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Archetypes of Evil
« on: 2004-08-07 13:41:00 » |
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Archetypes of Evil
Equations such as A=Hitler have appeared several times in posts during the last years. Putting aside "Godwin's Law", typically I give a short reply, sceptical of the use of Jungean archetypes for Evil or anything else. So, I was mildly amused when someone made up a story where I allegedly used the Hitler archetype. Anyway, I think that the use of archetypes of Evil is a good topic.
In fact, there are two equally interesting topics here, what Evil is and what an Archetype is, but I'll deal more with the second one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype
Archetypes of Evil as a part of culture offer a useful cognitive shortcut for aligning the members of a group or even a whole society. But how does it work in practice? You choose actions and traits of archetypal persons and identify them in real humans. Did you pick the right ones? Probably yes, at least for the culture in which you live.
What's the problem then? Well, archetypes hide the complexity of life behind a single name. What's behind this name? A name stands for a person. The analysis of the whole situation which brought Hitler -- one of the many ordinary but psychologically divergent humans -- to power is replaced by a bunch of personal traits and actions. Here is a pretty interesting piece where a historian expands on this in the case of Hitler:
Hitler: The Rise of Evil -- A review
http://www.h-net.org/mmreviews/showrev.cgi?path=388
For all their convenience, archetypes channel our thought in a certain direction: excorcizing the reincarnations of a demon. The simple truth that both the demon and the archetype are ordinary -- possibly divergent -- persons out of a big pool and the question of what really brought them to power is hard to be represented in such a model. The problem of predicting the birth of a "black swan" is made even more difficult by the fact that the demon's own culture is the one which chooses from the archetypal traits hidden behind the archetypal name of Evil.
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