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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:00
Harry Potter, Star Wars and the Violent Fantasies of Crushed Souls
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
This is a post that was put on the Free Domain Radio forum some time back and I thought it was just so brilliant and I've been meaning to read it for a while.
I do analyses of art in the show and I hope that you will go and check those out, movie reviews and so on.
But this is about the Harry Potter series.
I'll throw in a few thoughts of my own, but I thought I'm just going to read this verbatim.
It was a fantastic post.
The Harry Potter series is about mental illness.
Hogwarts is a mental institution.
I watched the fifth Harry Potter movie this weekend.
The series is wildly successful, one of the most successful of all time, and I'm interested in understanding why these mega-hits appear from time to time.
As I watched this installment it became clear to me that the entire Harry Potter series is an extended metaphor, a coded transcription really, about a boy with severe mental illness suffering from delusions.
Everything depicted in the movie can be interpreted as a recitation from his delusional perspective of his attempts to cope with the harsh realities of his confinement in a mental institution.
Here is my thesis.
Every major event in the book is a fantasy slash delusional version of the experience that a child would encounter in the course of being institutionalized and forcibly treated for mental illness.
When Steph reviewed the Twilight series in one of his podcasts, I was inspired to go back and look at a lot of popular books and movies and interpret them in a new light.
In short, my theory is that most, if not all, of the most popular books and movies of all time are constructed as a kind of double fantasy.
The reader and author understand and implicitly agree that the subject matter of the book or movie is not real.
But on another level, the events in these stories are also constructed as a fantasy or delusion of the protagonist himself.
Typically, the opening act of this kind of story takes place in the real world.
Then, something happens that sends the hero into a new world where the usual rules of the hero's former life do not apply.
In supernatural-based storylines, this is where the first non-empirical, quote, magical event occurs.
In the real-world portion of these stories, the protagonist typically experiences some form of psychological trauma, notably in the form of humiliation, rejection, or social isolation.
The hero finds himself to be anonymous, abandoned, dumped, or socially subordinated in some extreme way.
Luke Skywalker is told he can't leave the farm.
Dorothy is told to stay out of the way of the grown-ups while her dog is about to be killed.
Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby finds that he is incapable of intimacy and feels like a fraud among the New York elite.
The narrator in Fight Club is literally anonymous and lives in corporate hell.
Peter Parker and Clark Kent are bullied relentlessly.
Then some outside agency comes along and empowers the hero to respond to these traumas.
The resulting heroism is always the exact opposite of the earlier powerlessness, rejection or humiliation.
Freud called this type of story a family romance, in which a young hero imagines his primary caretakers to be mere substitutes for his real parents, who are dead or otherwise out of the picture, but are of higher social class than his foster parents.
In the Harry Potter series, his real parents are famous wizards, who were famous in all the world for their unparalleled love for the boy Harry, which set the whole series in motion, killing them and leaving the boy a scarred orphan.
This is fantasy, crafted as the direct opposite of the way in which children usually end up scarred, through abuse and neglect.
If we interpret the story as Harry's fantasy, then the Dursleys are Harry's real parents, and the Potters are imaginary.
The Dursleys either can't cope with the increasingly delusional boy living with them, or perhaps they are merely abusive, and it's the abuse that is making him delusional.
In any event, the parent figures constantly mistreat him, favor the brother, and inflict endless cruelty and humiliation on him.
One day, Harry snaps, and Dudley, who is really Harry's brother, is severely injured, in a way requiring repeated hospital treatments.
In the delusion, Harry imagines that a pig's tail is magically grown from Dudley's buttocks.
As a result of this incident, Harry is taken away to a, quote, special school.
My theory is that this storyline is a coded explication of a delusional boy that is starting to engage in violent outbursts and is sent to a mental institution as a result.
Everything that happens after that becomes increasingly detached from reality, and what we see as the audience is his delusion, which is a recasting of his institutionalization experience as a kind of adventure.
I believe there is a great deal of evidence in the text for this hypothesis.
Mental illness is featured just about everywhere in the series, and the theme of insanity is very prominent.
Classic features of mental illness, such as delusions, paranoia, and multiple personality disorders become increasingly more important to the storyline.
Here are a few examples.
The first book features Harry at his new, quote, school, becoming obsessed with the mirror where he spends endless days imagining his perfect parents.
Of course, they are dead, which is a metaphor for saying they are wholly imaginary.
Dumbledore, the paragon of surrogate love, warns Harry that the mirror has driven people insane, because spending all your time in fantasy causes you to become unmoored to the real world.
This is exactly what happens to Harry for the rest of the series.
The school is locked.
It is also filled with random insane dangers that everyone accepts as perfectly normal.
Moving stairs, talking paintings, deadly monsters roaming around outside.
Mental prisons are dangerous places where crazy situations are, in fact, ordinary.
Sirius Black is Harry's godfather and is overtly insane.
In the fourth book, Black is closely affiliated with, and introduced by, and treated as a kind of surrogate for, a werewolf who is obsessed with the moon.
The moon is a symbol for insanity, i.e.
lunacy.
The Goblet of Fire contest pits students against each other in contests that are openly life-threatening, which is what students at a school for violent, mentally disturbed children experience on a regular basis.
The clean-cut Derek Diggory, a fantasy image of the popular successful boy Harry could have been, were it not for his mental problems, is murdered by, quote, Voldemort, who is Harry's alter-ego, and the projection of his rage and fury.
Harry is the only one who sees this event, and no one believes it was, quote, Voldemort.
This event is a metaphor for Harry murdering a boy who was too perfect, despised for having a life of love and ease that Harry wanted but never got.
So he imagines that Voldemort did it when no one believes him.
It's an unspoken metaphor for the fact that everyone knows Harry is the murderer.
It is the murder of Dirk Diggory.
Sorry, if the murder of Dirk Diggory is not meant to be a real event, but entirely imaginary in Harry's mind, then the murder of the normal boy is a metaphor for Harry losing his final chance at a normal life.
The, this quote, murder takes place in a maze where the main danger is being psychologically possessed and going insane.
Harry is helped in this unwanted fight to the death by Mad-Eye Moody, who is also openly insane.
To compound the insanity of this parent-surrogate, Moody is not actually the real Moody, but an imposter, who is even more openly insane.
Book 5 opens with Harry again attacking his brother-slash-cousin Dudley, leaving him traumatized.
Periodically, Harry returns to civilian life, but finds that he can't go five minutes without a seriously violent, delusional episode.
This incident was interpreted by Harry as an attack by Dementors, who cannot be seen by normal people.
This incident causes Harry to appear before a board of inquiry to determine if he is too violent for Hogwarts, the alternative being Azkaban, i.e.
a more harsh mental prison.
Azkaban is heavily associated with insanity.
In the story, it is said that inmates go crazy within days of arriving, which is a metaphor for saying that it is a high-security prison for violent mental patients.
It is where Black and Lestrange and others went off the rails.
It is also in the fifth book and movie that we meet Black's cousin, Beatrix Lestrange, who is also openly insane.
She murders the insane Sirius Black just as he is becoming more stable and normal.
This is a metaphor for the violently delusional side of Harry's mind defeating and suppressing the side that might have healed.
Harry's newest friend at school is Luna Lovegood whose name is another reference to lunacy and is openly known to be crazy and is the only other student who can see Harry's delusions even within the context of an otherwise crazy place like Hogwarts.
Another classmate, Neville Longbottom, the forlorn loser, is revealed to have a family history of mental illness.
Parents who are mental patients, having been driven insane by Beatrix.
Repeated references are made to Voldemort being so evil that he drives his victims crazy with torture rather than merely killing them.
It is repeatedly indicated that the boy, Tom Riddle, the young, quote, Voldemort, is actually Harry Potter, with constant parallels and similarities being heavily stressed.
Same books, same wand, both orphaned, etc.
Harry has increasing visions of Voldemort, and they even share thoughts, which is an obvious symbol for saying that Voldemort is just a component of Harry's diseased mind, at first only a whisper, and becoming increasingly dominant and thus real to him.
In the sixth or seventh book, I believe Rowling tried to tell us what she was really writing about.
There is a flashback scene where Dumbledore first meets, quote, Voldemort as a boy.
Dumbledore comes to rescue the boy, who is really Riddle slash Harry, from abuse and poverty.
When Dumbledore says he has come to take him to a special school for kids with his kinds of needs, Riddle's first response is that he knows Hogwarts is an insane asylum and he doesn't want to go.
After I watched the movie, I suspected that the author, J.K.
Rowling, might have had some family or personal experience with childhood mental issues or institutionalization, and that her Harry Potter series is a way for her to talk about them in a safe way.
I did some quick searching about her online.
I couldn't find any reference to any institutionalization experiences in her childhood, although I did find this.
She donates heavily to two causes, multiple sclerosis, which was her mother's cause of death, and has gone to great lengths to fund an organization called Lumos, described as follows.
We want to end the systematic institutionalization of children across Europe.
We want to see children living in safe, caring environments.
We believe this should be the case for all children, whether they're disabled, from an ethnic minority, or from an impoverished background.
We know our vision is ambitious.
We understand that removing children from institutions isn't in itself enough.
We must work with governments, policy makers, and practitioners to enable children to grow up in a family-type setting.
Here's a quote from the author on the subject.
20 years ago, as communist regimes across Europe toppled, harrowing images of Europe's hidden children began to emerge, said Rowling.
Thousands upon thousands of children were living in vast depressing institutions, malnourished and often maltreated, with little access to the outside world.
Slowly, governments have begun to transform healthcare systems.
Real and lasting change takes time, but today we are putting down a marker and calling for significantly more progress in the next 20 years to ensure that eventually no children are living in, or at risk of entering, such institutions.
Steph once said that Catcher in the Rye was Salinger's way of talking about the sexual exploitation of children, but that he became withdrawn because no one seemed to understand.
I believe the Harry Potter series was written about the kind of experiences that institutionalized children encounter, the kind that the Loomis charity is working to eradicate, but that most people simply see it as an adventure story about magic.
It's not about magic.
It's about mental trauma and the delusions that result from it.
And somebody else posted on the thread, in the last Harry Potter book, I remembered a few lines that might be worth mentioning, especially since it is in the end of the last book.
Here's the exact quote.
Obviously it's a spoiler.
Harry says, Tell me one last thing.
Is this real?
Or has this been happening inside my head?
Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry.
But why on earth should that mean that it is not real?
Well, I think it's a brilliant theory.
It gave me goosebumps to read.
I wanted to share it with you.
I've had similar thoughts about Star Wars.
Just very, very briefly, Star Wars.
The interesting thing is that these adventure stories and these adventure scenarios and environments, like Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and so on, they don't tend to provoke people to great courage.
They tend to attract people who have a deficiency of courage as a result of isolation and childhood traumas.
It is entirely irrational and unreasonable, and I've podcasted about this, I'll put a link to the podcast below, to imagine that if Harry Potter had been raised by this abusive aunt and uncle who literally kept him locked under the stairs and isolated and half-starved, that he would grow into a heroic, brave, courageous, socially adept leader.
I mean, this is just not what happens to these kinds of victims, unless they're in a completely insane environment.
But with Star Wars, I mean, there is a trauma.
Luke goes off in a crazy state and meets an imaginary wizard who tells him that he's, you know, the lord of all universe and the son of a great starfighter and all that sort of stuff right after his uncle humiliates him and then he goes back and his aunt and uncle are mysteriously dead.
Well, you know, the typical way of looking at this from a psychological standpoint would be that in a fit of rage after the humiliation of his real parents, he went into a crazy state where, a grandiose state where he killed them and then fled with, you know, fled from this into fantasy, into madness.
So what this tells me about Luke Skywalker is that he is unable to stand up to his father, Uncle Owen, the dead-eyed, soul-crushing farmer in the ass end of nowhere who won't let him think about leaving. soul-crushing farmer in the ass end of nowhere who won't He's...
He can't stand up to him.
He can't escape that.
He's just crushed underneath and has no voice.
And what always follows from A feeling of an inability to negotiate is a flood of violence, of violent impulses.
In fact, I would argue that the fundamental reason why violence exists in the world is because people do not have the capacity to negotiate.
If people had the capacity to negotiate, there would be almost no violence in the world.
Violence is what happens When the flow of human communication is dammed up by an inability to negotiate, you get an overflow, right?
The boiling oil of the blood come over the ramparts and you get violence as a result.
And you see that.
He can't say anything to his father.
He can't stand up to this Uncle Owen.
He can't individuate.
He can't negotiate within or leave that relationship.
And so what happens next is a flood of fantastic violence, of fantasy violence.
And the archetypes that occur in these floods of fantasy, of violent fantasies, to me are very powerful.
His parents have to die, as all these parents have to die, as in almost every Disney film.
I think except the 100-month Dalmatians, the parents are all dead, the early ones.
The parents have to die because it's the only escape, right?
So if you can't negotiate your way out of or just leave abusive relationships, then you fantasize about people dying so that you can be free.
And the death fantasies that strike upwards through the hierarchy in these kinds of shows are amazing.
And this is why they attract the dweebs and the geeks and the nerds.
And this is the Big Bang Theory problem, right?
Because you have to explain this fundamentally, these stories.
You have to explain Why stories about heroism attract and ensnare the least heroic among us?
Right?
Well, it's because...
When you can't negotiate, when you've been crushed and abused and ground down and silenced and ridiculed and humiliated and punished and ignored and abused, or, you know, any random plate heaping from that infernal buffet, then you have murderous fantasies.
And these stories, these sword and sorcery tales, these space epics, they're all murderous fantasies.
And so, yeah, you can't negotiate and you can't escape and therefore you fantasize about violence, particularly violence towards parents or other authority figures who are close, which is why these things always occur.
Because the reality is, if you're in an abusive relationship, I mean, I argue you should strive to negotiate your way into some sort of equality, into some sort of better standing in that relationship.
And you should work really hard to try and do that.
But if you can't, then you should hit the eject button.
It's the only sane thing to do.
If you're in a relationship where you can't negotiate, you either can't find a way to negotiate within that relationship, or you leave.
And if the relationship continues to be abusive, Then, if you cannot leave an abusive relationship, or you will not leave an abusive relationship, you will leave reality.
If you can't hit the eject button on an abuser, reality will hit the eject button on you.
It's inevitable.
It's like dominoes going down.
And the prevalence of these stories is the degree to which this is a factor in society as it stands.
It's chilling.
And the architects of Star Wars, to me, are very interesting.
It's all just theorizing, you know?
It's just bullshit on a couch, so, you know, take it for what it's worth.
But when Luke escapes into these violent fantasies after he kills his parents, or he mentally kills his parents, right?
I mean, he goes into these fantasies and they're quite indicative because they keep him in a childlike state.
So, for instance, You know, the prelude to an adult sexual relationship is masturbation.
And who does he escape from this violence, the murder of his parents?
Who does he escape with?
Han Solo.
You just throw a D in there, there's Han Solo, which is obviously a synonym for masturbation.
There's also, in this kind of situation, there's a fear of women.
A fear of women that goes because there's a lack of bonding with the mom.
And I can't remember the Beru, Aunt Beru or whatever the mom is in this fantasy before she's killed.
I'm sorry, in reality before she's killed.
She gives him a sympathetic look but won't intervene with her husband.
So there's a lack of bonding with the mother figure which produces a terror of women.
And the terror of women, in my opinion, shows up in the form of Chewbacca, who's a big, well-armed vagina.
And you can tell that it's a vagina because there's no clothes.
He's naked, completely naked, and sexless, and scary, and big, and strong, and powerful.
And you can also see that his fear of women because he's only sexual attraction that you see in this in the stories is with his, well, with the woman who turns out, Princess Leia, who turns out to be his sister.
And There's, of course, the murderous rage towards the... and so there's an immaturity here, right?
There's a lack of acceptance of adult, a female sexuality of adult.
So if you can't negotiate, then you can only masturbate and fantasize about that which terrifies you, which is, you know, a woman's actual vagina.
This is, I mean, this is a very powerful thing in the psyche, particularly of men.
This is many years ago.
My therapist gave me the book Man's Fear of Women.
You wouldn't believe the amount of cultures where men believe that the vagina, vagina dentata, it even has a name.
The vagina has teeth and can bite off a penis.
This fear of women is very powerful in society.
And it's all the way through these stories.
I mean, think of Galadriel.
I mean, it's a terrifying woman, right?
In Lord of the Rings.
But what you see throughout Star Wars is this continual murderousness towards father figures, right?
Obi-Wan Kenobi is obviously a good father figure.
He's the Dumbledore.
He's the part that might be able to heal or whatever.
And, I mean, he's killed.
Obi-Wan is killed.
I don't know what happens to Dumbledore.
I haven't read too many of those books.
But Obi-Wan is killed.
So the good father is killed by the bad father, who is the real father, Darth Vader.
And, I mean, even the whole Death Star, the Death Star has this huge testicle, right?
He's a literal ball buster in this.
It's a...
I mean, and the little torpedo going in the hole.
I mean, it is rage against adult sexuality, because there's an inability to negotiate.
When there's an inability to negotiate, there's a lack of individuation, a lack of selfhood, a lack of capacity to be with another human being in an equal state, and therefore there is only fantasy.
There is no reality.
There is no intimacy.
There is only dreams of mad glory, right?
So I think at the end of the very first Star Wars film, I think in 1977, they're on this podium and they're all getting these awards and everyone's cheering, right?
In the absence of intimacy, there is only empty grandiosity and fantasies of violence and asexuality or hypersexuality.
There is not a self, there is not an identity who can connect with another human being.
So, I mean, if you start to look for these situations, if you start to look for these patterns, you can really, really see them.
But it all comes right back to...
If we don't process the humiliations of our childhood, then we will end up with these grandiose fantasies.
And you can see this in sports, in martial arts, in Transformers, in kids' intense fantasies about dinosaurs, you know, these big, giant, powerful, right?
These are all compensations for feelings of humiliation that can't be processed in the moment.
um the kids obsessions with uh war games and the kids obsessions again with with these giant either robots or or or um spaceships or war machines or um dinosaurs or whatever it is that has a massive amount of power well that's in a sense the brain blood that spills out of the wound called humiliation is this fight these fiery fantasies of grandiosity
naturally this ties very much into war right which is the ultimate murderous fantasy and and the humiliation of children is is essential to the development of the warrior class it's no accident that the south of the u.s is is known both for Violence against children, which is still legal in many parts of it, and also for military prestige, right?
And so you crush children in order for them to be spat out, basically the shithole of violent fantasies, so that they're much more primed to be warriors.
And again, if you take all of that out of the equation, if you don't humiliate children or if you accept the fact that you, if you were, that you were humiliated as a child and you can deal with that humiliation and the pain and smallness and difficulty that engendered in your soul, then you won't need to avoid your proximity, to avoid the toxicity of those who are close to you by spinning yourself off into fantasy.
I think of that engineering and Big Bang Theory who's got that wretched screechy Jewish mom.
He's always out there in fantasy and the tall skinny guy has got the religious mom who he can't communicate with, who he can't interact with.
He's always spinning off into fantasy.
Sheldon.
The main guy, the Jimmy Galecki, I think his name is, his character has got that really cold and distant mom and his girlfriend has these really cold and disapproving moms.
There is this continual drive towards fantasy that comes from being crushed early in life.
And so if you're attracted to these kinds of things, if you fantasize, about your capacity for violence.
If you daydream or are drawn towards movies with cartoony kinds of violence, that is a certain sign to my way of thinking.
It's just my opinion.
That is a certain sign that you are bleeding from a crushed and stomped and humiliated heart.
Please stop and staunch the wound.
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