allanhunter.net Blog

When thinking about how people act, perhaps when we hear about some event in the news, it’s worth realizing that seemingly unusual behavior may be much closer to what we ourselves do - except we haven’t noticed it yet.

This summer my local newspaper and the hometown paper I check on-line have both been full of what I’ve come to call teen summer violence.  These are the confrontations between urban youths that have a habit of turning deadly.  It’s hot, the young people have nothing much to do apart from mull over old antagonisms or slights to their pride, imagined or real, and suddenly things get out of control.

It’s almost impossible to overlook the repeated components of these encounters – and yet in a very real sense we don’t understand them.  It’s not just drugs, gangs, sex and guns that make this mix so volatile.  What makes this a potential disaster for our young people is something that elsewhere in our lives we may actually cherish.  I’m talking about what is, by another name, a sense of pride, even of patriotism.

It may sound incredible at first, but think about it for just one moment and you’ll see that the same pride that causes a young man or woman (but it’s usually a man) not to back down from a confrontation could, by a very slight adjustment, be recast as the patriotism and heroism of our police and fire fighters, or the devotion of the soldier who sticks to a dangerous duty.

If we think of literature or legends that might mirror this situation there’s one that seems to jump out, and that’s the legend of the Flying Dutchman.  The Flying Dutchman is in fact the name of a ghostly ship, and legend has it that the young captain was eager to reach the European markets with his cargo of Eastern spices and silks, so he sailed in terrible weather around the Cape of Good Hope (this was before the Suez canal).  He refused to take in his sails as most prudent sailors would have done, because he wanted to get home at top speed, to wealth and to his promised wedding.  What determination!  What courage!  What foolhardiness! Well, the ship was wrecked, everyone was drowned, and the ghostly shape of it can still, so they say, be seen sailing on, always just about to round the Cape, condemned never to complete the voyage.

The foolish captain, you’ll notice, is set on a course of action he feels he cannot back down from.  His determination is astonishing, but his wisdom is sadly lacking.  He wants to get home, get rich, and get married: sex, money, and pride urge him on.

And that’s the whole point.  He may look like a hero if he succeeds in taking his ship safely round the rocks, but if he fails he still looks pretty good - at least to some people. He becomes a legend, a martyr.  He reminds me of some of those high flying businessmen we read about who have made huge amounts of money (which makes them enviable) and then have over-reached themselves to collapse into ruin, legal trials and sometimes prison time.  And there we have the crux of this tale.  The captain may look like a hero, but in fact he’s caught in a role of what he thinks a hero is supposed to be, and unfortunately his understanding is imperfect.  If we focus on street violence again, some of the young men who have died, according to the news reports, have greeted their fate with arrogance; and some of their killers have been equally determined to show that no one crosses them, no one, without paying a price.  Isn’t this disturbingly similar to our ship’s captain?  When the Flying Dutchman went down it took an entire crew with it.  When young people kill each other a whole neighborhood becomes haunted, too. When a Mortgage company goes bust it ravages dozens of communities.

So we have to work to explode this myth, which is a perverted version of the myth of the hero.  Let’s frame this another way: Whenever someone adopts a code of behavior, a determination to do something just one specific way or for one specific purpose that is inflexible (like the captain) then that person has stopped thinking, and is operating from something like remote control.  Such a person is no more capable of freedom of action, or of heroism, than a robot or a rock.  Yet we keep wanting to see this as somehow heroic.  So let’s apply this directly to ourselves: Which of us hasn’t stayed in a relationship, or in a job, saying to ourselves that we’ll just grit our teeth until things get better.  We hold on, we work harder, we give more, and perhaps we exhaust ourselves in the process.  We love too much, we try too hard.  This is noble, but it’s not always effective. Sometimes things don’t get better.  It’s not that we’re doing anything wrong, it’s just that we’re not doing things right.  I call this the trick of working harder when what’s needed is to work smarter. We can all get stuck in ways of doing things that mean that our real qualities are not used productively.  The Mother who works three jobs so her children can go to college may be doing a noble thing, but she may also be sacrificing herself when the healthier choice might be to get the children to earn some money for themselves.  She may find they actually appreciate their college courses more when they have to pay for them out of their own pockets, and they may begin to appreciate her efforts more, too.

You see, we’ve all been in that trap at some point in our lives.  Whether it’s the kid from the projects who gets killed trying to be tough or the devoted mother who works herself to death, people are dying too early for all the wrong reasons, and they’re hurting others’ lives in the process.

The real hero is the person who knows when to back down for everyone’s sake.  Let’s put this in the strongest terms by looking at the street violence: getting killed doesn’t benefit the dead person or his family.  The killer is fairly likely to be caught, too, which brings misery to another person and to that family as well.  If this is heroism I’d have to say it’s a very peculiar version of it.  Similarly the mother who carries the whole weight of the family and then, after several years, collapses in exhaustion is not contributing to the long-term welfare of her loved ones, who sometimes do not know how to carry on without her.  She’s become a martyr. The business executive who works long hours ‘for the financial welfare of his children’ and dies young from hypertension is robbing his family of a far greater benefit than mere money.

So we need to rethink the nature of heroic devotion. Within the six archetypes of human development the hero stage can be seen differently, and this can help us. I describe it in my book Stories We Need to Know and the stage is called the Warrior-Lover stage for a reason.  It’s because one has to be willing to struggle for a cause that is ultimately one that brings more love into the world – one can be a warrior for peace, or a warrior for human equality, just like Martin Luther King Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela.  Notice that all of these figures are people of color.  I don’t know if that’s just coincidence. I can say for certain that all three are people who knew what it was like to be helpless before a rigid, brutal power structure, a way of thinking in which those who had the power really thought of themselves as ‘superior’ and ‘heroic’. Dealing with that sort of oppression required a different approach, a non-violent approach. Notice also how it is the people of color who presently are suffering disproportionately from the urban killings that fill the news, from the mortgage and home repossession crisis, and from the problem of single mothers and even grandmothers working extreme hours to raise the children.

If we are to understand ourselves the best place to start is at the crisis points of our  society, and these are pretty clearly crisis points.  Teachers I know who work in the inner city school systems say that by the time children reach tenth grade they almost all know someone they were close to who has been shot or killed.  Young people are depressed, desperate and scared, and yet they dare not show it. No wonder the scholastic and SAT results are so unimpressive.  Somehow we’ve created inner cities that are just like the legend of the Flying Dutchman, with young people who are so desperate for some sort of recognition that they’ll take on bizarre and dangerous behaviors in order to get it.  And the result is a deserted, ghostly ship - a haunted and blighted neighborhood.

At the other extreme is the driven business executive who turns to fraud and who has helped to engineer such things as our present mortgage crisis.  If he gets away with it he looks great.  If he’s caught he still gets to be famous.  Are these two situations – the street criminal and the white collar criminal, really very different?

The legend of The Flying Dutchman has existed in one form or another for several hundred years.  It was trying to warn us against exactly this type of ego and pride-based desperation, and what consequences it would create for everyone. A ship, after all, is a metaphor of a society. And then think of the bride of the ship’s captain, waiting, pining, heartbroken widowed before she was even married. That’s another image that should haunt us.

Reversing the present circumstances will be difficult, but at least we can see what the problem is.  And that’s half the solution. And we can begin to remedy things by starting with ourselves. Whenever we start to think of taking ‘heroic’ measures that we think we’re expected to take on we’d be well advised to ask, coolly, whether our action is indeed loving of others.  That’s why we need to remember that the Warrior is also a Lover.  Loving too much (that’s the self sacrificing mother) is as bad as fighting for no good reason, or gouging massive profits.  Balance is the key.