Do Heroes get to eat cake on their Journey?
My way of thinking has changed a lot since I started writing personal journals during that very special time of mine known as late 2020.
I started writing due to multiple reasons, one of them being I couldn’t handle the static in my head, and so I started writing things down, as rambunctious and haphazard my words were at the time. I didn’t even try to make it coherent, it was essentially me venting in front of my computer.
The other reason is that I was going through my Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell phase, thanks to clips of Jordan B. Peterson’s lectures. I found Jung’s conception of God to be compelling, and the same for Campbell’s idea of the Hero’s Journey, they were certainly ideas that fit well into the way the world was manifesting itself to me.
It was certainly a time full of hope, optimism, and self-discovery, and me freshly having watched Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, a story not very far removed from Jung’s conception of God, it felt like I was slowly but perfectly being given the correct way of seeing the world that a person should have, one of hope, the inner God within Man.
To tell the story of how my way of thinking changed from 2020 to now would not only create a 20 minute read, but also an incoherent one for I am currently lacking in sleep in the moment I am writing this, and so I’ll be skipping to the thoughts present me is having.
The day is Saturday, 7th of May, 2022, I had just watched the newest episode of Kaguya-Sama, a great episode storyboarded by Toshinori Watanabe. After I had watched the episode and subsequently hyped over it and its new ending animation directed by Vercreek with my Discord friends about it, I then went to Twitter to check out the reception, it was equally hype over there. Then I made the following short 3 tweet thread expressing my frustration over how I stopped having the enthusiasm I once had in making threads about greatly directed anime episodes:
The reason I used the sentence “set my whateverthefuck aside” is because, I do not know what it is that made me lose the motivation to create informative threads. It’s certainly not pride, if it was pride I’d be informing people left and right condescendingly, nor was it lack thereof, because I constantly make condescendingly vague messages that only those within the sakuga niche would understand.
As I am writing this I still do not know exactly what word could be attributed to the thing that caused my disappearance in motivation, but I do know what changed inside me during the time I last wrote a thread with the purpose of engaging outsiders — which happened to be on Ousama Ranking #09, the first episode directed and boarded by Arifumi Imai — and the me a few hours ago with almost no motivation let alone interest in creating threads; it was the Campbellian-Jungian sense of heroism, I seemed to have lost it.
After I finished the thread about the new Kaguya-Sama episode, I then saw that Sarah Haider had written a new Substack article titled “On Effective Activism and Intellectual Honesty”
I could not read the entire article due to a paywall, but the free to read sections, especially the last three paragraphs, were enough for me to come to a certain realization.
The thinker game is about truth. The goal is to uncover reality as it is — to achieve a true map of the real world (and hopefully, to be the first to do it). Reflecting reality accurately requires honesty — with oneself and with others — and a strict adherence to principled conduct. Although all fields have some degree of competition, knowledge-building is inherently not a zero-sum game. Truth builds upon itself.
The activist, meanwhile, lives in a world of scarcity — limited time, limited funds, limited public attention. To her, not winning is the same as losing: every minute in which her goals are not achieved is a minute in which a harm has been achieved. There is a cost to delay.
Meanwhile, from the thinker’s perspective, the only activism that doesn’t look like dishonorable demagoguery is, in practice, ineffective activism.
Jordan B. Peterson has actually mentioned this point multiple times quite some time ago. Activism stokes the dramatic in us, it compels us to slay the dragon that we see rampant and to set order in the world (the order we think to be the correct type at least), yet he denounces activism, sees a lot of it as vapid, and merely a quick way to get yourself an unearned moral superiority.
That passage truly resonated with me. I never liked activism myself (other than its chaos and rowdiness that I do enjoy observing) and did instinctually associate myself with the thinker and truth-seeker type that Sarah mentioned in her article as I read it. She herself thinks she is of the same type, and I believe she’s right, because that’s exactly what I admire her for. But truth-seeking is not always dramatic, and as someone who does seek for the truth, I find myself more and more agreeing and associating myself with people who I think are those most concerned with the same motivation, and unsurprisingly enough, they’re not heroism-obsessed drama queens — and those people happened to be, get this, Marxists (well-read ones mind you).
These Marxists are different, they don’t carry around the hammer and sickle in their bio, nor any red flags (ba dum tss), what they do carry is a genuine well-thought out belief in Marx’s Hegel-inspired dialectical processes and a materialistic way of looking through history. These people have some of the most nuanced and complex takes I see, their words are complicated that even I give up on reading them sometimes, but they are indeed, good truth-seekers, and the truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Last year, the movie adaptation of Dune directed by Denis Villeneuve came out, I very much enjoyed the film, thought it to be very much archetypal in its story, it’s pretty much literally an Abrahamic prophet story in a science fiction setting. It is rife with references to the Campbellian Hero’s Journey and Jung’s archetypes of heroes — for example Paul having the ability of future vision, magical commanding speech, and courage to venture into the unknown, three of the common traits that many ancient mythical heroes have, according to Jordan B. Peterson.
Because I enjoyed it quite a bit, I dug a little into the author Frank Herbert, and indeed he’s a very interesting person. In the story of Dune, the main character Paul Atreides is the Mahdi, the Lisan al-Gaib, the Kwisatz Haderach, all different names that essentially mean he’s the Jesus of the story, the Messiah, yet, **Spoiler Alert**, Paul ends up becoming an oppressor, a warlord, and commits genocides.
Frank Herbert apparently created this with the message of telling his readers to beware of designating people as heroes, for it is a very dangerous thing to do. To an extent, I believe in the same thing, for I see a lot of the moronic things people do is in the name of idolatry.
This could very much slip into a Nietzschean Death of God coming true rhetoric, but since my realization originally didn’t go that far, I’ll refrain.
Truth-seeking and heroism doesn’t always go together, and in this day and age where the internet has essentially created a Tower of Babel causing a fragmentation of everything, I believe they go together even less (phrase inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s article Why The Last 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid).
Reading the point made in Sarah’s three paragraphs right after creating a thread about a well-directed anime episode, it reminded me of a tweet by Jamal from GetInTheMecha
The contrast of activism and truth-seeking, is the same kind as of being an esoteric content creator and being an approachable one
I do not make podcasts, video essays, or long articles regarding animation like Jamal does, but I do understand his point, because I myself struggle with getting more people into the things I like. The moment I was reminded of Jamal’s tweet, that is when I realized that the contrast of activism and truth-seeking, is the same kind as of being an esoteric content creator and being an approachable one.
I started writing this to address my sudden complete loss of interest in making informative threads about well-directed anime episodes, and I realize that it happened to coincide with me losing much belief in heroism and dramatics.
I’ve already once written a thread about another big part of why I stopped writing,
and I believe what I wrote to be true, but it is not whole, and only the pragmatic side of things. As I find myself to be agreeing more and more with Marxists who are very good at explaining things materialistically, naturally I slowly lose the side of myself who believes in hope, possibility, and the inner God within Man. There’s no more Hiroyuki Sawano music playing within me, and no more red and green glowing Psycho Frames.
I am an imaginative person, I love creativity, I love dressing up fashionably and have fun around the city, I love to imagine being a superpowered anime main character as I listen to my music with my earphones, I tweet all the time about how I wish for Godzilla to be real, or the GN Drive from Gundam 00 that could expand human consciousness and flawlessly communicate our deepest feelings. But somehow I’ve perfectly compartmentalized that part of me as simply the art and media enjoyer Soultan, none of that sense of wonder can touch the part of me that is responsible for orienting myself in the real world, the part that was once overflowing with a glowing sense of hope and possibility in 2020, the part of me that once participated in an essay contest that would’ve sent me to Japan. Some might say I’ve just grown up, but to that I’ll say: that is simply not how I wish to grow up.
We’re all living our lives, hopefully doing or trying to do the things meaningful to us, and going through our own Heroes’ Journeys, but it is an age of fragmentation, where attempts to manifest dramatic heroism is more than ever likely to bring inconsistency and falsehood, and the other type of swordless heroism that is of seeking the complex and nuanced truth does not satisfy the need for meaning in the metaphysical psyche. There does indeed need to be a hit balance that Jamal said he was seeking in his tweet, one in-between esotericism and the mainstream, one that will educate yet exhilarate, one that will allow the Hero to eat his cake in his Journey. And I am now searching for it as well, but perhaps one of a larger scope, and one that might take me on an actual journey, with my new shoes :) .
