Why Are We Waiting for a Hobbit?
By: Mike Meyer
Tags: Change, Culture, Books, Future, Climate Change

This is particularly true of the United States as the failing center of the modern world. The irony of the US becoming like the tower of Mordor and the domain of resurgent evil as its population struggles with that realization is so exact it is hard to avoid. The mindless minions of a reality TV Sauron, screaming threats while stumbling into a self made hell, should be satire. So why is it becoming real?

Because a large enough portion of the population can’t, yet, see fantasy as metaphor and cannot escape childhood delusion. Their stories are reality and complexity is beyond them but only with a increasingly violent struggle to suppress the realization of what that really means.

It is part of the new reality that we are all becoming able to see that an intense reaction by a minority is able to force their delusion on all of us. The universe of which we are a part is not made up of separate, unaware pieces and is not limited to individual consciousness.

This dangerous situation is actually a proof of the nature of what we perceive as our new reality. We cannot randomly deny components of our shared reality whether right or wrong without conscious and careful planning. The old world of our individual desires in complete isolation from everything of which we are a part is gone.

In many ways this is the total focus on self of early childhood. We have succeeded until now pursuing our own desires and have even convinced ourselves that this is valid. The result has been disastrous for our planet, its biosphere, and our species. We know that but maturity does not come to everyone at once and some never make it. We need to face this and act on that understanding.

I see this in the frame of Lord of the Rings as it the base archetype that predicted what we are experiencing but the full reality of this is the dominance of replicas as our chosen story. We read and watch almost nothing else but ‘the war against great evil’ or apocalyptic narratives of struggle and survival.

Tolkien created this form of heroic fantasy as a struggle against magical and fundamentally evil powers. This was produced in direct reaction to the horrors of World War II but more exactly as a result of the near planetary collapse of mechanical warfare and 20th century authoritarianism based on Tolkien’s own experience in WWI.

This is not an essay on Lord of the Rings or the inherently traditionalist and paternalistic social structure with mythic reworking that was the product of Victorian England. An strongly critical discussion of this was done in 1987 by the author Michael Moorcock in an essay called Epic Pooh.

My concern is with the broad focus of a stories built on elements of mythology, fantasy, science fiction, and escapist literature as recognition of archetypal dangers beyond our abilities to rationally express.

We are caught in a classic dilemma with only limited understanding bounded by our inability and refusal to break from our past even as the world of that past collapses around us threatening all life. The first part of this challenge is recognizing the evil that is threatening us and overcoming the lure of that evil.

This is the power that is offered to make us invisible but at a terrible cost. None of it is real and it is the ancient delusion of sacrificing our freedom to a powerful magician who promises us our share of great loot. We should know this by now but the history has been lost for many.

The fact that we have achieved the levels of education that we have means that the history is not lost for the majority. Unfortunately we all bare the responsibility for those that never learned or have been tricked into forgetting the lessons. There are too many of them and they are pulling us into the past because we cannot abandon them. That level of brutality has been left behind and we desperately want to avoid returning what the people without the needed history are so willing to accept. They show us that ugly world everyday.

There is a major problem with our stories of good against great evil. We always see this as the hero who saves us. Whether an incredible brave hobbit with one master wizard or a small team of heroes, we have been taught to wait and watch for that hero. That absolves us from having to act on our own.

But that will no longer work. We need a new story about collaboration and cooperation. We could save a tribe with a hero or two but not a planet with 8 billion people and billions of other beings. We are repeating the same old story when we need to make major changes to our tradition and if we don’t we will not survive.

It’s time to get beyond Tolkien.