Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces and the McDonaldization of Myth

[00:00:00]Well, hello friends of the European spirit. You will have heard of Joseph Campbell who counts as perhaps the most important popularizer of mythology in the 20th century who made accessible to everyone the hero story and who reminded everyone as it seems in the modern world of the importance of the hero of the arcane, of the archaic, and hence also of myth in general.

[00:00:30]But I beg to differ. I think that Joseph Campbell was more destructive than a force for good and here is why.

[00:00:42]Now, if you think of Joseph Campbell's most important work, that might be The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

[00:00:52]And in it Joseph Campbell presents what he calls the monomyth.

[00:00:59]Let me just say before I even begin on the monomyth that Joseph Campbell was hugely influential on George Lucas and on Star Wars.

[00:01:12]And there's a reason for that. If you watch Star Wars, obviously, what you see is a sort of pastiche of all kinds of different stories.

[00:01:23]Luke Skywalker is a heroic figure who might be Apollo, but also Jesus Christ.

[00:01:33]And we can see that George Lucas perhaps worked with some of the patterns that Campbell believed to have recognized in every single hero story across the globe that he collected and compared.

[00:01:50]Now, if we just consider the term monomyth, we find a certain similarity to monoculture.

[00:02:01]And I believe that this is in fact what Campbell's work leads to.

[00:02:07]It is perennialism on steroids.

[00:02:10]And it doesn't actually see any difference. Yes, you know, there is a there are a thousand different faces, but ultimately what it all can be broken down to is that one fundamental structure which he outlines quite succinctly very early on in the hero and the god, which is chapter three.

[00:02:29]And then as he says, the hero leaves the world just on an ordinary day and looks for a realm of supernatural wonders and just um has to withstand certain tests. So, let's read the quote. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. And he actually um draws a little cycle how the hero moves from X to Y to Z and back again. So, it's all perfectly patronized. Everything is perfectly formulaic. And you can find this pattern afterwards everywhere. And of course, he's um he's all too content admitting that some of the hero stories don't follow every single step that he has seen or that he wants to see, but still ultimately you can all break it down to this one {quote} {unquote} archetype.

[00:03:25]So, again, here's the quote. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are then encountered and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Now, if we think of Odysseus, for example, um Odysseus does not venture forth from the world of uh of common day into a region of supernatural wonder.

[00:03:56]Uh he ventures forth to Troy.

[00:04:00]That is how the journey begins.

[00:04:03]There's no supernatural wonder in Troy.

[00:04:06]There are the gods, but the gods are everywhere in the Greek world. They are present in the world. Nothing supernatural or nothing wonderful about them. The gods are present in the house in the oikos in Ithaca just as much as they are present in the battlefield of Troy.

[00:04:26]So, there are no fabulous forces are encountered anywhere in the Iliad.

[00:04:31]That's bogus, so that's not the case at all.

[00:04:34]And the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Now, of course, we could say that if we reduce the Odyssey um to uh just the so-called adventures of which the disease tells, for example, that he encounters the Cyclops um who are a a a race of barbaric uh shepherds who for some reason are chosen by the gods uh and who may or may not be related, by the way, in the Odyssey to the other mythical Cyclops that make the flashes, that produce the flashes for for Zeus.

[00:05:18]So, it's not clear whether that's actually whether they're actually related.

[00:05:22]Whether they're the same or not.

[00:05:23]And, of course, you could think of Circe uh or of Calypso, but Calypso is a nymph.

[00:05:31]Circe is is a nymph or a goddess, uh and so again, there's no supernatural wonder that would be out of the common.

[00:05:40]Um now, we can say, of course, that it it it sounds to us as strange and as supernatural.

[00:05:49]And yes, we might say that they didn't encounter encounter, sorry, uh Calypso in their everyday life, but the world was full of gods.

[00:06:03]Not perhaps to a 20th century man, um but in the ancient world, yes. So, these stories, these myths aren't something that is separated from the mélange of the everyday, from that dreariness and that ever sameness in which we live and then we need something supernatural on top of it, which we get, if we're honest to ourselves, by watching superhero movies, etc. Um no, the world is full of the divine.

[00:06:36]And they have a way of understanding their myths as actually showing how the divine and the mortal or the human are interlaced, interwoven at every step.

[00:06:50]Yeah?

[00:06:51]And so, I'm not certain that Odysseus, upon his return, bestows boons on his fellow men.

[00:06:58]I mean, he loses every single one of his men.

[00:07:04]Now, we can debate whether Odysseus is to blame for that or whether he is not to blame for it because So, he does get them in danger, yes, on the in the land of the of Polyphemus, of the Cyclops. He does get them in danger. He endangers them perhaps, um on Circe's island, and he does But he doesn't get them in danger. He doesn't endanger them when they choose, when his fellow men, those that are still left, choose to slaughter the cattle of Helios, the sun god, and uh and eat them and feast on them, which was prophesied they shouldn't do and if they did, they were to and they they knew they would die. So, they are defiance of the gods and hence they're punished. So, that's not necessarily uh we can't necessarily blame Odysseus for it, but still does he bestow boons on his fellow man? He comes home disguised as a beggar. He has to kill the suitors to install some sort of order again.

[00:08:11]Um and yes, he restores order, but that's not some wonderful, fabulous thing he brings home from from his magical journey that he took.

[00:08:27]So, even just looking at Odysseus, um we see that the outer journey, this formula of adventure as you might call it, is not present in one of the fundamental hero stories [snorts] of Europe.

[00:08:45]But of course he doesn't stop there because in his let's just say I'm I'm sorry to say, but in his very American ways, he's looking for a way to monoculturalize everything, to monocultivate. It is ultimately the psychology of the McDonaldization of the world is present here in Campbell.

[00:09:07]Campbell McDonaldizes.

[00:09:09]You forgive me that. Um he completely homogenizes myth.

[00:09:15]Everything becomes the same and interchangeable. And hence you also get this hotchpotch of Star Wars.

[00:09:21]We is Lucas. So, he wasn't officially employed by Lucas, but Lucas read this work and maybe others by Campbell. They were friends apparently as well. And so they there was influence, let's say, on uh on Star Wars and as we can see, Star Wars won't hold up um, as a story. And in a few years from now, people will say, "Why Why was this ever ever popular?"

[00:09:51]And that has to do with, of course, lip global liberalism, that monoculture of liberalism having run its course, because we now have seen where it leads. And Campbell is part of it. It's part of that neoliberal program that wants to turn the planet into a monoculture. This is ultimately the equivalent of a shopping mall.

[00:10:15]Which year are you shopping for today?

[00:10:19]And it works to a certain extent because it triggers some very you know, how reduced we already are in our being and our ways. That's why it works on us, or at least some of us, and unfortunately, maybe the majority of people. But, in fact, even just looking at Odysseus, we can see that the formula of the outer journey doesn't hold up. So, then there's the inner journey, or the cost of growth, as we might put it. The agony of breaking is a quote from Campbell again, "The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth."

[00:11:00]So, these three stages I should mention are separation, initiation, and return. And they're always the same. Separation, initiation, and return.

[00:11:16]Um, now, I'll say a few words maybe on Beowulf and and Odysseus uh, and Dante in a second.

[00:11:26]But, to say, for example, that Odysseus it just suffers the agony of breaking through personal limitations as if this were some sort of self-help program is to me that it's fascinating to me that this because what So, what Campbell turns out to be is the mythologian, the mythologist of of the technological and framing of the world, as Heidegger might put it.

[00:12:09]And I might put it a bit differently.

[00:12:13]It is the mirage, the eidolon, the shadow image, the mere shadow image of memory.

[00:12:21]You know, there's this there's this supposed collective memory of all the great hero stories, which turn out to be the perfect same effort, which is also quite subversive, if you think about it.

[00:12:32]Because it strips everything from its uniqueness. Its uniqueness is stripped from Uniqueness is stripped from everything, and what you're left with is just a scaffolding.

[00:12:44]A mere structure that then can be replicated again and again and again for the sake of quite obviously Hollywood movies to be you know, programmable in terms of profit maximization and audience outreach.

[00:13:02]W- W- Once that that that monoculture is established, you also get the mono hero and the mono myth, etc. This crowds out the beauty of the of multi- of multiple divinities, of multiple gods, and hence actually is a direct attack on genuine dialogue and intercultural exchange and dialogue and discourse and debate claiming that everything is already the same.

[00:13:42]The Buddha is the same as Jesus, etc. Um nothing out of the ordinary is Jesus.

[00:13:49]They have to leave.

[00:13:50]They're not being kicked out, by the way. They're not refugees. I don't know where that nonsense comes from.

[00:13:55]Mary and Joseph have to leave because there's a census and they have to get counted and that's fine.

[00:14:00]So, they leave. Jesus never leaves. He just runs around where he's where he knows everyone and everyone knows him until they get a bit sick of him.

[00:14:10]Um I don't know. Who's he sep- Who's Who's Jesus separated from? I can't think of it now. Who's he separated from? His mother? No, that never happened.

[00:14:21]How's he initiated? Well, he gets baptized. How does he return? What does he return to? Heaven? Is he separated from God? Is that the story? So, you can see you can make anything fit into this.

[00:14:31]Beca- And this is the This is ac- It's actually really it's I have to say it is quite ingenious. But, it is also just producing a monoculture.

[00:14:41]And I think ultimately purposely so.

[00:14:46]Yeah?

[00:14:47]So, there's I mean, it's how it works structurally.

[00:14:50]He says sameness or there's the archetype.

[00:14:53]And from that archetype, you get a thousand faces, the so-called nuance.

[00:14:57]Yeah? So, I'm looking over my notes now and that is um it's he wouldn't want to see it as a rigid formula. So, he actually pushed back on this, Joseph Campbell, to be fair to him. Yeah? He does acknowledge that there can be stages that happen out of order and that some stories focus entirely just on initiation while others will focus on the return, etc. But but still um for him they are the same because they're maps of the human psyche and the human psyche to him is the same everywhere.

[00:15:29]And that in itself is a mono-cultural view. It's the view of Gleichschaltung.

[00:15:39]It's the view of homogenizing the planet.

[00:15:43]Of making it flat.

[00:15:47]To flatten the earth is the urge of the last man.

[00:15:54]The Erdfloh as Nietzsche says in Zarathustra.

[00:16:00]So let's consider Beowulf.

[00:16:03]Yes, he leaves.

[00:16:06]And however we need to understand that the Beowulf is a And And there's a reason why for example the medieval very often Germanic um myths do not have that same universal claim that for example the Homeric epics have.

[00:16:32]Because they are very Germanic ultimately.

[00:16:35]Yeah, and they've they sort of died with with that with that time. They were We can still read them but they do not speak to us as much as Odysseus's attempt to get home uh to is a doom-laden Germanic tale of of fate of weird.

[00:17:01]Yeah, the the which is by the way where you get of course the word weird from in in modern English.

[00:17:10]And I think the word weird even of course means um means fate um in Old English as well.

[00:17:17]And he dies in a very tragic manner, uh, and in his struggle against the dragon.

[00:17:24]So, how is that the same as Odysseus?

[00:17:28]Not not a glorious return home, but a return home. A fulfilled nostos. The kairos is fulfilled. He returns home. He restores order at home.

[00:17:40]There's no doom. And it's a universal story, the Odyssey, because it is about restoring order.

[00:17:48]Beowulf isn't. Now, let's look at Dante's Divina Commedia.

[00:17:55]Yeah, a very the uh, so, on the surface, deeply Catholic.

[00:18:02]And, of course, there's some personal um, issues that Dante had in his exile, etc. Um, but the Dante doesn't return home, or doesn't return.

[00:18:19]There's no initiation.

[00:18:21]What the Divina Commedia is about is ultimately, on the surface, I would say, is a theological or is a poetic justification for the goodness of God and the justice of the division between heaven and hell.

[00:18:42]That both must be of necessity.

[00:18:46]There are other layers to this I won't go into here, but there's a sort of a esoteric layer to it.

[00:18:53]Um, which may have to do with Dante not trying to justify existence as a divine comedy, but perhaps trying to tie the Christian European world, the Christianized European world, to the ancient world being explicitly guided by Virgil etc. But that's for another time to discuss.

[00:19:20]And so even just looking at a few myths narratives as did I think we can show that the monocultural view of the mono myth is mistaken.

[00:19:33]And it doesn't even work and it's a cop-out by Mr. Campbell to say, well, you know, some stories skip entire stages.

[00:19:41]Stages happen out of order.

[00:19:43]But still ultimately what matters is the formula cuz once you have the formula now you can produce Star Wars.

[00:19:50]Now you can produce all of these movies that always have the same pattern which helps with the view the viewership.

[00:20:01]Um which helps sort of improve the reaction by the viewers cuz they're is sort of now expecting the ever same story to be told again and again, which is what?

[00:20:12]Let's go back.

[00:20:14]Separation, initiation, and return.

[00:20:17]Think of how many Hollywood movies work on that specific formula or pattern.

[00:20:27]And >> [clears throat] >> that I think is the real pattern. It is the it it it it is the Americanized monoculturalization of the world.

[00:20:40]And it This is what Campbell sort of it's he's just holding up a mirror to himself as it were, to his psyche, to this to the American psyche that can only go out into the world and turn everything into part of its grand shopping mall.

[00:20:54]And in this sort of metaphysical supermarket um that we find here is one that has to be pushed back tremendously. Because on the one hand he he is the myth mythologist or the mythological apologist, if you like, of technological enframing.

[00:21:12]To stay with Heidegger, and on the other hand, I would say that what he does is he he and and so his theory or his worldview and whoever uses it for whichever movie production, etc., it allows to generate some sort of memory.

[00:21:34]A sort of a memory particle as a mere format that has the mere appearance, the eidolon, a shadow image, of memory, of let's just say of deep cultural memory, to put it like that, to make myself perhaps uh clearer if I'm speaking ordinary parlance. And so, that is now produced, and this gets confused then with what?

[00:22:02]With the actual memory.

[00:22:05]Which is found in the text.

[00:22:08]And which have to be retrieved again and again and again by every generation if they And and is only alive as long as and comes alive as long as we give, to paraphrase book [clears throat] 11, to borrow from book 11 of Homer's Odyssey, if we give our own blood to that memory and let those spirits rise again and let them speak to us on their own accord, in their own way, and not in their own right, and not by making them fit into this Procrustes bed of this pseudo-scientific, of this scientistic model that Campell has produced.

[00:22:55]So, thank you very much for listening.

[00:22:58]If you enjoyed this video, make sure that you like and subscribe. And also, if you'd like to read some real philosophy, take one of my courses at the Halcyon Philosophy Academy.

[00:23:13]Thank you very much, indeed.