace Batman and spider-man and a whole edifice of pop culture that you know unlike the Christian Bible isn't linked to a history of genocide isn't linked to circumcision or slavery but that fundamentally doesn't serve our interest as parents and doesn't inform the next generation about the values of that edifice of civilization that scaffolding holding up society but if you want to say that doesn't even serve that productive function in the same way that the tragic death of heracles once did