The “Hero’s Journey” Is Nonsense | Hacker News Reader

The “Hero’s Journey” Is Nonsense

talesoftimesforgotten.com

14 pointsshantnutiwari19 comments

The monomyth is itself a myth not science.

Is this how people really interpret people like J. Campbell (and J. Peterson)? I don't take him so literally. When a meta-story is described I imagine it is described not in a general abstract way (as in mathematical laws) but in a list of prototypes and archetypes that also contain aspects that are idiosyncratic and don't apply generally. I guess you could think of it as the synthesis of the specific and the general done in a wise way. That is lossy compression + mnemonic additions of non-general properties.

That is the hero's journey is a meta-myth not an abstract general law like the Pythagorean theorem. The reason that mythological communication (and meta-mythological communication) as opposed to precise, mathematical/scientific communication is used is because it serves more purposes than just an attempt at perfect predictability. Like memorability and being widely understood by even children.

I just thought of Campbell as saying "here are some interesting comparative parallels that contain interesting some tendencies", but the general implicit point is that of the lesson of developmental processes being nonmonotonic.

That is development occurs through periodic degenerate movement. This is even true of the nonliving world. My chemistry knowledge is zero, but I wonder if this applies to even nucleosynthesis (the emergence of the periodic table). That is opposing periodic trends create a progression of electron configurations and so the energy levels have degeneracies. (but in this example I don't remember if the degeneracies have to be "moved through")

Also in chemistry we have the idea of a reaction barrier. In the domain of consciousness people speaking of a metaphor to annealing from metallurgy. This pattern is ubiquitous and in mythology and psychology is about the value of progressively and iteratively confronting our fears. More generally it is just about the concept of indirection.

First off, thank you for a very interesting response.

> More generally [this pattern] is just about the concept of indirection.

What do you mean?

How does the metaphor of annealing relate "hero's journey" to "the concept of indirection"?

> That is development occurs through periodic degenerate movement.

I understand physical annealing as heating a material up to a point where it can recrystalise, and controlling the speed at which the material cools causes crystals to form in intended patterns determined by the material's ability to form certain crystal structures at certain temperatures.

I understand simulated annealing as the metaheuristic where the metaphorical heat of a system determines the probability that an iterated search for an optimum is found close to or far from existing optima.

I can also imagine the chemical reaction barrier as a metaphor.

But I don't understand how that relates to indirection, or what's even meant by this.

Sorry just seeing this now. By indirection I just meant taking a longer path than the direct shortest path. This could be seen as being in a local minima and by climbing that hill so arrive at a lower more stable even lower minima.

The monomyth isn't best concetualized as a perfect circular cycle but as a 3D upward spiral. That is because it is considered to be progressive. As the T S Eliott quote goes "...Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time."

My point is that this spiral isnt always upward as it cycles. It also has to go downward (degeneration) in order to go upward. Mythologically speaking this is the descent into hell or facing your fears.

We understand this in our everyday life in that we hardly ever approach goals directly. Think of how people endure the suffering of exercise so they can minimize suffering/death later in life (well there is more than one reason for exercise).

In fact another way of seeing it is through finance. We save and invest rather than spend because of the present/future value trade-offs.

Think of a maze for an AI, where you know the coordinates of the goal ahead of time. Do you assume that the navigation will be the shortest path and never move in a way that increases your distance from the goal? There will likely be instances like this.

The annealing examples if I remeber correctly have to do with the notion of getting to a lower more stable energy state by going up first (climbing a hill).

I didn't find the author's argument compelling. The "Hero's Journey" continues to be a useful model to understand both myth as well as an individual's growth into mature adulthood.

> It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases

Okey-dokey. No need to read any further.

No mention of the Golden Bough, no Jung, no Levi-Strauss.

Author has no idea what they're on about. This amounts to a hot take on an entire field of study, viewed through a very narrow and specific ideological lens. No self awareness.

The author repeatedly undermines their own thesis by showing multiple examples of how the myth is in fact deeply embedded across many cultures. What a strange anti-argument.

If you'd like to go beyond the reductionist view of Joseph Campbell as a proponent of something that can be summarized by a phrase or a pop-sci concept, I recommend his four-book series, Masks of God.

- Primitive Mythology

- Oriental Mythology

- Occidental Mythology

- Creative Mythology

Based on his study of history and anthropology, these book are rich with insights into human psychology and cultures around the world. Particularly the final volume culminates in a philosophy of art that's fit for the modern artist.

This is generally correct; Campbell's not a horrible influence or anything like that, but after it all, it's hard to suggest that he's ever said anything much more than "Good stories involve a protagonist who goes through a tough struggle." That's the only real unifying theme.

It really is generic Jungian horseshit. I find it so bad (and with such airs of pseudo-profundity) that it actually complicated my feelings about Bill Moyers, about whom I like everything else.

edit: I don't even know how you discuss it for more than five minutes. Whenever discussion about this Hero's Journey gets specific, it gets obviously wrong. The lane the discussion stays in is endless cherry-picking of particular events from stories and calling them examples. I get that you can tell a story about a hero taking a journey, what I want to know is why you think that most stories are about a hero taking a journey, or why that's more important than any other story, like a woman trying to start a stationary shop. And don't tell me that the woman is the hero, and the stationary shop is the journey.

> don't tell me that the woman is the hero, and the stationary shop is the journey.

Why not? Journeys can be of the mind. That is, after all, what reading is. A classic Danish story is the Brothers Lionheart about two brothers, one of which has cancer and the other trying to comfort him with stories about what happens when you die, conquering your fear of death and such… but wait, they’re two boys, one of which is always in bed, so there’s no journey. Similarly, The Kite Runner is about a boy who plays with a kite in the same limited area of a desert. Hardly a journey if you keep going forth and back like you perpetually lost your keys. ;-)

The point isn't that what you're saying is false, the point is that what you're saying is meaningless precisely because it can apply to literally every story.

Because most stories, if they are at all compelling, are about change.

As for models, The Story Circle is easier to use, but these are still models of stories.

It's like arguing that "I've never seen purple weather" when discussing how weather models are shown on newscasts. That would be missing the point.

I actually enjoyed reading Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. I understand that in the last few years he’s really taken off the human mask and showed a really unflattering side of himself.

One of the points I took away from the book is that the hero’s journey story form is inevitable because it maps to how we make sense of the world. We are constantly trying as animals to make sense of a chaotic environment. His version of the ur-story is that we have a territory of understanding, and the journey is how to go out of this safe place of the know , make some meaning out of it (make it useful, understand it, conquer it) and “bring it home”. At the end we are better for having incorporated more of the world into ourselves.

They way humans uniquely do this is through story, but even at an autonomic level our bodies maintain homeostasis through the same process. Fundamentally what it means to navigate an environment—something all mobile creatures do— is to create these “maps of meaning” and then use the maps that we have internalized to move through the world. This skill is what makes is able to learn, to be flexible, and to be resilient.

Stories aren’t very interesting to people if the characters in them don’t at least have a chance to learn something. Stories where everything always goes right and there are no problems at all mean that the characters in them never leave the territory of the known. But there are so many ways to inject meaning in a story that don’t map directly to the heroes journey. There can be stories where the hero never learns or conquers anything at all, but the viewer is better for having experienced it. That’s where I think the heroes journey theory breaks down.

Thanks for sharing.

> [Jordan Peterson]'s really taken off the human mask and showed a really unflattering side of himself.

Is this just a disclaimer to counterbalance any positive reflection of him so that a reaction to what you say will more likely focus on his points about the hero's journey, rather than his persona?

> Indeed, even Campbell himself admits in his book that not all stories address all seventeen stages of the “hero’s journey” explicitly, that sometimes certain stages may be expanded, condensed, or skipped entirely, and that not all stories will necessarily address the stages in the same order.

> In other words, the “hero’s journey” is essentially just a list of tropes that sometimes appear in some stories from some cultures. This actually poses a huge problem for Campbell’s thesis that the “hero’s journey” is an innate part of the human psyche.

For those that want a TLDR, here’s the hero’s journey: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heroesjourney.svg

It looks as though these might be “part of the human psyche” because they’re commonly lived experiences.

Call to Adventure = A challenge

Supernatural Aid = Luck

Helper / Mentor = Family / Friends

Revelation / Transformation = Learning

Atonement = Reconciliation / Resolution

Return = Success

I’m sure there are other ways to interpret it too, but if you generalize the most engaging / exciting aspects of being human, that makes a story most people can relate to.

If you replaced "The Hero's Journey" with the (Japanese-anime) word "Isekai", I get the same feeling here.

"Isekai" is the "Trapped in another world" trope that suddenly became popular for anime/manga in the last 10 years. But the basis of the story has been backwards-applied to Wizard of Oz, a Kid in King Author's Court, and even 90s shows like Digimon, Escaflowne, and .Hack//Sign.

Except "Isekai" as a concept didn't exist until relatively recently, within the past decade or so. There's no way Mark Twain was thinking of that concept when he wrote "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" over a hundred years ago.

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Furthermore, a lot of the tropes associated with the Isekai genre can be applied to plenty of other stories (including the Hero's Journey). Harry Potter, for example, hits overpowered main character, travel to effectively another world hidden amongst people (Hogwarts), magical / fantasy tropes (classical monsters), etc. etc.

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There are however, certain tropes and storytelling devices that are popular amongst people. When you take an "average person" and stick them as the main character, with few defining features... it allows for the reader / watchers to "self-insert" themselves as the protagonist.

See Harry Potter who comes from Muggle society, The Connecticut Yankee who represented a modern American from Mark Twain's era, Dorethy from Kansas, or the legion of Isekai protagonists from Kagome (Inuyasha), to Kirito (Sword Art Online). You give the main character a degree of wish fulfillment, including adventure, romance, and overall a positive and uplifting story. And a lot of people will like it. (The notion of "The Outsider" from Westerns and Japanese Samurai films also hits this trope)

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We can see that "The Hero's Journey" in fact follows a lot of similar patterns with "Isekai" itself even. Adventure is thrust upon the protagonist in the form of "The Isekai" moment (the moment where the protagonist is teleported to another world somehow).

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I think "The Hero's Journey" is largely the same. Its a backwards application being applied forwards. A concept created in 1944 that tries to unify stories from centuries or millennia ago, and tries to distill them into a singular "pattern" that works for today's audiences.

No different from "Isekai" these days (though on a shorter timescale: a concept from the past 15 years that very well could be applied to stories from 100 years ago). Now excuse me, I have some trash anime to watch...

EDIT: The trolls will joke that "Saving Private Ryan" is an Isekai. The WW2 front was a very different life, and the "Isekai" moment was getting off the boat and onto the shores of West Europe. They can't go back until they've accomplished their mission, so its an Isekai, trapped in another world.

If the emphasis is on the the interaction between the protagonist and the new environment, I've also heard it called a 'fish out of water story'.

The opposite.

Isekai are normally about how "normal everyday man" has innate advantages over the new world.

Ex: Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court knew about solar eclipses. He pretends to "destroy the sun" on his day of execution. When King Arthur pleads to bring the sun back, he "does so" (or the eclipse passes I should say), and this event solidifies himself as a wizard on King Arthur's Court.

Ex2: Rimuru Tempest (That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime) uses his general-contractor knowledge to find specialists and organize his new town, becoming effectively the king of the monsters. The stronger monsters, with good leadership skills from Rimuru thanks to General Contracting knowledge, allows him to build roads, build new buildings, and advance his country faster than his neighbors. Ordinary humans simply don't have as much strength, dexterity, or stamina as Orcs, Goblins, and Oni. His former knowledge (and now monster-body) allows Rimuru to lead this group tremendously. And his general knowledge of humans allows him to play the political game with humans much better than any of the monsters could.

Ex3: Harry Potter has plenty of "Muggle Knowledge", like how to send mail / post office stuff, or interact with TVs, Telephones, and Computers, throughout his series. Wizards and witches don't understand this, so Harry Potter can do a lot of things and help out.

Ex4: "The Wizard of Oz" is himself, just a Kansas man, who knew some party tricks. These party tricks and conman-like trickery in general makes him into the leader of the Emerald City. Dorethy, herself from Kansas, is a kind-hearted young girl who knew how to use a water bucket to put out a fire... And that's all that was needed to overpower a lot of the evil-witch's spells and defeat the witch.

Ex5: Ains, from the Anime/Novel "Overlord", is a guild-leader from a popular MMORPG. He uses his guild-leader / video game organization skills to lead the new NPCs to conquer the new world. (Though its more tongue-in-cheek: a lot of Ain's "brilliance" is dumb luck. So its somewhat making fun of other Isekai, since it makes it clear that Ains really isn't that smart)

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Its not a "fish out of water" story, because Isekai is largely about wish fulfilment. You make the average, ordinary person into a hero.

So its more like this optimistic, hopeful story about how a typical person's ordinary experience can be very helpful in different circumstances. There's also normally some kind of superpower that's not fully under the main character's control (ex: Harry Potter's scar, that connects him to Volemort). The superpower helps the "fish out of water" situation, allowing the main character to focus on how "ordinary people skills" help this new world out so much.

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