Month: December 2024

In a post a few days ago, we used the archetypes defined by Eric Berne to analyse the role reversal that had occurred in the story of Lilly Phillips. While generic archetypes such as the Child, Parent, and Adult are valid at a more abstract level of analysis, there also exist culturally-specific archetypes that play an important role in more localised stories. That is what we are going to talk about in this post since Raygun’s story has taken a culturally-specific turn here in Australia in the last few weeks.

Thus, the popularity of Raygun for international audiences was a kind of Australian-themed visual humour that required no extra storyline to make it work.

Things were different here in Australia, of course. Raygun had become a celebrity and people wanted to know what her story was. A narrative built up around Raygun that took on a very culturally-specific form. To understand that story, we need three archetypes that are integral to Australian culture: Tall Poppy Syndrome, the Aussie Battler and the Larrikin.

For a variety of reasons, early Australian culture developed an adverse attitude towards the pretences of the imported British aristocracy. It’s not hard to see why. About 1/3 of the convicts transported to Australia in the early days were Irish or Scottish, who had more than a few bones to pick with their English overlords. Meanwhile, the English convicts were not exactly on good terms with their elites, who were, after all, banishing them to the other side of the world.

It’s not hard to imagine how a resentment towards the “upper class” evolved in early Australian society. It solidified into what is called Tall Poppy Syndrome, which is the desire to remind those who reach the upper echelons of society that they aren’t all that special.  

Related to the Tall Poppy Syndrome is the Australian identification with the average man. The early settlers here had an awfully hard time trying to make European agricultural practices work in poor Australian soils with all the vagaries of a climate that had nothing to do with northern Europe. The average person who strove hard against the odds came to be embodied in the Aussie Battler archetype. Both the Battler and the Tall Poppy would later be easily transplanted into the class struggle that arose between capitalist and worker in the industrial factories of the big cities.

Nowadays, with overt class animosity removed from public discourse, it is the sports field where the Aussie Battler archetype often manifests. Australians will enthusiastically support a player who is clearly never going to be the best but who works hard and tries with all their might.

Of course, that’s an almost exact description of Raygun’s performance at the Olympics. She was not good at breakdancing, but she gave 110%. Because she was performing an American cultural tradition that no Australian has any understanding of, Australians viewed her performance as the embodiment of the Aussie Battler archetype, and that’s exactly how commentators here began to frame the larger story around her.

The Larrikin is related to both the Tall Poppy Syndrome and the Battler in that its historical origins were tied up in bringing the elites down to size. Since the Olympics is all about being elite, it is a natural target for the Larrikin. That’s why some people thought that Raygun’s performance was deliberately designed to take the piss out of the Olympics. They created a story where she was cast in the role of the Larrikin archetype.

These were the two main threads of the story that grew up around Raygun here in Australia. She was part-Battler and part-Larrikin. Now, it has to be said that Raygun went out of her way not to encourage this story. After her Olympics performance, she deliberately stayed out of the spotlight. Perhaps she did that because she could see that the archetypes were not a good fit for who she is as a person.

Raygun’s real name is Rachael Gunn. She has a PhD in Cultural Studies and is a full-time academic at Macquarie University. Based on her social position alone, irrespective of her personal qualities, she is exactly the kind of person that the Larrikin would want to take the piss out of and that the Aussie Battler would resent.

Nevertheless, while the primary material of the story of Raygun was her whacky dance moves at the Olympics, the stories told about her worked and the archetypes of Battler and Larrikin were valid. That’s almost certainly how things would have remained, but recent events have thrown a spanner in the works.

Ironically, what forced the overturning of the official narrative was that somebody else wanted to tell a version of Raygun’s story. An enterprising comedian here in Australia decided to try and capitalise on the Raygun craze by creating, of all things, a musical about her. The inaugural performance was due to take place a couple of weeks ago at a comedy club in Sydney, with all proceeds apparently going to charity.

Given that this was just a local performance in a small venue, by itself this wouldn’t have changed the mainstream narrative. There would have been a performance or two, and then it would have all been over. The rest of Australia would have been completely oblivious. But here’s where the power of archetypes shows itself yet again.

Because Raygun had been cast into the role of Larrikin, many people had assumed that she had organised the comedy show herself. This makes perfect sense. Writing a musical about yourself is a very Larrikin thing to do.

In the real world, Rachael Gunn did not want people to think that she was associated with the show. Rather than simply dissociate herself from it with a public statement, she called in some lawyers to force the venue to cancel it.

Here is where the story takes an ironic twist. Raygun became famous by badly performing American-style dancing. Now Rachael Gunn went for the classic American move of calling in the lawyers. That might work in New York City, but it absolutely doesn’t fly in Australia.

The combination of the Aussie Battler, the Larrikin, and the Tall Poppy’s Syndrome gives Australian culture a large part of its distinctive quality. Americans love winners, and Americans expect and encourage their winners to partake in public displays of power and aggression. In Australia, our public figures are simply not allowed to take themselves too seriously. Australian public figures must be able to take a joke made at their expense. It’s part of the job description.

Raygun had inadvertently become a public figure due to her Olympics performance. Since, she had also been cast in the roles of Aussie Battler and Larrikin, any Australian would have expected that she should have no problem with a comedy show about her. Calling lawyers to shut the show down is the complete opposite of the behaviour expected of her. In one fell swoop, she had punctured the archetypes that had been assigned to her.

That would have been bad enough. But in just the last few days a new twist in the story has hit the news. It turns out that Raygun’s lawyers have demanded that the venue pay for her legal fees in the matter to the tune of $10,000. The venue is a small local comedy club. It’s not a huge corporation; it’s an owner-run business in a very tough industry. Incredibly, the owner of this comedy club fits exactly the two archetypes that had previously been assigned to Raygun: Battler and Larrikin.

Rachael Gunn has managed to flip the entire story that had built up around Raygun. She has become the Tall Poppy who is going out of her way to destroy the Battler and Larrikin. Accordingly, there has been a flurry of comment over the past few days denouncing her. She’s gone from being a quintessential Aussie hero to a quintessential villain.

All of which goes to show, stories and archetypes are not just fiction. They are very real.

Some readers will have seen the story swirling around the internet in the last week or so about the young woman named Lilly Phillips who had sex with a hundred men in one go. I normally wouldn’t bother to comment on such a story. After all, we live in the world where such debaucheries are an everyday affair. However, this story has taken an interesting twist, one that is actually worth commenting on. It’s worth commenting on from my personal point of view because it is unusually and clearly amenable to archetypal analysis.

The crucial fact in this case is that what has prompted the flurry of public discussion is not the original sex act. That apparently happened back in October. As far as I can tell, it got little to no attention. What did get attention was an interview with Phillips that was released on YouTube about a week ago. The part of the interview that was most poignant was when Phillips broke down crying.

It was the sight of a young woman in distress which triggered commentators to claim that it was actually men who were responsible for the situation. There was even apparently an op-ed in a newspaper claiming that the men involved should be jailed over the matter. This led to a flurry of counter-comment claiming that this was all typical of modern feminism, where women get to have the freedom to do what they like but get to blame men when it all goes wrong.

The Child represents our basic drives, desires, and dreams. The Parent represents authority in the broadest sense i.e. things that should be done because they are morally right. The Adult represents the workaday world of getting things done. It is concerned with outcomes and how to get to them most efficiently.

Berne’s key insight is that the transactions we go through in real life are structured around these roles. Where it gets particularly interesting, however, is when we switch between roles. We might begin our interaction as two Adults who are taking care of some business. Things can get awkward fast when one participant transitions to the Child role.

This happens fairly often in most places of work, where the expectation is that we are Adults, but where somebody suddenly slips into the Child role. Ricky Gervais built his entire TV series The Office on the premise of having a boss, who should be playing the role of Adult, or at least Parent, but instead is a Child.

Berne was concerned with interactions between individuals. However, we can easily abstract his model to public discourse in general. There are repeated patterns, or games, that public discourse falls into just as we fall into patterns with the people we interact with on a regular basis. The Lilly Phillips story fits exactly such a pattern, one that is very common in the modern West.

Using the Bernian analysis, the big question is this: Which role is Phillips playing? Is she a Child, an Adult, or a Parent?

Like many young women these days, Phillips makes money from the OnlyFans website. OnlyFans is a business venture that generates about $5 billion per year in revenue. Since this is all business, we could place Phillips in the role of Adult. She is a tech-savvy young woman making use of an opportunity to make money.

But, of course, there is more and more competition on OnlyFans these days, and so we can also guess that the sex-act was a way for Phillips to win the battle for attention. Remember that the Adult archetype is concerned with getting results. Since Phillips achieved her goal of winning attention, which will presumably translate into money, we can still claim that she is playing the Adult, and doing it smartly.

If Phillips was originally playing the role of Adult, it was the release of the YouTube interview a week ago that changed her role. The interview showed her human side, which really means it showed her in the role of Child. More importantly, because it showed her breaking down crying, she was a Child in need of protection.

Like clockwork, this triggered the Parent response from a number of commentators. What is the role of the Parent: to protect the Child. Who did Phillips need to be protected from? Well, it must be the other party to the sex act, the men.

It was this targeting of men which duly brought another set of commentators out of the woodwork to point out that Phillips’ needed to take responsibility for her actions. These commentators were denying the validity of casting Phillips into the role of Child. For them, she was and should be an Adult.

Suddenly, the story had changed and we see the moves in a game that everybody knows because it takes place in practically every family at one time or another. This is the game where the Child plays the Parents off against each other. The most common form of this is to run to Mother to avoid discipline from Father. That is what we see in the story of Phillips as it unfolded this week. Those who want to portray her as the Child are playing the role of Mother. Those who want her to take responsibility for her actions are playing the role of Father.

As if to emphasise this new reading, there was a new twist in the story just a few days ago when Phillips announced that she was going to do it all again, this time with even more men. At this point, we are definitely in exactly the kind of game that Berne analysed. Ostensibly, the roles in the game are Protective Mother, Tyrannical Father and Innocent Child. Innocent Child runs to Protective Mother who blames Tyrannical Father.

In actual fact, however, the real roles of the game are Devouring Mother, Impotent Father and Naughty Child. One of the primary properties of the Devouring Mother is that she engages in enabling behaviour. Enabling allows the Child to harm themselves so that the Mother can offer “protection” and “care”. It keeps the Child dependent on the Mother.  Implied in this game is that Father is either absent or impotent.

Once the Child has learned how to play the game, the steps become clear: Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father -> Naughty Behaviour -> Protective Mother -> Blame Father. This game is very common in the public discourse of the modern West, and has become even more prevalent in recent decades.

Ultimately, it is the Child who suffers most from this game, and that is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome in the story of Phillips. However, we can also extrapolate from this individual case to the broader pattern of modern society.

Absent Father is really the Adult. He’s too busy keeping industrial capitalism running to have time left over for family. Since industrial capitalism runs on money, that’s his only concern. Sites like OnlyFans make money, and that’s enough for him.

Meanwhile, Devouring Mother likes money too, so she won’t stop the game from being played, especially because it lets her indulge in her main addiction: performative compassion.

With Absent Father and Devouring Mother as parents, is it any wonder that the collective Child of the modern West is in trouble?

The Australian Housing Minister has gone viral on the internet this week over an interview she gave a couple of weeks ago, just one day after I wrote my post on why the Australian government is addicted to real estate inflation. (Synchronicity much?)

The interview was conducted on Australian youth radio broadcaster Triple J. Here’s the short section that has gone viral – https://www.instagram.com/triplejhack/reel/DC8Pd1LRIqs/.

This is the key part of the exchange:

Interviewer: “Why don’t you want to be seeing house prices drop?….If you’re a young person, looking at what’s ahead of you, you definitely want to see house prices come down.”

Minister: “Well, that may be the view of young people. It’s not the view of our government. We want to see sustainable price growth.”

Interviewer: “But minister, if house prices don’t come down, doesn’t that mean that this system is stacked against young people…”

Minister: “Sure. And Dave we may have a difference of view about this…”

The incredible part about this exchange is that the minister just flat out agreed with the interviewer’s framing of the issue that the system is stacked against young people. Of course, that framing is exactly correct: high house prices are screwing over the rising generation.

Maybe this was just a political gaffe. But there’s actually a very good reason why the minster might not think she has to care. The politics of the issue are surprisingly clear because it turns out the Australian population divides almost exactly into thirds on the subject.

About 1/3 Australians own their home outright. About 1/3rd have a mortgage on a home. The remaining 1/3 are renters. House price inflation is in the interests of owners and mortgage holders, but not renters. Therefore, house price inflation is in the interests of 2/3rds of the voting public.

The people hurt by house price inflation are the renters. Since renters are mostly made up of young people, the minister basically went onto youth radio and told that demographic to its face that the government couldn’t care less about its interests. Nice job, minister!

Given Australia has a federal election coming up early next year, the immediate effect of this could be to see young voters shift even more away from Labor and towards the Greens. Since Labor’s position is already looking tenuous, we could very well see the Greens holding the balance of power in a minority government.

Longer term, however, this is pretty much the number one ticking time bomb of Australian politics. Both government and a majority of voters support a policy position that is disenfranchising the entire upcoming generation. Anybody who thinks that’s a viable strategy for the future has not studied history very well.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a party where I met a woman whose exact profession I can’t remember, but who is one of the army of modern psychological workers that treat autism. Funnily enough, it was at exactly the same friend’s house that I randomly met a virologist just a couple of years ago. Opportunities like that don’t come along very often, and I very politely and non-confrontationally asked many of the questions around the identification of viruses that I had formulated during the corona debacle. Unsurprisingly, I was very unimpressed with the answers given.

Now, I haven’t been following the autism thing anywhere near as closely as I did corona, but I was keen to ask my new conversation partner about it. My first question was the most obvious: “What exactly is autism?” Interestingly, the woman seemed uncomfortable answering. There’s no definitive definition, she said, and then proceeded to reel off a collection of possible symptoms.

For me, this was a now very familiar story. What do AIDS, covid, long covid, and autism all have in common? They all comprise a grab bag of seemingly unrelated symptoms whose only unifying factor is a name and maybe a dodgy lab test to go with it.

That might have been the main lesson I took away from the interaction, except for the fact that the conversation came during the time that I’ve been working on my analysis of the Nietzsche-Wagner relationship. That analysis had, in turn, led me back to questions around childhood, adolescence, and maturity. As a result, I saw some interesting correspondences with my reading since autism is very much a problem of childhood.

The reason why Wagner and Nietzsche are relevant here is because they represented a cohort in the 19^th century that had a very different opinion on these matters, one that we can usefully contrast against the dominant paradigm that holds in our time, the one that wants to turn every problem into a “disease”.

At the heart of the philosophy of education and development that existed in the 19^th century was a concept that we can call the child of nature. Wagner is relevant here because almost all of his operas are about the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and almost all of his heroes are children of nature. Siegfried in the Ring Cycle is the best example of these. He is raised in the forest by a peasant and owes his great strength to the fact that he has not been corrupted by civilisation.

This idea expressed by Wagner was a more extreme version of some of the main educational theories of the time, including those of Locke, Rousseau, and, later, the American psychologist and educator, Granville Stanley Hall.

The basic idea of these educational theories is that young children, once they are old enough to have a level of autonomy, should be left alone to learn things for themselves wherever possible. The role of the parent or educator becomes exactly that exemplified by Wotan in Wagner’s opera Siegfried, i.e., they should observe the child from a distance, making sure no harm comes to them, but not directly interfering.

In the post-Darwin era of Stanley Hall, this philosophy had taken on an interesting variation. It was believed that in childhood we re-experience the genetic history of the entire human race. But children needed to be left to themselves in order for this recapitulation to occur. Stanley Hall argued that children should be left to nature until about the age of 8, and only then should they be introduced to an education in culture. To give them a cultural education too early would lead to precociousness, early adulthood, and would stifle future development.

This basic idea was later taken to an extreme, especially by the hippies in the 60s and 70s. According to them, all of our lives should be lived “naturally”, whatever that means. Arguably, Wagner had flirted with this idea, but it was certainly not what Locke, Rousseau, or Stanley Hall had in mind. What was important to them was that childhood should be left to nature, while adolescence was always about culture.

Stanley Hall is interesting in this respect because, even as early as 1904, he could see that increasing urbanisation meant that creating the environmental conditions where children could be natural was a practical difficulty. How can children who live in the city connect with nature? It’s an underappreciated fact that the rise of modern suburbia was partly motivated by this notion of reconnecting with nature.

And that brings us neatly around to our time. We now have far more urbanisation than in Stanley Hall’s era. We have also have far more “education” that happens at younger and younger ages. We have suburban parents who are unwilling even to allow their children to walk to school. All of our social trends are in the exact opposite direction to what would have been considered desirable by any of the thinkers we have mentioned in this post.

More than that, however, these thinkers would have fully expected to see the rise of disorders like autism. Within their model of childhood development, such problems are caused by overeducating children, while preventing a connection with “nature”. The fact that disorders like autism and ADHD are primarily found in children backs up this analysis of the situation.

From the point of view of the 19^th century, the rise of these disorders is the logical outcome of modern social developments. The reason we don’t hear about any of this is because these 19th century thinkers were fully well aware that these social developments didn’t come out of nowhere. They were in the interests of certain sections of society.

Nietzsche is often caricatured as a proto-fascist, but, actually, he was vehemently against the Prussian model of education, which he saw as a disaster whereby young minds were handed over to the interests of the state. Meanwhile, the Marxists were also correct that the new style of education was in the interests of capitalists, not just in the sense of vocational training to churn out useful employees, but, more recently, due to the necessity of dual-income households, which may have helped to lower wage costs for business, but have left no option for the average parent but to send their children to care facilities while they go to work.

All of this would be bad enough by itself, but we have now taken it a step further by diagnosing the children who won’t passively accept their predicament with fancy new disorders and then subjecting them to pharmaceutical interventions to shut them up. That is a level of perversity that Stanley Hall could never have dreamed of.

Wagner did have a presentiment of it, however. In the final opera of the Ring Cycle, Götterdämmerung, he has the character Hagen give child-of-nature Siegfried a potion that causes his downfall. But at least Siegfried was a grown man in the opera. If Wagner were writing the Götterdämmerung today, he’d have to make his hero a six-year-old boy, and the story would no longer be a tragedy but something more like a zombie horror.