The Danger of Messianic Figures in Fiction

An archetype found in narratives of all medium is the cosmic, anointed protagonist sent to make the world a better place. This set of protagonists includes “Christ figures” but is not limited to them, as technically “Christ figure” implies that this character must die to meet his goal. This anointed character possesses a specific brand of superhuman ability, whether that manifests itself in intelligence, physical prowess, or magic.

Calling a character the most “x” human ever, where that x can be pretty much anything most Westerners would like to have, is a quick way to create an interesting, “unique” character without having to do much actual thinking. By concentrating all aspects of this character’s greatness into that one x, the protagonist remains “human” and easy to identify with. The character-development portions of the narrative quickly write themselves against the backdrop of showing off all the neat tricks the protagonist can perform with x. The writing and dialogue can be crap, but the audience may remain entranced as it watches what it would be like to be the most x ever.

Unconvinced that this archetype is especially prominent in fiction? Here is a list of films that exhibit this attribute and are either culturally essential franchises, critically acclaimed, or both.

1. The Matrix
2. Harry Potter
3. Good Will Hunting
4. Star Wars
5. A Beautiful Mind
6. Any superhero movie. Ever. Including Iron Man.

That list is not comprehensive and amounts to what I can remember without any research. Of the top 100 grossing movies of all time, I conservatively count 27 to fall unambiguously into this criteria. That does not include situations like The Lord of the Rings series where a secondary figure arguably fulfills the role or when the characters are simply ridiculously skilled at what they do rather than THE greatest at it (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, 300, and several others). I’m not even considering the two instances where a character’s divinity is more than implied, those being The Passion of the Christ and Bruce Almighty. This “archetype” is not just an archetype or a cliché, but a defining aspect of popular modern cinema.

There isn’t anything particularly “dangerous” about popular narratives portraying the same hackneyed storytelling device over and over again. Narratives relying on messianic figures have in a certain sense become a genre of their own, trading in the lust scenes of erotica or the explosions of action movies for a human character with a single, unrealistically strong characteristic. Critics seem completely unaware of their universal effect of turning any movie into a meaningless experiment into a showcase of how neat it would be to be the most “x” person ever. Any meaning found in the acclaimed Rain Man or the universally panned The Wizard flows directly from the genius of either protagonist, as both are character-driven dramas. However, critics seem fixated upon performances, technical virtuosity, or whether or not the movie in question was a ninety minute commercial for the Super Nintendo, rather than the underlying quality and content of either story, which are seemingly identical. To selectively praise equally cliched narratives with messianic figures as a focal point is roughly analogous to giving a Pulitzer to a book of random words simply because the words were spelled correctly and the formatting was pristine. For any popular narrative, the literary application of superhuman abilities is the equivalent of valueless shiny rocks, not a device of meaningful brilliance.

There are yet situations where portraying a character as great is effective and consequential. This is when the narrative only ostensibly tells a story while really making a (allegedly) demonstratively true argument. The writer places importance on developing the argument and the character possesses desirable traits embodying the writer’s philosophy. The best example is Neitzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Zarathustra is not great out of virtue of being really smart or really strong, but by personifying the philosophy Neitzche argues. The reader sees Zarathustra’s reaction to an array of situations. If the reader disagrees with Zarathustra, he rejects Neitzche. If she agrees, this is out of reasonable persuasion, not because Neitzche embroidered his protagonist with irrelevant implications of cosmic greatness.

The titular “danger” in messianic figures is when the author does the opposite. If the writer latches onto one of the aforementioned “x” and applies it to his character, it’s harmless. When that character is then used as a spokesperson for a philosophy, with no argument proffered beyond the fact that this character is the best person ever, it’s ridiculous. In the Ender’s Saga, a series of books succeeding the sci-fi classic, Ender’s Game, the protagonist, a military genius who saved the world with his unquestionable logic and rationality as a child, takes a jarring, unsubstantiated turn towards a condescending form of smarmy relativism later in the series. This turn is scarcely justified by anything but the events in the narrative which uncomfortably fit in with such relativism, and which the protagonist can magically foresee with his massive intelligence.

These books, starting with Speaker for the Dead, do not really ever argue anything. Instead, they promote a value set by stating it self-evidentially within the narrative, and use the endorsement of the messianic figure to provide justification. Such argument is no more than a startlingly clear example of Appeal to Authority, but one that takes it a step further. The “authority” is no more than the author himself. In effect, works such as this, which use irrelevant characterizations of a protagonist as “the best”, argue nothing but that the author’s political and philosophical opinions are true because he said so.

The phenomenal popularity of messianic narratives ensures us a steady supply well into the future. Our enjoyment of watching really smart or really strong or really magical people is fine. We take pleasure in watching seemingly human characters use superhuman powers. However, the audience and critics should not confuse this pleasure with meaning, as the effective differences in plot amongst diverse messianic stories are metaphorically little more than the differences in setting for explosions in an action movie. If the author uses these analogous explosions as a way to vindicate her personal opinions, the work can without further consideration be tossed aside as dishonest and crass. The only exception is an argument wherein a character is great because he embodies the argued philosophy, as in the case of Zarathustra, rather than stating argument is true because the character asserting it is great, as in Ender. It is rare when a messianic narrative holds meaning; I leave it to the critics to begin seeing when they do.

True Anti-Intellectualism

The press, commentators, academics, and pseudo-philosophers slur other points of view as “anti-intellectual” when those views fail to conform to the consensus of science, academia, or the mainstream understanding of either. While even serious analysts may conflate such contrary points of view with the naive irrationality of the “flat-earth” crowd, that characterization both demonizes intellectuals who have taken an unpopular view and ignores the greater evil- proudly true anti-intellectuals.

Set aside your opinion of the views of conservatives, liberals, middle America, Europeans, or city-dwellers. The veracity of any of their political paradigms is not relevant in identifying what I called anti-intellectual. Whether or not those at the forefront of intellectual inquiry are right is ultimately irrelevant when considering the non-intellectual. That is to say, one cannot criticize a non-intellectual Liberal for holding a Liberal perspective. The reasons to be Liberal or Conservative are unclear to society since the people who study the issues for a living cannot themselves come to consensus. Society should not turn non-intellectuals into pariahs as punishment for not holding intellectual comprehension.

While liberal societies should not reflexively mock conservative individuals and vice-versa, that does not imply that the lack of intellectual understanding is somehow a good thing. On all sides of the debate, there exists an attitude that it is somehow bad to provide reasons for one’s opinions. It is almost as if one’s ability to cite sources and facts or the ability to pick out the flaws in another’s argument is offensive. Frequently, conversation makes apparent that there is no reason that a non-intellectual has chosen a point of view, leaving the non-intellectual feeling naked and benighted. Instead of asking themselves why they chose that point of view, the non-intellectual may lash out at the offending criticism as not being supportive or for being overly abrasive.

The desire for communal or friendly support is fine for the trivial, subjective choices of ballet, basketball, or beerpong, but it is quite another for anything that has demonstrative effects, such as the case of politics. In such areas, truth is the only thing that matters, not pleasantries. The idea that it is somehow offensive to demand reasons to justify views and decisions and to provide evidence for one’s own drags society down to an illicit orgy of irresponsibility, irrationality, and emotion.

The inability of intellectuals to come to a consensus is not a moral carte blanche to believe whatever you want to believe. It is easy to hold idly a position knowing that one can go home and in ten minutes find a passage from Bill O’Reilly or Lewis Black, or some other book with a pundit, his expression serious and his arms crossed, on its soft-cover, whenever some waxing intellectual invokes some unknown argument. That ease does not make an idle position justified. This self-affirming dishonesty has two particular flavors: unjustified relativism and simple close-mindedness.

Relativism, while varied in specific meaning and intent, has a general guiding principle. There is no real truth and that anything an individual perceives is equally valid to what anyone else sees. This is a subject that can be rationally debated and discussed intellectually; whether or not the nature of the world is relative is a fact that is objectively true or untrue. Unjustified relativism assumes relativism without citation or argument, insisting that discussing cosmic truth is petty, and that therefore whatever position taken by the individual is sacred. It sidesteps the importance of discussing important issues by citing a vague, philosophical concept brimming in controversy. One’s deep understanding of the intricacies of relativism may justify a general indifference to reality, evidence, and facts proffered exogenously from one’s individual truth, but it does not justify unsupported conjecture ex post.

Simple close-mindedness believes itself to be unmitigatedly and objectively true, but finds the other side of the argument too offensive to take seriously. Those exemplifying this exhibit emotional, negative reactions upon hearing evidence in favor of the views with which they disagree. The desire to reach the goal confounds any discussion of whether or not the goal should be reached in the first place. Learning why intellectuals of the opposition believe what they believe becomes an annoyance, something they don’t want to consider. Such understanding only muddles their ability to construct a counter-factual army of straw men used to guilt a portion of the other side of the argument out of association with the other side. To the close-minded, learning is only learning, and learning is only beneficial, when those pretenses of truth and intellectualism favor the selected goals.

Any argument can retain such specious auspices when truth stops being the rubric of choice. Either flavor of anti-intellectualism mentioned boils down to one factor, pride. Intellectuals know more than us. I personally am not an intellectual. That recognition does not justify my ignorance and blind spots. Instead, that recognition should guide anyone towards filling those blind spots. Failure in prioritizing the discovery of true intellectual discussion renders one anti-intellectual, a personification of boasting ignorance and willful non-understanding. It is unreasonable to demand that we all become intellectuals; it is not to ask that we do not become anti-intellectuals.

Leasing the Prius

Choosing a hybrid car may be out of an unselfish desire to limit your environmental footprint. If you rack up mileage on your car, it may also make financial sense to purchase a hybrid. However, if you do not drive long distances constantly, there is little to no chance that leasing a hybrid is a viable option.

Leasing cars stops being financially reasonable for dealers around 13,000 miles per year. Occasionally, those leases do happen, but it’s not normal and would require the car to depreciate incredibly slowly. Hence, I assume that the maximum number of miles you can “take advantage of” in a lease deal to be 13,000 a year for three years.

I will compare the Toyota Prius to Toyota’s other compact, the Corolla.

Using calculators found here and here, along with the weak assumption that you’ll pay $2300 up front for either car, a Corolla would cost $257.54 and a Prius $355.26 per month. I have screen capped both results below, as the calculations will change with time.

According to consumer reports, the Corolla gets 32 MPG and the Prius 44.

We now have all of our variables except one- the price of a gallon of gas for the next 36 months. At the time I’m writing this, oil unexpectedly dropped to $3.85. Since we have all other variables, however, we can simply “solve for x” to figure out what the break even price of a gallon of gas must be for the Prius to save you money.

(13000 Miles Per Year * 3 Years) / 44 miles per gallon = 886.36 gallons of gas used with Prius

(13000 Miles Per Year * 3 Years) / 31 miles per gallon = 1258.06 gallons of gas used with Corolla

(1258.06 Gallons_Corolla – 886.26 Gallons_Prius) * Break Even Price of Gas = 36 Months * ($355.26 per month_Prius – $257.54 per month_Corolla)

371.80*Break Even Price = $3517.92

Break Even Price = $9.46

Only the most extreme Peak Oil advocate would really consider $9.46 for a gallon of gasoline to be anything but a remote possibility. There is no situation where leasing the Prius is a legitimate option for any individual American.

Of course, this isn’t exactly true since hybrid cars are subsidized to the tune of thousands of dollars. If we say that the government subsidizes the use of of a Prius at $600 per year (a low ball estimate), it means that society is spending $1800 to decrease gas usage by 372 gallons in our hypothetical above. In comparison, Americans use 1.4 trillion gallons of gas per year. Does this make sense to anyone? A year’s worth of antiretrovirals to provide treatment for someone in Africa is $92.

Considering the subsidy, it may well be worth it to lease a Prius. I just don’t feel very comfortable taking the subsidy and doing so.

The Hypocritical Vision of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed

Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy argues that the “anointed”, or left-liberals, choose unfounded arguments that make them appear to be the saviors of humanity. They scorn anyone who disagrees with their urgency in fighting their perceived evils, leaving no room for dissent. According to Sowell, empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that the policy initiatives championed by the “anointed” in the 1960s have unequivocally failed.

While his conclusions regarding the outcomes are ones I tend to endorse, the method by which he presents them in the scope of the book I find ironically academically lacking and wholly hypocritical. He cites a plethora of examples of left-liberal policies, such as sex education, Keynesian economics, and affirmative action, to qualify how the “anointed” fail to form a conversation with the other side of the argument. Although Sowell’s dismissal of sentimental, non-evidentiary forms of argument is commendable, he focuses far too much in ascribing these attitudes to left-liberal points of view in place of demonstrating the fallacy of “self-congratulation as a basis for social policy”. Sowell is far too overzealous in using the argument to smear liberals rather than providing a balanced view of the issue.

Using case studies to make a point may sometimes be informative. Sowell very effectively argues the existence of “The Residual Fallacy” in an early chapter.

The common procedure in trying to prove discrimination with statistics is to (1) establish that there are statistical disparities between two or more groups, (2) demonstrate that the odds that these particular disparities are a result of random chance are very small, and (3) show that, even holding constant various nondiscriminatory factors which might influence the outcomes, that still leaves a substantial residual difference between the groups, which must be presumed to be due to discrimination. Since essentially the same intellectual procedure has been used to “prove” genetic inferiority, the choice of what to attribute the residual to is inherently arbitrary. But there is yet another major objection to this procedure. Not uncommonly, as the gross statistics are broken down by holding various characteristics constant, it turns out that the groups involved differ in these characteristics on every level of aggregation – and differ in different proportions from one level to another.

This is an excellent point, even if it is little more than an application of the statistical aphorism, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. However, instead of fully developing this point, Sowell is quick to bash liberals over the head with it. Seeing how all politicians use the “residual fallacy” is used universally is far more instructive in understanding it than to focus on how American left-liberals do by themselves.

Another frequent theme in the book is the contrast between the “Vision of the Anointed” and the “tragic” view of human nature. To Sowell, the tragic view is the economic understanding that the world is one of tradeoffs while the view of the anointed is one of solutions. He portrays Keynesian economics as being of the latter (while never citing a single example demonstrating this), even though some very smart people at least partially accept this view while arguing in the language of the “tragic”. To Sowell, the anointed present a self-congratulatory conjecture while, to paraphrase the author, no evidence is presented and none is asked for those conjectures. While anecdotal evidence is cited, there is no line of argument suggesting such thinking is endemic to the thinking of the left.

It took a while reading the book for my distaste in its style to truly coalesce. All the while I attempt to form an educated opinion on any issue I reasonably can, I only consider myself an expert in one: baseball. Sowell self-evidentially uses the sport to provide an analogy for the “merit versus performance” issue.

Even at a more mundane level, nothing seems to be more of a purely individual feat than a baseball player hitting a home run, and yet the number of home runs depends on factors that reach beyond the individual player. Ted Williams, for example, hit home runs with greater frequency, in proportion to his times at bat, than either Roger Maris or Hank Aaron – and yet Williams never came close to Babe Ruth’s home-run records that Maris and Aaron broke. The difference is that Williams was walked far more often than either Maris or Aaron – in fact, about as often as the two of them put together – and that in turn was due to who was batting after each of these players.

To walk Ted Williams was to drastically reduce the danger of the home run, but to walk Maris or Aaron was only to bat Mickey Mantle or Eddie Matthews [sic], each of them top-rank home-run hitters in his own right, leading the league in that department four years each. Individual batters must of course hit their own home runs, but the man on deck has a lot to do with how the man in the batter’s box will be pitched to – or whether he will be pitched at all.

Now, while The Vision of the Anointed was written in 1995, well before the “statistical revolution” in baseball began, the presumption of such an effect is exactly the type of the type of non-evidentiary Sowell spoke out about. No evidence is presented and none was asked for. Well, in 2007, J. C. Bradbury looked into the question, known in baseball as “protection”, in The Baseball Economist. This question was even examined elsewhere earlier, but not quite as popularly.

For data from 1984 to 1992, we measured the influence of on-deck hitter quality (measured by OPS) on the likelihood that a batter would walk, get a bit, get an extra base hit, or hit a home run. [Colleague] Doug and I were a bit shocked by what we found. Thought the conventional baseball wisdom – a better on-deck hitter does protect a batter from being walked – is partially correct, the batter also lowers his ability to hit for average and power. Therefore, a good hitter imposes a negative externality on the batter who precedes him in the batting order. This is completely counter to the conventional baseball wisdom.

For the one issue I feel I have a firm grasp on, baseball, I can skim and immediately know Sowell has made a strong error of logical presumption. This does not prove that the conclusions to similar arguments he made are incorrect, but that the questions of discrimination or the role of government in society are ones requiring more “empirical” argument than a few dismissive paragraphs.

If Sowell really wanted to argue against the “vision of the anointed”, he should have chosen applicable examples from both Republicans and Democrats. It’s not like non-evidentiary arguments from free-market conservatives didn’t already exist in when he wrote his book. By selectively citing only examples of the “anointed” from the left, the label stops becoming anything meaningful and becomes a smear. Moreover, the book has become far less relevant in this decade as neoconservatives have been far more receptive to non-evidentiary arguments than Reagan-era conservatives ever were. Speaking as someone who is ultimately a conservative Christian, nothing sounds more similar in tone to the anointed than the indifference and evasiveness to truth found within the schools of intelligent design.

“The Vision of the Anointed” ceased to become a meaningful criticism of left-liberals when it ceased to apply the criticism to anyone but left-liberals. The reaction by pseudo-intellectual conservatives to each example of the supposed ignorance of liberals is ironically analogous to the “a-ha! statistics” (confirmation bias in the perusal of statistics) criticized elsewhere by Sowell. As Sowell himself points out, it’s easier to trash the other side of the argument than to rationally converse with it. By providing a guilty-by-association outlet to do exactly that, he supplies an ostensibly scholastic cop-out of what liberals say while ignoring what they actually have to say.

Educated moderate and liberal Americans are going to see straight through the purported “empirics” Sowell presents. I find each of his statements -the failure of sex education, the insignificance of racism in today’s society, etc.- by themselves to be more likely to be true than not, but he is not so compositionally concise that he can give justice to liberals’ arguments in two-and-a-half pages. These are questions that require books by themselves to argue in one direction or another, not something that can be hand waved in a couple hundred words. The structure of the book, by locking in on broad conservative viewpoints, bites off more than it can chew. In doing so, it disregards counterarguments that any academic liberal could rattle off in his sleep with a nearly-fatal dose of opium.

The examples Sowell provides are nothing but fractious, derisive conjectures that further splinter conservatives and liberals apart. If humans individually are psychologically prone to believing themselves to be an omniscient, judgmental savior, Sowell should argue that alone. If a given left-liberal policy is fallacious, that deserves its own book or paper of similar scope. Making the former argument by cherry picking examples of the latter does not do much of anything.