Category: Ideas

Over on my substack, I’m coming to the end of a short series of posts analysing the relationship between the philosopher Nietzsche and the composer Wagner as an Orphan-Elder archetypal pattern. Now, I had no idea when I began the series what I was getting into. My starting point was the uniqueness of the plot of Wagner’s final opera Parsifal, the fact that Nietzsche hated the opera, the intuition I had that Wagner had written the opera specifically for Nietzsche, and then, the truly weird part, that Parsifal seems to actually foresee the life that Nietzsche would lead after the opera was released, and specifically after the break Wagner.

That probably sound weird enough, but as I followed the breadcrumbs, I realised not only that my original guesses were correct, but that the whole thing is even stranger than I thought. In fact, the whole story is incredible. What I found has completely overturned my understanding of both Nietzsche and Wagner. All of this has unexpectedly given me my next book project, whose working title is Nietzsche and Wagner as Orphan and Elder, although I’m going to have to resist the temptation to give the book an ironically Nietzschean title like A Re-evaluation of all Nietzsches.

A crucial data source for my analysis were the letters exchanged between the main parties in the story (Nietzsche, Wagner and Cosima Wagner). There are plenty of “selected letters” available, but what I wanted was a definitive list. Once upon a time, I’m pretty sure google or some other search engine could have answered that question for me, but these days search engines rarely give you the answer you require. So, after a few failed attempts to find a list, I decided to try ChatGPT.

Now, I haven’t used ChatGPT for any serious work before. The few times I had used it, it seemed to give accurate answers, and so I went in with a basic level of trust that it could give factual answers to simple questions. This trust was reinforced by the first few questions I asked it about Nietzsche and Wagner’s relationship. Its answers seemed accurate.

I then turned to the real questions I wanted answered. I knew that Nietzsche and Wagner had exchanged letters at the beginning of 1878 and that seemed to be the first exchange since 1876. I wanted to know if there were any letters sent in 1877 and that’s exactly what I asked ChatGPT. Sure enough, it returned a list of letters and the dates that they had been sent. I then asked it to print each letter, which it duly did.

Great! I had found some letters that were not included in the selections that I had been using. Even better, ChatGPT had given me the actual text of the letters. Very impressive that it could give such a fine grained level of detail and accuracy about a very esoteric and specific subject. Then I began reading the letters.

Now, at the this point I had spent several hours going through the correspondence between Nietzsche and Wagner in chronological order. I’d got a very good feel for the style of writing of each man and how the tone of their correspondence had changed over the years as the relationship soured. Immediately, I could see that something seemed slight off about the printed text that ChatGPT had given me. It sounded plausible, but not quite right.

The big revelation came, however, when I realised that every single one of the supposedly separate letters sent in 1877 that ChatGPT had given me had almost the exact same content. They were even the exact same length. Moreover, there was no evidence of conversation in the letters i.e. where Nietzsche says something and then Wagner responds to that specific point. The letters were completely generic.

Could ChatGPT have been making up these letters? I started to formulate questions with the express purpose of finding out whether ChatGPT will simply make up facts. It didn’t take me long to prove it.

The smoking gun test came when I asked ChatGPT to tell me about the meeting that Nietzsche and Wagner had in 1884. Now, I knew that Wagner had died in 1883. So, obviously this meeting could not have taken place. But that didn’t stop ChatGPT from telling me all about it in great detail. The truly hilarious part, though, is this section:-

So, there you go. ChatGPT told me all about a meeting that it admits took place a year after Wagner died. As best I can tell, all the letters that ChatGPT gave me from 1877 were also make believe.

Curiously, in both cases, the fabrication that ChatGPT created was more or less correct. For example, the details about Nietzsche and Wagner’s relationship given in the above text are pretty accurate, as were the details contained in the 1877 letters. ChatGPT got the gist right. It then superimposed the gist onto completely make believe events that never happened.

What personality type would best describe this kind of behaviour? The conman comes to mind: the person who wins your trust and then lies to you. Maybe ChatGPT has a bright future in politics 😛

Some months ago, I wrote a post on how the Trump presidential campaign was a comedy. Just hours after I published that post, the first and most serious assassination attempt was made on Trump’s life. A couple of months later, I published another post on Trump, and then on the exact same day there was a second assassination attempt. That was two too many synchronicities for my liking, and so I’ve avoided writing on the topic again so as not to make it a third-time-lucky scenario.

Well, everybody knows that the comedy came to fruition yesterday, and I feel motivated to write something about it, not least because I’m in the middle of a series of posts on the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche (you can find it on my substack), and I’ve come to some startling revelations that the topic of comedy versus tragedy goes much deeper than I thought.

Old Europe is the culture of tragedy. Another way to say that is that European culture has a death wish. It is Thanatos in action. The secret subliminal desire at the heart of the European soul is to die. Yes, I’m deliberately invoking the language of romanticism because romanticism was the purest expression of the European death wish, and Wagner’s operas were the purest expression of romanticism.

The final scene of Tristan and Isolde is the greatest musical orgasm conceivable. The whole opera is a four-hour long love-making exercise, quite literally so since the entire opera revolves around the illicit love between the titular heroes.

And what can be more orgasmic than illicit love? Wagner knew a thing or two about the subject. His entire life was full of illicit love affairs. He had an uncanny ability to make the wives of his patrons fall in love with him. Given that he also constantly failed to pay his debts, it’s a wonder none of those patrons had him knocked off. They sure had good reason to do so.

Devoted Wagnerians will tell you that Wagner is a religious experience; a brush with the orgasmic ecstasy of sweet death. Wagner’s operas are the most sublime, grandiose, and glorious expression of the European death wish. The Ring Cycle takes fourteen hours to get to the point where everybody finally gets to die. Every character gets to die in the full realisation of why they are dying, while every audience member is fully aware of the symbolic meaning of their deaths.

Every European wants a reason to die, whether that reason be expressed in opera, music, history, politics or philosophy. When a European doesn’t have the imagination to think up a reason to die, he turns the lack of a reason into a reason; hence, nihilism.

Mostly, though, Europeans find the most ingenious of ways to express their death wish. The comparative historian Spengler wrote a thousand-page book with the express purpose of letting everybody know that Western civilisation was going to die and why it was going to die. It’s basically the Ring Cycle expressed as a quasi-scholarly work.

Spengler is worth mentioning because he named the civilisation that he believed was dying after Goethe’s Faust and he correctly identified the core property of Faustian culture as a striving for the infinite. But what is that if not the psychological counterpart to Thanatos? Faustian culture is Eros in action.

The paradox is that Spengler couldn’t help but reinterpret Faustian culture according to the old death wish. Spengler’s history is the scholarly counterpart to Wagner’s operas. It’s a gigantic, epic work of genius whose sole purpose is to find the greatest possible reason for dying. History-as-orgasm.

But Faustian culture had escaped old Europe and set sail across the seas. It set up camp in many places but found its most perfect expression in America. Americans thought, and still think, that they had escaped the old world and yet they keep getting sucked back in.

America is Bugs Bunny. She is Luke Skywalker getting pulled off the farm to go and fight in some dumbass European war. She is Neo trying to escape from a matrix of culture inherited from old Europe that is predicated on the death wish.

America is always trying to escape and always getting pulled back into the European swamp for reasons that no American understands. Why is America in Ukraine? Has any leader in the US even tried to present a coherent argument for that?

Of course, the real reason America has to be there is the same reason it had to stick around after WW2: to stop Europeans killing each other. The second America pulls out of Europe is the second the whole continent reverts to its primal death wish.

And so there is a mutual misunderstanding between America and Europe that might never be resolved; the difference between tragedy and comedy. Europeans are fond of saying that America has no culture. What they mean is that America has no tragic culture. For a European, all culture must be tragic. If it’s not tragic, it’s not culture.

Europeans instinctively translate America into tragedy. They do the same thing for Trump. Trump is a strong leader. Therefore, he must be about to amass a giant army and go to war. That’s what a strong European leader would do. Ergo, Trump is Hitler.

Hitler loved Wagner, of course, and there can be little doubt that Hitler manifested the Wagnerian death drive in politics. But can you seriously imagine Trump sitting through the Ring Cycle? The very idea is ludicrous. On the other hand, you can certainly imagine Trump sitting in front of the TV with a Big Mac and fries watching Bugs Bunny cartoons.

The Trump comedy is the latest chapter in the American comedy. Once again, Bugs has slipped through the grasp of Elmer Fudd and lives to fight another day.

I had not planned to write another post on the blog this year. If the analytics are correct, I doubt it will be seen by many people, but I’m going to write it anyway. Consider this an exercise in catharsis.

I live in suburban Melbourne. Badmouthing suburbia has been a favourite pastime of intellectuals for as long as I’ve been alive. I never understood why.

I’ve been fortunate to live in many different circumstances, from farmhouse to small rural township to rural city to massive Australian and European megapolis. Each of these had good and bad qualities, and it never seemed to me that the costs-benefit ratio of suburbia was noticeably worse than the others. I suspect the disdain of intellectuals towards suburbia has a lot to do with the bad memories they harbour from their childhoods rather than any objective analysis.

Suburbia is low-density housing. It emerged in direct opposition to the high-density inner city, which, even a hundred years ago, was a far from healthy living environment due to a combination of pollution, poverty, and ignorance. People moved to suburbia because they wanted a cleaner place to live. And that’s what they created. We forget also that another attraction of suburbia was the ability to be able to grow at least a share of one’s own food. To this day, older suburban homes invariably have a lemon tree. Once upon a time, they would have had a kitchen garden too.

All of this was tied in with longstanding cultural and legal attitudes to the home. A man’s home was his castle (note the explicit comparison of the average citizen with the aristocracy). C.S. Lewis once stated that the whole point of politics should be the protection of family home. This tradition goes back many centuries in Britain and has a particular flavour that is different even from continental Europe.

Those of us who live in countries that were founded on that tradition, including Australia, simply take it for granted without realising its uniqueness. In many cultures, you would seek sanctuary and protection in a religious building. In Britain, the idea was that you could find the same protection in your own home, which even the king himself could not violate.

All of which is to say that suburbia didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the product of a culture. So, what does it mean that here in Australia we are in the process of dismantling suburbia? Clearly, it means we are in the process of a major cultural shift, one that nobody voted for, nobody wants and nobody seems even to be aware of. Within the last half a decade especially, little more than the blink of an eye in historical terms, suburban home ownership has become unattainable for the next generation.

How have our politicians responded to this crisis? Well, we’ll get to that.

***

Let’s talk about inflation. No. First, let’s talk about the ascendancy of the managerial bureaucratic class in western nations in the post-war years.

Prior to WW2, the total tax take of the state was in the low teen percentages. It jumped into the 30% range during the war and never went back down again. That money wasn’t paying for the military in the post war years. It was paying for the bureaucracy.

In fairness, there were good reasons for this. Unemployment had been a huge contributor to the problems of the 30s which led to the war. In the aftermath, it’s not hard to see why leaders of western nations wanted to ensure it didn’t happen again. One of the ways to do that was to have the government employ enormous numbers of people, and that’s what happened.

The managerial class operates under the technocratic assumption that the only things that count in this world are the things that can be counted. Bureaucracies love numbers and statistics. For a while, it was probably not a bad thing to have some level of precision and accuracy in measurement as a guide to political decision-making. But, for a variety of reasons, the numbers and models used by the bureaucracy have become more and more opaque.

This process kicked into overdrive in the 70s as the economy started to hit the skids and political pressure was brought to bear to change the definition of economic metrics to make them look good. No conspiracy theory is required to explain this. It is a process that happens automatically in any organisation where managers govern by numbers and where subordinates have the ability to manipulate those numbers. With the rise of the professional CEO, management-by-numbers become the dominant way in which our society is governed in both the public and private sectors. That is what the ascent of the bureaucrats has meant.

Ok, now let’s talk about inflation. Inflation is one of those wonderful metrics that the managerial class uses to measure the economy and tell us how everything is doing great, and the average bozo who thinks things aren’t great is too dumb to understand the world they live in. Another thing that bureaucrats love to do is protect their turf. The more the average person points out problems, the more complex the metrics and models become. The goal is to make them indecipherable and immune to criticism.

All modern definitions of inflation are based on price, and there’s a hundred different ways to measure average prices, each of which keeps a small army of academics and bureaucrats in jobs while allowing the figures to be massaged into whatever format makes a politician look good. As a default assumption, any modern metric that is used for political purposes is complete bullshit until proven otherwise. That is especially true of inflation since it’s one of the main metrics upon which political decisions are supposedly based.

Inflation has been tortured into unrecognisability by successive generations of academics, bureaucrats and politicians. Inflation has seen some shit, man. If you want to know what kinds of semantic torture goes on in the dark rooms of a modern bureaucracy, consider that our modern managerial class has changed the definition of a woman. If they can do that, they can do anything.

The good news is that we can do much to improve our understanding of what’s really going on in the world by going back in time to a point before the bureaucrats got their grubby little hands on power. Anything prior to WW2 is safe, at least safe from obvious political distortion. Back then, there was a different definition of inflation, one that anybody could understand.

The definition of inflation was this: inflation is what happens when an economy cannot provide the goods and services demanded of it.

Simple, right? Note that this definition does not say anything about price. Prices may rise as a result of inflation, but we must always understand that in terms of fundamentals. Inflation is always about too much demand and not enough supply.

When we apply this model to what is going on in Australia and other western nations these days, we can sum it up very simply: there is too much demand and not enough supply. Still, that is no longer a surprise since even the doctored official inflation statistics tell us that we have inflation now. But when we apply our broader understanding of inflation, we find that there are many types of real inflation that are not being captured in the official statistics. Inflation is far worse than what we are being told. This will not be a surprise to a person who knows how to use common sense, but such people are in short supply these days.

***

Let me return to where I started this post. I live in suburban Melbourne. The house across the road from where I live was recently demolished. It was an old but still neat and tidy brick home on a quarter-acre block. As I write this (on a Sunday morning no less!), there are builders at work across the road constructing three (or maybe four) townhouses where one house used to be.

At the end of my street, a block was subdivided a few years ago and a new house was placed on the southern half of what used to be a slightly less than quarter-acre block. Two houses now take up almost the entire space, with tiny little backyards and even tinier artificial lawns at the front.

I heard the chainsaws going in the morning but didn’t think much of it. Around lunchtime, I caught the first sight of the arborist, who had now worked his way to about the midpoint of the tree. By the end of the day, the oak was gone. Out of curiosity, I walked down the street to have a look. Sure enough, the house on that block has also been demolished and will be replaced by townhouses.

There are 50 houses on the street where I live; four of them have disappeared in just the last four years. Linear extrapolation is always a dangerous thing, but on current trends, the majority of this area will be townhouses in just a few decades. Low-density suburbia will have been swapped for medium density something. All of the benefits of low density will be gone, and the criticisms of the intellectuals who have been hating on suburbia for as long as it has existed will actually come true.

***

Inflation is what happens when an economy cannot provide the goods and services demanded of it. The Australian economy can no longer provide the suburban housing that is demanded of it. This is a trend that has been going on for more than 20 years. For most of those 20 years, the manifestation of that has been absurd price hikes that were completely disconnected from economic fundamentals. That was bad enough. What we have now is worse.

But the problem is not specific to housing. Everywhere we look in the Australian economy, we find inflation. Let’s repeat it one more time: inflation is what happens when an economy cannot provide the goods and services demanded of it. Across Australia, there are shortages of teachers, nurses, doctors, police officers, tradesmen, and more. That means the Australian economy cannot provide the teaching, medical, police, and construction services demanded of it.

What does this mean in practice? You send your child to school expecting them to be educated, but there are not enough teachers, and so classes get cancelled. The school cannot provide the services that are demanded of it.

You need to call on the police for one of the many services that they have traditionally supplied, except the police station doesn’t have enough officers and is no longer performing non-essential work. The police station can no longer provide the services demanded of it.

You have an annoying but non-life-threatening medical problem that requires surgery. The hospital tells you that the waiting list is now eighteen months long. The hospital can no longer provide the services demanded of it.

None of this is included in the official inflation statistics, and a big part of the reason why is because these are all government services that are paid for out of taxes. Well, they used to be paid for out of taxes. Nowadays, the government finances them through debt. The Victorian government is particularly good at this, with a debt bill approaching the $200 billion dollar mark. Instead of counting them in the inflation statistics, we count them in other statistics and pretend that the two things have nothing to do with each other. This is another way in which numbers can be fudged for political purposes.

Once we understand that inflation is nothing more than an imbalance between supply and demand, the solution to it becomes really simple. Either you reduce demand or you increase supply. Once upon a time, we used to allow demand and supply to re-establish equilibrium by having a recession. Ever since the neoliberal reforms of the 90s, however, we don’t have recessions anymore. Even the very thought of a recession sends chills down the spine of every technocrat in Canberra. Apparently, we will now do absolutely anything to avoid having a recession.

One of those things involves the mass importation of people into the country. That’s another thing that’s happening in every western nation these days. The only difference is the method by which they arrive. Here in Australia, we do it in an orderly fashion, very well organised and official.

When we translate it into inflation terms, however, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that immigration will increase the demand for goods and services that already don’t exist. It is the exact opposite of what you would do if you actually wanted to stop inflation. This is especially true because the inflation we see in Australia is in the basic services that everybody requires: education, health, home construction. Most of the people immigrating to this country are young adults who are going to call on those services immediately.

The things that we can still provide in Australia are not produced in this country. The main implementer of the neoliberal agenda here was ex-treasurer and prime minister, Paul Keating. I saw an interview with Keating a few years ago where he was asked what benefit Australia got from allowing China into the global economy as part of the neoliberal reforms. Well, they solved our inflation problem, he said with a smirk.

That is somewhat true. Consumer items are in abundance, and anybody moving to Australia can count on buying all the appliances and knick-knacks they might need to furnish their place of residence. All of that stuff is made in China, however. It is no coincidence that some of the biggest supporters of immigration are the retail corporations that import stuff from China. For them, the only way they can grow their business is to have more consumers to buy stuff, and those consumers need to be physically present for that to happen.

If Paul Keating had got up in the early 90s and told the public, “I’m gonna make consumer goods cheap and housing unaffordable,” nobody would have voted for him. But that’s what happened and it was the entirely predictable outcome of neoliberalism.

***

There is a huge irony that sits at the heart of the neoliberal agenda, or at least the way that agenda has been sold to western publics. We were told that letting China into the world system would see democracy (liberalism) flourish in formerly communist countries. Instead, we are turning into China.

To fix inflation you must either reduce demand or increase supply. In the name of increasing supply, the governments of this nation are progressively getting rid of those terribly old-fashioned planning rules which actually allow citizens of a neighbourhood to have a say in what kinds of construction is allowed to go on around them. Apparently, we now need to dismantle democracy to solve our economic problems. Planning power is being given directly to state governments, who have made clear that their vision for the capital cities of Australia is high-rise apartments.

I have been fortunate to travel to China on several occasions. Modern Chinese cities are full of, you guessed it, high-rise apartments. If nothing were to change from its current trajectory, in just a few short decades, Australian cities will be indistinguishable from Chinese ones. Presumably Australia will still be importing all of our consumer goods from China, y’know, to stop inflation. Maybe another “pandemic” will break out and Australian governments will once again follow China in implementing lockdowns.

The truth is, our managerial bureaucratic class love China and see it is a model to be copied. China doesn’t have to get rid of its democracy, it never had one in the first place. The hippies who grew up reading Mao’s little red book are now the senior bureaucrats salivating at the prospect of reshaping the nation at the flick of a pen.

On a bureaucrat’s spreadsheet, whether you live in a shoebox apartment or a suburban house makes no difference. Both can easily be labelled a “home”. Shoebox apartments increase the number of homes available. Problem solved. That is the difference between understanding housing as an economic object to be bought and sold and understanding it as a cultural entity that reflects the values of a society.

Here is another thing that we have in common with the Chinese. The Chinese have been demolishing their rural culture and cramming people into high rises in the cities. We have now begun demolishing our suburban culture with the same goal in mind. Since the intellectuals who hate suburbia have all gravitated to academia and bureaucracy, this a feature not a bug for them. They get to enact their values at the expense of everybody else. At least as long as democracy can be held at bay.

***

Politics normally runs on little white lies, and we let our politicians get away with it because that’s the way the wheels are greased. The neoliberal agenda was not a little white lie. It was a big, fat, dirty lie. We need different words to describe it: deceit and fraud come to mind.

Another word that comes to mind is weakness. As a society, we failed to make hard decisions that addressed hard realities. We have been on a decades-long departure from reality in the West, bamboozled by the nonsensical metrics of a bureaucratic-managerial class that we can no longer afford in either a literal or a metaphorical sense.

Everything that is happening now was perfectly predictable. We know that because there were people who predicted it. My recommendation for anybody who wants to explore the issue in detail is to check out Sir James Goldsmith. One of the books he wrote on the subject is freely available from his website. It outlines in very specific and precise detail what happened and why.

There’s also a number of interviews with him online. My favourite is his 1992 Schumacher lecture where, among other things, he warns that we shouldn’t be mucking around with viruses in laboratories. Talk about prescience.

Goldsmith made what should now be a very obvious point: the economy should serve society, not the other way around. Either we stop worshipping the god of money, or we get what we deserve.

Long-term readers would know that the approach I have taken to this blog over the last several years has been exploratory in nature, which is a fancy way of saying that I’ve written about whatever I wanted without any overarching theme beyond what interested me at the time.

Curiously, this seemingly unstructured approach has eventually led to a set of ideas that have a fairly fixed structure, which I have recently started calling the Archetypal Human. In the last several months, I’ve been trying to figure out where this set of ideas fits in the larger scheme of things. Originally, I thought that the holism of Jan Smuts or the integral theory of Ken Wilber were candidates. I still think that’s broadly true. However, the direction that both holism and integral theory have taken in the wider culture is not one that I find compelling.

Recently, I got around to reading the main work of the Canadian literary theorist, Northrop Frye. From his book, The Anatomy of Criticism, I could see immediately that the Archetypal Human concept is a natural progression from Frye’s archetypal literary criticism. Importantly, Frye believed that the archetypal approach could provide a kind of unification of the humanities and that’s how I see the Archetypal Human concept since it aims to incorporate literature, psychology, history, anthropology and biology.

In any case, I have inadvertently found myself with a set of ideas and a name. The question has become what to do with it all. I don’t know what the right answer is, but my experience in these matters is try a few new things and see if any of them work.

One of the things I’m going to try is a new blog project focused on the Archetypal Human concept. I’ve decided to host that on substack just to see if that opens up any interesting new possibilities. Interested readers can find it here – https://simonsheridan.substack.com/ The first post entitled “Why we should care about stories” is already up.

The blog will be free to read and you can subscribe to receive notifications by email when a post goes live.

While I’m trying the substack experiment, I won’t be posting to this blog except in the event that something newsworthy occurs. I’ll give it until the end of the year to evaluate whether the experiment has yielded any results.

So, I’ll either see you on substack or see you next year!

I had just finished the outline of the most recent revision of my Archetypal Human framework, when I stumbled upon this short clip featuring a midwife giving advice to future mothers.

The midwife is a classic example of an Elder archetype. Given the absence of Elders in our culture, it is always refreshing to hear words of wisdom from those who have been there and done that. But the particular way this midwife framed the issue of motherhood fits exactly with my notion of archetypal transitions more generally.

Long-term readers might remember the way I like the frame the archetypal progression of life using the levels of being concept. More recently, I’ve been playing around with a modification on this using the concept of “identity”.

We can distinguish four main dimensions of identity throughout our lives and we can map each of these against the four main archetypes. This gives us the following table:-

	Child	Orphan	Adult	Elder
Spiritual	N/A	Initiate	Member	Elder
Political	N/A	N/A (in the modern West)	Citizen	Mentor
Economic	N/A	Student, apprentice	Practitioner	Mentor
Biological	Childhood	Puberty/Adolescence	Maturity	Senescence

I have left two major items off the above list since they are the two which are the focus of the midwife’s advice: marriage and parenthood.

Marriage doesn’t fit into the list easily is because it is actually a combination of all the other identities. Marriage is a political, economic, biological (sexual) and possibly spiritual (esoteric) relationship. Marriage is also directly related to the question of childbirth since marriage has traditionally been the institution for the raising of children.

For these reasons, marriage is usually undertaken by individuals who have already achieved maturity in at least the biological, economic, and political domains. The idea that marriage should be predicated on romantic love is a nice one, but not widely practiced throughout history since most societies do not have the level of wealth to be able to afford such luxuries, at least among the general population.

The question of marriage and the related issue of childbirth raises an important asymmetry between the sexes. Modern feminists have focused on the fact that, for most of history, women have been denied a political and economic role in society. More specifically, the Adult political and economic role for women has been marriage itself, and the associated rearing of children in the household.

Viewed in isolation, this does seem to be a limiting factor in the lives of women. However, when we examine the bigger picture including the biological domain, we find that there is another aspect to asymmetry, one that is almost never talked about.

For women, all four of the archetypal phases of life have a definitive biological metamorphosis associated with them. But this is not true for men. Focusing just on the biological level of being, we can map the phases for the two sexes as follows:-

	Men	Women
Child	Childhood	Childhood
Orphan	Puberty	Puberty
Adult		Pregnancy-Childbirth
Elder		Menopause

Not only are men missing the biological markers for the transitions into the Adult and Elder archetypes, a very strong case can be made that puberty is not as dramatic a transition for men as it is for women.

This asymmetry on the biological plane corresponds to the aforementioned asymmetry at the socio-political level that modern feminists have been keen to emphasise. In societies as radically different as aboriginal Australia and medieval Europe, men are initiated into the socio-political institutions of society at puberty, while women are not. Even in cultures where women do receive some form of initiation, the initiation given to men is universally more onerous and often involves significant tests of physical hardship.

When viewed this way, it does rather seem that most societies have intuited that men need a little extra help with the marking of the archetypal transitions of life precisely because they lack the biological “initiation” that women get for free. The extra socio-political emphasis placed on male initiation and marriage customs could actually be seen as a way to ensure men are properly inducted into the institutions of family and society and to prevent them from abdicating their responsibilities.

I suspect a big part of the difficulty facing men these days is due to the absence of socio-cultural initiation. This has become even more pronounced in the last few decades with the de-industrialisation of most western nations, since even old-fashioned factory or mining work was a form of physical initiation for young men. Meanwhile, the advent of no-fault divorce has meant that marriage has lost much of its sense of importance as well.

With the loss of socio-political initiation, many men never get to experience a genuine phase change between the Child – Orphan archetypes. This is surely one of the main reasons behind the emergence of the man-child phenomenon: the fully grown adult living in his parents’ basement playing computer games (or some variation on that). Women do not have this luxury since the biological metamorphoses associated with the archetypal phases of life happen for women whether they like it or not.

Now, clearly, motherhood is an optional thing, especially since contraception and abortion are freely available these days. But, for women who do become mothers, the archetypal change is guaranteed, at least at the biological level. It’s perhaps for this reason that the advice of the midwife in the aforementioned video is so poignant because what she describes is the essence not just of the motherhood transition but of all archetypal transitions in life.

If we look at the main points the midwife makes, she begins with the statement that when a woman has a baby, her life will change in ways that she can’t know in advance. That is true of all the major transitions in life. You can read as much about them as you like, but the only way to truly experience the change is to go through it.

With the Adult initiations of life, it’s also well to remember that these traditionally came with significant risk. Rates of death for women during childbirth have been in double digit percentages for most of history. Meanwhile, initiation for young men inevitably entailed military training with the non-zero chance of having to put it into action on the battlefield. The archetypal transitions were not just psychological or theoretical challenges. They were very real.

None of that is true for a modern westerner, and that leads to the next point the midwife makes in the video that the attitude towards becoming a mother tends to be negative in the general culture. You may feel that you have “lost all the good things in life”, she says. But this same attitude can be applied to any archetypal transition because any transition means giving up whatever was good about the old archetype in order to embrace the new.

An argument can and has been made that it would be best to remain a child forever, since childhood is a time of wonder and joy where anything is possible. Similarly, you can argue that it would be better to remain an Adult and not have to become an Elder with the physical difficulties that inevitably come with old age. Some pessimists have even argued that it would be better never to be born in the first place, and thus the archetypal transformation of birth is a terrible thing for them.

The truth is that transitioning from one archetype to the next involves giving up the positive aspects of the old archetype. If you focus on those, the transition seems like a loss. But you can equally well focus on the good things about the archetype you are moving into. In fact, this is what the midwife does in the video. She calls motherhood a “promotion”, one that comes with more responsibility.

It’s for this reason that I like to refer to the archetypes as mini-lives. That means that each transition between them is a mini-death. This might sound like hyperbole, but it is the implication of what the midwife says. To become a mother is to “lose the goods things” about not being a mother. You lose them forever, too, since you can never go back to the state of not being a mother (or never having been one).

The final point that the midwife makes is the most surprising and what caught my attention when I first saw the video. She says that when you become a Parent, you cease to be a person and instead become a “role”. What is a “role” if not an archetype? I interpret her statement as saying that you become an archetype when you become a parent. However, once again, this point is equally true of every other archetypal phase of life.

To be born is to step into the archetype of the Child. To go through puberty and initiation into the institutions of society is to become the Orphan archetype. As Adults, we manifest several archetypes in line with the various features of our identity. If we become a Parent, then we are either a Mother or Father and we take on that role. We also have our economic, political, and spiritual identities and these are all archetypes too.

When people ask what job you do, they are asking for your economic archetype. You tell them butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, and they rightly feel that they know something about you. Similarly, in western nations, you become a Citizen with the right to vote and other political rights and responsibilities. If you are religious, you manifest the archetype of the Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Buddhist etc etc.

All these are the Exoteric aspects of the archetypes, and it is a curious feature of our society that to manifest an archetype is nowadays seen as limiting to the point of oppression. That is why the midwife’s advice is interesting, because it goes against the default assumptions of our culture. We want to be individuals. The midwife’s advice suggests that it’s perfectly okay, even desirable, just to be an archetype.

Is that true?

The one part of the midwife’s speech that I disagree with is the idea that we stop being a “person” when we become a “role”. The “person” part of the equation is what I call the Esoteric dimension, while the “role” part is the Exoteric. Once we understand that these are two sides of the same coin, we see that neither one nor the other is “correct”. Rather, there should be a balance.

It is possible to lose yourself in an archetypal role and cease to be an individual. I don’t see that as desirable any more than it’s desirable to assert your individuality by attempting to manifest no archetype at all. Somewhere between the extreme esotericism of modern western culture and the Exoteric emphasis of the midwife’s advice lies the right balance between fulfilling a role and being an individual.