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Anna Pugh, Unicorn Pool, 2018.

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Cupid and Psyche as illustrated by Errol Le Cain.

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Pedro Ruiz(Colombian, b. 1957)

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How do you fight a monster without becoming one yourself?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la8gCrT7U7o&t=3581s

Transcript of part of Jordan Peterson’s October 2018 Q&A video.

How do you fight a monster without becoming one yourself?

You don't!

You become a monster by fighting with a monster. But it's actually a good thing to become a monster. The difference is - and really this is the answer to your question - you can stay naïve, and that's not good, because you're vulnerable and not useful if you're naïve. That's a bad situation. So, let's say, instead of being naïve, you decide to go confront the monster. The problem with that, is that you become the monster.

How do you deal with that? The answer is to do it voluntarily. Because if you develop your monstrousness voluntarily, then perhaps you can bring it under civilised control. You can integrate that capacity for mayhem and destruction that you developed within yourself, you can integrate that within a comprehensive and properly directed practical philosophy. That means that you're disciplined. Like a warrior isn't a monster. You have to discipline your monstrosity and you to do that by developing it voluntarily.

You see it happening all the time in classic hero stories.

If you look at the story of The Hobbit for example.

Bilbo... when the Hobbit starts (the book), Bilbo lives in this little protected area. It's like the castle the Buddha grows up in. All the bad things are outside of it. And the reason for that is because the kingdom is guarded by these descendants of great Kings, the Striders, who the Hobbits have some contempt for - they kinda look like tramps - Aragorn is one of them. So, the descendants of great Kings patrol the border and keep the naïve inhabitants of the Shire safe. They are naïve and they go about their day to day work, nothing really threatens them, there are no monsters around, because they don't have any real challenges and because they are peaceful in their wealth and security, they think they are good.

But they are not! They are just naïve, undisciplined and relatively weak. So they are not prepared for anything when all hell breaks loose. They're like bait, they're like prey, and of course the wizard Gandalf knows this.

Despite the fact that the Shire folks are rather small, a bit comical and tremendously naïve, they do have a latent ability for courage and forthrightness. Gandalf can really see this in this one Hobbit Bilbo. He tells Bilbo that darkness is brewing in the out lands, outside the protected territory. Absolutely classic mythological representation.

It's the same in the Lion King where Mustafa tells Simba that his kingdom is everything that the light falls on and that he's not to journey outside of that domain - that's the elephant graveyard and death and all of that. That's outside of the Shire, it's outside of Paradise, it's outside of the Walled City, it's outside of your domain of knowledge.

That's where malevolence and chaos brew. You see that again in the Lion King, that's where Oscar and the hyenas go off to conspire and turn into what are essentially jackbooted Nazis before they take over the pride land. Same idea.

What happens to Bilbo when he goes off to confront the Dragon, is that he has to become a thief. It's very strange ethically because Bilbo wasn't a thief, and you think, well, it's better to not be a thief than to be a thief. The answer to that is a very hard answer, a very complicated answer, not one to be dealt with lightly.

It's not good to be moral if the reason that you're moral is because you cannot be otherwise. That's the naivety issue. Naivety is not morality. If you're terrified to be a thief and you have no skill at it, and you're not a thief, doesn't mean you're good.

Now, if you could be the best thief in the world, you were one sneaky character, and fast on your feet, and a strategic thinker, and capable of breaking rules when necessary, and scaling walls and climbing houses and infiltrating parties and plotting for the long run - and then you decide not to do it, then that's a whole different story. Then you're a moral animal. You need that capacity for criminality, you need the capacity of evil and you need to have mastered that, and that's what makes you good.

That's what happens in the Hobbit. Bilbo has to develop his dark side, his shadow, and he does that. He's a thief in a variety of ways, he ends up stealing the Ring, which is really interesting, and that leads to Lord of the Rings.

He doesn't get away scar free from developing his dark side. He's touched by evil from then on in, he's got the Ring problem, that's a big one, that thing might possess him because he's got too close to it. It's like Harry Potter and his scar and the fact that he has a bit of Voldemort in him. It's exactly the same idea. Or the strange affinity that the Joker insists upon in Joker and Batman.

When Bilbo comes back to the Shire he's never one of the Hobbits again. He's always an outsider, he's got a glimmer of magic and danger about him. That makes people respect him but they also think that he's unconventional in an unacceptable way. Kind of make a wide berth around him because now he's contaminated with evil and the unknown, even though that makes him a much better character all things considered, and a real fighter in the battle between good and evil, and the person who's gone out and confront the Dragon and got the treasure.

The pathway from naivety to the full development of character is associated with the development in the Union sense of the shadow, and that's that capacity for mayhem and malevolence that needs to be brought under control.

It's complicated.

That doesn't mean you're justified in going out and breaking rules because you think you're building your character. it's not that simple. If you look at stories like Harry Potter, all of Harry's crew breaks rules but they only break a rule when not breaking it would break a higher-order rule. And that's still morally ambivalent, because the best pathway forward is to violate no conventions, to do the right thing and violate no conventions. But now and then you're in a terrible situation where you can do a small bad thing or a large bad thing. Or you can allow a large bad thing to happen by failing to break a rule. That often happens in Harry Potter. So then you're in trouble, and part of being wise and oriented towards the good is to know when breaking a rule is the right thing to do even though you shouldn't break rules.

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Vincent van Gogh - Almond blossom (detail)

Vincent van Gogh (detail)

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“Farmhouse in Provence“ (details), 1888, Vincent van Gogh.

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House of cards nails it: For psychopaths it’s all about collecting people.

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Birth of Venus - Sandro Botticelli

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Looks like Zurich, CH

Paul Delvaux Faubourg 1956

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Snail Colored Pencil Drawing

Faber-Castell Classic Colour Coloured Pencils Derwent Sketchbook No.2

I am working on upping my snail game.