Jordan Peterson introduced the general internet to the Jungian archetypes and the collective unconscious as they manifest in myth, narrative, and modern media. He demonstrated how seemingly simple stories decompose into dense, information-laden structures. What is a dragon? What is the dark forest? What layers of meaning and interpretation are mapped onto the everyday symbols we passively consume?
Dr. Peterson was not the first to uncover these ideas. Anyone who has spent time studying myth or comparative religion recognizes the immense density of meaning embedded in these stories. Joseph Campbell explored this in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he articulated the concept of the “monomyth:” the tendency of human cultures to tell fundamentally similar stories through their myths. These recurring patterns offer a glimpse into our shared humanity: a common ancestry, or at least a broadly similar experience of life, suffering, and transformation.
Jung developed the concept of the collective unconscious; the idea that our shared humanity gives rise to archetypes that reemerge not only in culture and art, but also in dreams. When we encounter these archetypes, we recognize them instinctively, often on an emotional level. The conscious mind may never have fully articulated their meaning, yet the collective unconscious has already shaped and packaged that meaning into a form that feels immediately familiar.
These are old ideas, but they were unfamiliar to most people. Much of the criticism aimed at him boiled down to: “It’s not that deep… the story is just superficial.” That response is maddening in its wrongness, yet understandable. Very little in modern culture prepares us to engage with symbolism or layered meaning in a serious way. Religion is routinely mocked as an outdated worldview, supposedly superseded by the infallible logic of science. Myths, once complex vehicles for transmitting immense meaning, have been flattened into little more than interchangeable backdrops for the next Marvel IP.
If you watch a show or read a book about goblins and elves and orcs, you’re most likely reading a third or fourth derivative of Tolkien. A copy of a copy of a copy that doesn’t say much other than the superficial. “Orc is sad he has to go to war.” Why is he an Orc exactly? What makes him an Orc? He’s exactly like us but hideous? Why make him hideous? If you read Tolkien, and if you read his letters and lectures, he explains the myths, the analogies and metaphors, how they all reveal something about our collective unconscious. Orc isn’t sad he’s going to war; he is the part of us that loves war. The dwarves are both our greed and our industriousness, the two interlinked on a fundamental level. The elves an expression of our love of nature, and of that part of our nature we fear is long lost, fading into history.
Without being able to identify the archetypes most people are wholly equipped to form a moral opinion of a story, especially when that moral is at odds with the author’s intended goal. The “media literate” are shockingly shallow thinkers. They’re in the habit of repeating what an author has said about their own work rather than engaging with what the work actually expresses.
Art is a conversation the artist is having with you, seemingly the media literate thinks the speaker speaks with full clarity and is never mistaken about what they’re saying. What if the author is unfamiliar with the symbols he is using? What if the artist has been cut off from thinking about the meaning of these archetypes? How could he possibly explain what he has created?
Speak with most people who are even aware of the ancient myths and they will recite details of the characters involved: Zeus was Hercules’ father; he ruled from Mount Olympus. Odin lost an eye. Ra was the sun. Ishtar rejected Gilgamesh’s proposal for marriage. It is a scientific accounting of narrative facts: precise, orderly, and empty. The story remains, but the meaning is gone.
Science is a destructive mode of inquiry. It proceeds by isolation, by tearing things apart. We have become extraordinarily good at it. Lead becomes molecules, molecules become atoms, atoms become electrons and neutrons, then quarks and bosons, until one might forget that the object in question is a bullet, and a bullet is meant to kill.
You can tell me its weight, its dimensions, its method of manufacture, its geological and even astrophysical history, but none of that captures what a bullet is. The scientific method is powerful and its results are extraordinary, but it is limited.
When discussing media, it becomes quite clear people are having two conversations. One group, by far the most populous, believes the discussion is limited to the superficial. They might be very smart people, trained in the superior form of thinking: the scientific method. The Orc is sad he has to go to war. This is a good story, because I believe I would be sad to go to war. The second is at least familiar that these archetypes have meaning beyond what is expressed. They are confused that the Orc is sad to go to war. How could he be? He is the part of me that loves war. This is a bad story.
This causes perennial divides in debates about certain movies. Who were the bad guys in Starship Troopers? (The Bugs but let’s not get into that). The debate is ongoing largely because the director doesn’t really know what kind of movie he made. An attempt at satire is dangerous when you don’t really understand the symbols of the thing you are satirizing. Unfamiliar symbols treated with contempt arranged in a mocking fashion can easily invert the authors intent, becoming emblematic of the very thing they were meant to critique.
We have seen this recently with the “Amelia” meme, or the adoption of “Chud” by many on the right. Satire is dangerous.
Modern culture has not lost its myths; it has lost its ability to recognize them. We still produce stories filled with dragons, orcs, and monsters, but we increasingly lack the symbolic literacy required to understand what they are doing to us and through us. Trained to dissect rather than interpret, we mistake analysis for understanding and description for meaning. When we treat stories as merely superficial, or when we wield satire without comprehension, we surrender the conversation to forces we no longer know how to name.
To read myth seriously is not to reject science, nor to retreat into superstition, but to acknowledge that meaning operates at a different level than mechanism. Until we relearn how to read them as such, we will continue to argue past one another, confusing the facts of the story for its truth, and mistaking ignorance of symbolism for sophistication.
Thanks for reading Memetic’s Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.