Archetypal versus Elementary Criticism

One of the things that I've been thinking about recently is how I've been using archetypes to think about my life, and how it's been helping me through my issues and along my path of self-improvement. If you've been following us, then you'll know that we've been doing a series on Pearson's personality archetypes (affiliate link) and previously on Campbell's Hero's Journey. I need to create an index later to allow quick access to each of the articles, but that is neither here nor now.

What is immediately pressing is understanding how to use the archetypes as a basis for thinking, and I think that there can be a potent example given in my own life right now.

One of the things that's going on with me is that I'm beginning to hit the age where I'm thinking about the sort of husband and father I want to be. I'm actually a little past that, but I can pretend I've been on the ball if I catch up hard enough.

It occurred to me that for much of my younger life, I was thinking of this in an elementary fashion.

When I say elementary, I am referring to thinking in rigid domains of disconnected expertise, knowledge, and concepts.

In the elementary view, a father needs to provide three things: safety, initiation, and protection.

The elementary approach to this is to figure out what sort of goals and objectives you have. It lends itself to quantitative thinking.

People are happier when household income is above $60,000 a year (in the US), though happiness increases less after that point. So my goal as a provider could be to provide that much money for my family. It could also be to make sure I have food on the table for my kids. Or it could be to provide them with a college education at a four-year institution without needing debt.

The elemental provider has a great set of objectives and goals, but planning and goal-setting are only forerunners to action, and the plans that they are based on consider only those factors.

There is an obvious issue with inflexibility in this system. There is no end to the list of tragic figures that has met their downfall because they were thinking in this manner, then failed to deliver on their promises. This led to a crisis of existence and meaning.

In my own life, I recall a time when I was in college and my father had lost his job. He'd gone through periods of unemployment before, but he was more seriously concerned about his potential inability to compete in the workforce and deal with the stresses. His goals were elementary in nature: provide enough for my family to be comfortable.

When reality made that difficult, it was hard on him. I remember crying openly (as a nineteen year old) in front of a bunch of my close friends, feeling the bitterness of being a burden as a full-time college student and also the hopelessness that had begun to set in as a result of that failed goal: my father's loss was mine, not just on a practical level, but also on a spiritual level: his goals were not being fulfilled, and the bond between us made that a personal loss for me as well.

This elementary thought focuses on domains. If you're familiar with Mazlow's hierarchy of needs, the elementary mode is entirely focused on structures such as these.

There are a few issues with using this sort of schema. First, any notable deficiency is viewed not as a problem within a whole framework, but as a whole problem of its own. This limits the ability to seek less traditional solutions (for instance, if I need money, and I know a job is a way to get money, I may pursue a traditional job instead of entrepreneurship), but it also makes it very easy to sacrifice things without realistically assessing value of domains against each other and weighing the costs that those decisions have in other domains.

To go back to the fatherhood example, we can look at other domains in the elementary system as well.

Part of the reason why my father's unemployment shook me so hard as a young man was that he lived entirely within a focus on being a provider. We lived in a place where he could trust the state for our safety, and he handed the role of our initiation in society largely over to my mother.

In the elementary mode of thinking, this worked well enough. After all, my needs were met, and everything worked well enough on the surface. In reality, this approach lent itself to creating a rift in the paternal relationship.

My father's approach to being a provider ahead of being an archetypal rounded father figure was not a fault in his character. After all, he didn't devalue those other sources of growth and maturity. When he had time, he would do his best to provide initiation, recounting the story of his life and family legends, teaching on ethics, politics, and values as well as he could.

But the dominant focus was on providing and the other needs were well enough met, by an elementary standard, that providing became the primary focus.

Understand that I use the example of my father only for illustrative purposes; if this example seems harsh it is not intended to be so. I have grown to have a much better relationship with my father than I had as a youth, it continues to improve, and I value his presence in my life (and the life of my potential future children) highly.

In my life, however, I have constantly been terrified of becoming merely the provider.

For a long time I struggled with getting ready to fulfill my duty as a father or husband. Being a parent or spouse is probably the greatest responsibility. I don't want to leave women out of this, but I can't really talk from the perspective of motherhood or being a wife. It is an equally great and terrible responsibility.

The flaw of the elementary system is that it is slow to learn by example. It uses analysis, which works well in many fields, but lacks the ability to gather wisdom and meaning. To avoid making mistakes, it avoids making choices until much information has been gathered. Hypotheses are built, but the scientific exploration is often lacking; rather the hypothesis created by the elementary philosophy results in a pursuit of known outcomes.

The archetypal mode of thinking is in many ways the antithesis of the elementary system. Rather than looking at goals, it looks at the whole, and each domain it assesses is looked at as only part of that whole.

Goals still exist, of course; these are important. But the goals are based around a core. Rather than thinking as a provider, or a guardian, or an initiator, the focus is on being a father first.

This liberates the archetypal thinker to pursue a broader range of opportunities and methods. The weakness of the elementary system is that in all its analysis it leans toward the quantitative. The human experience, however, is largely a qualitative one. I do not necessarily care how many hours I spend reading a book, if it enriches my life in some way.

The archetypal thought process also inoculates against failure and setbacks. The weakness of the elementary method is as follows:

"I am a father who must provide for my child, therefore if I fail as a provider, I fail as a father."

Of course, this is not entirely wrong. Even from an archetypal perspective, a significantly meaningful failure is
devastating. But it is not all-defining. The archetypal approach to the situation above is more like this:

"I am a father who must provide for my child, but it is one of many duties I have as a father."

Obviously, this provides more room for failure, but the benefit of the archetypal approach is that it is holistic, and as a result strength in one area will translate to another more naturally than elementary approaches permit.

The other power of archetypal thinking is that you can learn more about who you are as a person by looking at others. Where elementary reasoning relies on projected outcomes, archetypal reasoning relies on pattern analysis.

This is where stories and legends come into play. Every story ever told has something as an intended lesson, whether it's clearly stated or not.

Archetypal thinking allows us to identify archetypal figures in stories and apply them to our own lives. A character like Ahab in Moby Dick, whose elementary lesson may be "don't chase a single goal so maniacally that it clouds your judgment" can bear not just that lesson but also others when we consider the archetypes that the character displays and what we know about those archetypes.

By continuously applying and refining archetypes, we further our ability to learn quickly, boosting our schema for interpreting new information.

Of course archetypes have their own defining traits; the father archetype still serves as a provider, protector, and initiator, but the emphasis is on thinking about fatherhood, not those three separate traits.

I've provided an illustration that should help to illustrate the differences between the modes of thought. The archetypal method functions with a holistic core, from which the domains that represent responsibilities, strengths, and ability to overcome weakness project. Depending on granularity being considered, these can be the archetypes that a person needs in their life–or the qualities that they have with regards to a particular archetype. By comparison, the elementary approach that seems to be favored, consciously or not, by many instead continues to divide not into domains from a common center but rather entirely independent strengths and weaknesses.

This is the reason why I feel it's important to build and define games that focus on archetypes and storytelling. They allow more lessons to be told, and more meaning to be produced, in the same space as other endeavors.

In velotha's flock, this is done by defining the mechanics of a character from the central hub of a character's dominant archetype. I'm not as happy with this solution as I would be elsewhere, since the mechanism of doing so is heavily number-driven and still goes out to a sort of elementary approach to resources.

In Hammercalled, this function is served by specializations with IAAT statements. Characters are able to choose a variety of strengths (and, by omission, weaknesses) that define them, and while it is filtered through a number system, it allows players to define people who fit archetypal roles, rather than simply having broadly defined attributes (the weakness of velotha's flock) or becoming a spreadsheet to be maintained.