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We ignore that addition to the story at our peril, because life is so difficult that losing sight of the heroic part of existence could cost us everything.
Our knowledge of how to act in the world remains eternally incomplete—partly because of our profound ignorance of the vast unknown, partly because of our willful blindness, and partly because the world continues, in its entropic manner, to transform itself unexpectedly.
And so we find ourselves inescapably faced with the need to move beyond order, into its opposite: chaos.
Chaos is anomaly, novelty, unpredictability, transformation, disruption, and all too often, descent, as what we have come to take for granted reveals itself as unreliable.
Sometimes it manifests itself gently, revealing its mysteries in experience that makes us curious, compelled, and interested. This is particularly likely, although not inevitable, when we approach what we do not understand voluntarily, with careful preparation and discipline.
Whatever is not touched by the new stagnates, and it is certainly the case that a life without curiosity—that instinct pushing us out into the unknown—would be a much-diminished form of existence.
Rule XII makes the case that thankfulness in the face of the inevitable tragedies of life should be regarded as a primary manifestation of the admirable moral courage required to continue our difficult march uphill.
He was not accustomed to the subtleties of social interaction, so his behaviors, verbal and nonverbal, lacked the dance-like rhythm and harmony that characterize the socially fluent.
He was the best personal and practical exemplar of something I had come to realize over my more than twenty years of psychological practice: people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized.
People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.
She thrived on that, and no wonder. We compete for attention, personally, socially, and economically. No currency has a value that exceeds it.
To have others attend to what you find important or interesting is to validate, first, the importance of what you are attending to, but second, and more crucially, to validate you as a respected center of conscious experience and contributor to the collective world.
Less self-evidently, we require companionship, play, touch, and intimacy.
must perceive and act in a manner that meets our biological and psychological needs—but, since none of us lives or can live in isolation, we must meet them in a manner approved of by others.
The fact of limited solutions implies the existence of something like a natural ethic—variable, perhaps, as human languages are variable, but still characterized by something solid and universally recognizable at its base.
Piaget suspected, for example, that games undertaken voluntarily will outcompete games imposed and played under threat of force, given that some of the energy that could be expended on the game itself, whatever its nature, has to be wasted on enforcement. There is evidence indicating the emergence of such voluntary game-like arrangements even among our nonhuman kin.6
Their attention must be carefully reciprocated. To be surrounded by peers is to exist in a state of equality, and to manifest the give-and-take necessary to maintain that equality. It is therefore good to be in the middle of a hierarchy.
By three years of age, however, most children are capable of truly sharing. They can delay gratification long enough to take their turn while playing a game that everyone cannot play simultaneously.
child without at least one special, close friend is much more likely to suffer later psychological problems, whether of the depressive/anxious or antisocial sort,7 while children with fewer friends are also more likely to be unemployed and unmarried as adults.
All causes of mortality appear to be reduced among adults with high-quality social networks, even when general health status is taken into consideration.
Through friendship and collegial relationships we modify our selfish proclivities, learning not to always put ourselves first.
If the problem is real, then the people who are best at solving the problem at hand should rise to the top. That is not power. It is the authority that properly accompanies ability.
When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully.
good people are ambitious (and diligent, honest, and focused along with it) instead because they are possessed by the desire to solve genuine, serious problems.
Someone who is sophisticated as a winner wins in a manner that improves the game itself, for all the players.
The oldest child can take accountability for his younger siblings, instead of domineering over and teasing and torturing them, and can learn in that manner how to exercise authority and limit the misuse of power.
There is great intrinsic pleasure in helping already competent and admirable young people become highly skilled, socially valuable, autonomous, responsible professionals.
Sanity is knowing the rules of the social game, internalizing them, and following them.
The solutions of yesterday and today, upon which our current hierarchies depend, will not necessarily serve as solutions tomorrow.
It also requires knowledge that on the more radical, creative side—the necessary source of revitalization for what has become immoral and outdated—there also lurks great danger.
What this all means is that the Harry Potter series does not point to drone-like subservience to social order as the highest of moral virtues.
It offers deeper insight into the complex and paradoxical relationship between respect for the rules and creative moral action that is necessary and desirable, despite manifesting itself in apparent opposition to those rules.
These stories portray the existential dilemma that eternally characterizes human life: it is necessary to conform, to be disciplined, and to follow the rules—to do humbly what others do; but it is also necessary to use judgment, vision, and the truth that guides conscience to tell what is right, when the rules suggest otherwise. It is the ability to manage this combination that truly characterizes the fully developed personality: the true hero.
It is the living interaction between social institutions and creative achievement that keeps the world balanced on the narrow line between too much order and too much chaos.
How do you know who you are? After all, you are complex beyond your own understanding; more complex than anything else that exists, excepting other people; complex beyond belief. And your ignorance is further complicated by the intermingling of who you are with who you could be. You are not only something that is. You are something that is becoming—and the potential extent of that becoming also transcends your understanding.
Who are you? And, more importantly, who could you be, if you were everything you could conceivably be?
Stories become unforgettable when they communicate sophisticated modes of being—complex problems and equally complex solutions—that we perceive, consciously, in pieces, but cannot fully articulate.
We are dormant adventurers, lovers, leaders, artists, and rebels, but need to discover that we are all those things by seeing the reflection of such patterns in dramatic and literary form.
Question: Who are you—or, at least, who could you be? Answer: Part of the eternal force that constantly confronts the terrible unknown, voluntarily; part of the eternal force that transcends naivete and becomes dangerous enough, in a controlled manner, to understand evil and beard it in its lair; and part of the eternal force that faces chaos and turns it into productive order, or that takes order that has become too restrictive, reduces it to chaos, and renders it productive once again.
The Rebis is a symbol of the fully developed personality that can emerge from forthright and courageous pursuit of what is meaningful (the round chaos) and dangerous and promising (the dragon).
Representing that reality—pay attention, above all, even to what is monstrous and malevolent, and speak wisely and truthfully—could be the single most important accomplishment of our species.
Most importantly, perhaps, it allows us to realize the immense importance of words in transforming potential into actuality, and helps us understand that the role we each play in that transformation is in some vital sense akin to the divine.
Then a hero, representing the highest of values, must arise or be elected to confront this chaotic force.
To think of it another way: the hero is the embodied principle of action and perception that must rule over all the primordial psychological elements of lust, rage, hunger, thirst, terror, and joy.
Victory over the dragon—the predator, as such, the ruler of unexplored territory—is victory over all the forces that have threatened the individual and society, over evolutionary and historical spans of time, as well as the more abstract evil we all still face, without and within. The cross, for its part, is the burden of life.
As humanity became more sophisticated in its capacity to abstract, we increasingly appreciated the fact that predatory monsters can come in many guises, only some of which are animal in their form. Literature of an arguably more sophisticated form endlessly echoes this realization.
They exist as part of his intrinsically magical potential—the magical potential of all of us, in fact, as we are all children of Nature and Culture, with the tremendous potential that implies, as well as the more mundane offspring of our particular parents.8
What does this mean? That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.
Who dares wins*—if he does not perish.
Even truth, virtue, and courage are not necessarily enough, but they are our best bet.
