Luke : The Mytho-Historical Warrior-Shaman

In theology, apotheosis refers to the idea that an individual has been raised to godlike stature. 

The long-deceased heroes linked with founding myths of Greek sites were accorded chthonic rites in their heroon, or “hero-temple”.

Myth today has come to have negative connotations which are the complete opposite of its meaning in a religious context... In a religious context, however, myths are storied vehicles of supreme truth, the most basic and important truths of all. By them people regulate and interpret their lives and find worth and purpose in their existence. 

Myths put one in touch with sacred realities, the fundamental sources of being, power, and truth. They are seen not only as being the opposite of error but also as being clearly distinguishable from stories told for entertainment and from the workaday, domestic, practical language of a people. They provide answers to the mysteries of being and becoming, mysteries which, as mysteries, are hidden, yet mysteries which are revealed through story and ritual. 

Myths deal not only with truth but with ultimate truth.

These are the hidden words that The Living Jesus spoke. 

And Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down. 

“Not until The Male becomes Female and The Female becomes Male shall ye enter The Kingdom of Heaven.”

— The Gospel of Thomas

In theology, apotheosis refers to the idea that an individual has been raised to godlike stature. In art, the term refers to the treatment of any subject (a figure, group, locale, motif, convention or melody) in a particularly grand or exalted manner.

Antiquity

Further information: imperial cult and divine king

Before the Hellenistic period, imperial cults were known in Ancient Egypt (pharaohs) and Mesopotamia (since Naram-Sin). From the New Kingdom, all deceased pharaohs were deified as the god Osiris.

Ancient Greece

Main article: Greek hero cult

From at least the Geometric period of the ninth century BC, the long-deceased heroes linked with founding myths of Greek sites were accorded chthonic rites in their heroon, or “hero-temple”.

In the Greek world, the first leader who accorded himself divine honours was Philip II of Macedon. At his wedding to his sixth wife, Philip’s enthroned image was carried in procession among the Olympian gods; “his example at Aigai became a custom, passing to the Macedonian kings who were later worshipped in Greek Asia, from them to Julius Caesar and so to the emperors of Rome”. Such Hellenistic state leaders might be raised to a status equal to the gods before death (e.g., Alexander the Great) or afterwards (e.g., members of the Ptolemaic dynasty). A heroic cult status similar to apotheosis was also an honour given to a few revered artists of the distant past, notably Homer.

Archaic and Classical Greek hero-cults became primarily civic [tied to the Mytho-Historical Founder of a City-State] extended from their familial origins, in the sixth century; by the fifth century none of the worshipers based their authority by tracing descent back to the hero, with the exception of some families who inherited particular priestly cults, such as the Eumolpides (descended from Eumolpus) of the Eleusinian mysteries, and some inherited priesthoods at oracle sites. The Greek hero cults can be distinguished on the other hand from the Roman cult of dead emperors, because the hero was not thought of as having ascended to Olympus or become a god: he was beneath the earth, and his power purely local. For this reason hero cults were chthonic in nature, and their rituals more closely resembled those for Hecate and Persephone than those for Zeus and Apollo. 

Two exceptions were Heracles and Asclepius, who might be honoured as either gods or heroes, sometimes by chthonic night-time rites and sacrifice on the following day.

Ancient Rome

Main article: Imperial cult (ancient Rome)

Up to the end of the Republic, Romans accepted only one official apotheosis: the god Quirinus, whatever his original meaning, having been identified with Romulus. Subsequently, apotheosis in ancient Rome was a process whereby a deceased ruler was recognized as having been divine by his successor, usually also by a decree of the Senate and popular consent. In addition to showing respect, often the present ruler deified a popular predecessor to legitimize himself and gain popularity with the people. The upper-class did not always take part in the imperial cult, and some privately ridiculed the apotheosis of inept and feeble emperors, as in the satire The Pumpkinification of (the Divine) Claudius, usually attributed to Seneca.

At the height of the imperial cult during the Roman Empire, sometimes the emperor’s deceased loved ones—heirs, empresses, or lovers, as Hadrian’s Antinous—were deified as well. Deified people were awarded posthumously the title Divus (Diva if women) to their names to signify their divinity. Traditional Roman religion distinguished between a deus (god) and a divus (a mortal who became divine or deified), though not consistently. Temples and columns were erected to provide a space for worship.

Ancient China

The Ming dynasty epic Investiture of the Gods deals heavily with deification legends. Numerous mortals have been deified into the Daoist pantheon, such as Guan Yu, Iron-crutch Li and Fan Kuai. Song Dynasty General Yue Fei was deified during the Ming Dynasty and is considered by some practitioners to be one of the three highest ranking heavenly generals.

DATHON [on monitor]: 

Darmok at Tanagra.

TAMARIAN [on monitor]: 

Shaka! Mirab, his sails unfurled.

DATHON [on monitor]: 

Darmok.

TAMARIAN [on monitor]: 

Mirab.

DATA: 

Freeze. Darmok.

TROI: 

Darmok. Well, it seems to be a point of contention between them. Perhaps something the Tamarian captain proposed that the First Officer didn't like.

DATA: 

The apparent emotional dynamic does seem to support that assumption. As with the other terms used by the Tamarian, this appears to be a proper noun. The name clearly carries a meaning for them.

TROI: 

Computer, search for the term Darmok in all linguistic databases for this sector.

COMPUTER: 

Searching. Darmok is the name of a seventh dynasty emperor on Kanda Four. A mytho-historical hunter on Shantil Three. A colony on Malindi Seven. A frozen dessert on Tazna Five. A

TROI: 

Stop search. Computer, how many entries are there for Darmok?

COMPUTER: Forty seven.

TROI: 

All our technology and experience, our universal translator, our years in space, contacts with more alien cultures than I can even remember.

DATA: 

I have encountered one thousand, seven hundred fifty four non-human races during my tenure with Starfleet.

TROI: 

And we still can't even say hello to these people.

DATA: 

Correct.

TROI: 

A single word can lead to tragedy. 

One word misspoken or misunderstood. 

And that could happen here, Data, if we fail.

DATA: 

Replay at time index one four four.

DATHON [on monitor]: 

Darmok at Tanagra.

DATA: 

Freeze. Computer, search for the term Tanagra. All databases.

COMPUTER: 

Searching. Tanagra. The ruling family on Gallos Two. A ceremonial drink on Lerishi Four. An island-continent on Shantil Three —

TROI: 

Stop. Shantil Three. 

Computer, cross-reference the last entry with the previous search index.

COMPUTER: 

Darmok is the name of a mytho-historical hunter on Shantil Three.

TROI: 

I think we've got something.

RIKER: 

What did you find out?

DATA: 

The Tamarian ego structure does not seem to allow what we normally think of as self-identity. 

Their ability to abstract is highly unusual. 

They seem to communicate through narrative imagery by reference to the individuals and places which appear in their mytho-historical accounts.

TROI: 

It's as if I were to say to you, Juliet on her balcony.

CRUSHER: 

An image of romance.

TROI: 

Exactly. Imagery is everything to the Tamarians. 

It embodies their emotional states, their very thought processes. 

It's how they communicate, and it's how they think.

RIKER: 

If we know how they think, shouldn't we be able to get something across to them?

DATA: 

No, sir. The situation is analogous to understanding the grammar of a language but none of the vocabulary.

CRUSHER: 

If I didn't know who Juliet was or what she was doing on that balcony, the image alone wouldn't have any meaning.

TROI: 

That's correct. 

For instance, we know that Darmok was a great hero, a hunter, 

and that Tanagra was an island, 

but that's it. 

Without the details, there's no understanding.

DATA: 

It is necessary for us to learn the narrative from which the Tamarians drawing their imagery. 

Given our current relations, that does not appear likely.

[Planet surface]

(Night has fallen, a fire is lit and Dathon is lying down.)

DATHON: 

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

PICARD: 

Our situation is similar to theirs. 

I understand that. But I need to know more. You must tell me more about Darmok and Jalad. Tell me. 

You used the words, 'Temba, his arms wide' when you gave me the knife and the fire. Could that mean give? 

Temba, his arms wide. Darmok. Give me more about Darmok.

DATHON: 

Darmok on the ocean.

PICARD: 

Darmok. 

(draws on the soil) 

The ocean. Darmok on the ocean. A metaphor? For being alone? Isolated? Darmok on the ocean.

(Dathon writhes in pain.)

PICARD: 

Are you all right?

DATHON: 

Kiazi's children, their faces wet.

PICARD: 

Temba, his arms open. 

Give me more about Darmok on the ocean.

DATHON: 

Tanagra on the ocean. 

Darmok at Tanagra.

PICARD: 

At Tanagra. A country? 

Tanagra on the ocean. 

An island. 

Temba, his arms wide.

DATHON: 

Jalad on the ocean. 

Jalad at Tanagra.

PICARD: 

Jalad at Tanagra. 

He went to the same island as Darmok. 

Darmok and Jalad Tanagra.

DATHON: 

The beast at Tanagra.

PICARD: 

The beast? 

There was a creature at Tanagra? 

Darmok and Jalad, the beast of Tanagra. 

They arrived separately. 

They struggled together against a common foe, the beast at Tanagra. 

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

DATHON: 

Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.

PICARD: 

They left together. 

Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.

DATHON: 

The ocean. (another spasm) 

Zinda! His face black, his eyes red. 

Callimas at Bahar.

PICARD: 

You hoped this would happen, didn't you? 

You knew there was a dangerous creature on this planet and you knew from the tale of Darmok that a danger shared might sometimes bring two people together. 

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. 

You and me, here, at El-Adrel.

DATHON: 

Kira at Bashi. 

Temba, his arms wide.

PICARD: 

My turn? No, I'm not much of a story teller. Besides, you wouldn't understand. Shaka. when the walls fell. Perhaps that doesn't matter. You want to hear it anyway. There's a story, a very ancient one, from Earth. I'll try and remember it. Gilgamesh, a king. Gilgamesh, a king, at Uruk. He tormented his subjects. He made them angry. They cried out aloud, send us a companion for our king. Spare us from his madness. Enkidu, a wild man from the forest, entered the city. They fought in the temple. They fought in the street. Gilgamesh defeated Enkidu. They became great friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.

DATHON: 

At Uruk.

PICARD: 

The new friends went out into the desert together, where the great bull of heaven was killing men by the hundreds. Enkidu caught the bull by the tail. Gilgamesh struck it with his sword.

DATHON: 

Gilgamesh.

PICARD: 

They were victorious. But Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods. And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears, saying, 'he who was my companion through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.

(And so Dathon dies.)

These are the hidden words that The Living Jesus spoke. 

And Didymos Judas Thomas wrote them down. 

“Not until The Male becomes Female and The Female becomes Male shall ye enter The Kingdom of Heaven.”

— The Gospel of Thomas

The Worlds of Men and Women

Peterson: See that also seems to me to be related to the postmodern emphasis on power because there’s something terrible underground going on there. And that is. . .

I think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the Soviet Union, too. Especially in the 20s when there was this idea, a radical idea, that you could remake human beings entirely because they had no essential nature.

So, if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe

that, then that also gives you the right in some sense to exercise your power at the

creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions. 

And that also seems

to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct.

It again goes down to the notion of power, which Derrida and Foucault and Lacan are

so bloody obsessed with.

It seems to me what they’re trying to do is to take all the potential power for the

creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever.

There’s no history, there’s no biology, and everything is a fluid culture that can be

manipulated at will.

In Canada there are terrible arguments right now about biological essentialism, let’s

say. And one of the things that happened, which was something I objected to precisely

a year ago, is that the social constructionist view of human identity has been built

11

now into  Canadian law. So there’s an insistence that biological sex, gender identity,

gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently with no causal relationship

between any of the levels.

And so that’s in the law, and not only is it in the law, it’s being taught everywhere. It’s

being taught in the Armed Forces, it’s being taught in the police, it’s being taught to the

elementary school kids, and the junior high school kids. And underneath it all I see this

terrible striving for arbitrary power that’s associated with this crazy utopianism.

But I still don’t exactly understand it. I don’t understand what seems to be the hatred

that motivates it that you see bubbling up, for example, in identity politics, and in the

desire to do nothing but, let’s say, demolish the patriarchy.

It kind of reminds me. . . And this is something else I wanted to talk to you about.

You’re an admirer of Erich Neumann and of Carl Jung. 

The Neumann connection is really interesting because I think he’s a bloody genius. 

I really like The Great Mother.

It’s a great book and really a great warning, that book. And also The Origins and History of Consciousness.

Paglia: One my most influential books.

Peterson: Yeah well that’s so interesting. I read an essay that you wrote. I don’t remember when it was.

Paglia: It was a lecture I gave on Neumann at NYU, yes.

Peterson: Yes, it’s always been staggering to me that that book hasn’t had the impact that it should have had. I mean Jung himself, in the preface to that book,

wrote that that was the book that he wished that he would have written. It’s very much associated with Jung’s Symbols of Transformation. 

And it was a major influence on my book, Maps of Meaning, which was an attempt to outline the universal archetypes that are portrayed in the kind of religious structures that you put forward.

But the thing that I really see happening. . . And you can tell me what you think about this. 

In Neumann’s book, consciousness - which is masculine, symbolically masculine for a variety of reasons - is viewed as rising up against the countervailing force of tragedy from an underlying feminine, symbolically feminine, unconsciousness. 

And it’s something that can always be pulled back into that unconsciousness.

The microcosm of that would be the Freudian Oedipal Mother familial dynamic where the mother is so overprotective and all-encompassing that she interferes with the development of the competence not only of her sons but also of her daughters, of her children in general. 

And it seems to me that that’s the dynamic that’s being played out in our society right now.

And it’s related in some way that I don’t understand to this insistence that all forms of masculine authority are nothing but tyrannical power. 

So the symbolic representation is Tyrannical Father with no appreciation for the Benevolent Father, and Benevolent Mother with no appreciation whatsoever for the Tyrannical Mother.

I thought of ideologies as fragmentary mythologies. 

That’s where they get their archetypal and psychological power. 

In a balanced representation you have the Terrible Mother and the Great Mother, as Neumann laid out so nicely. 

And you have the Terrible Father and the Great Father. 

So that’s the fact that culture mangles you have

to death while it’s also promoting you and developing you. 

You have to see that as balanced. 

Then you have the heroic and adversarial individual.

But in the postmodern world - and this seems to be something that’s increasingly seeping out into the culture at large - you have nothing but the Tyrannical Father, nothing but the destructive force of masculine consciousness, and nothing but the benevolent Great Mother.

It’s an appalling ideology, and it seems to me that it’s sucking the vitality - which is exactly what you’d expect symbolically - it’s sucking the vitality of our culture. 

You see that with the increasing demolition of young men, and not only young men, in terms

of their academic performance. 

They’re falling way behind in elementary school, way behind in junior high, and bailing out of the universities like mad.

Paglia: Well the public school education has become completely permeated by this kind of anti-male propaganda. To me, public school is just a form of imprisonment.

They’re particularly destructive to young men, who have a lot of physical energy.

I identify as transgender myself, but I do not require the entire world to alter itself to fit my particular self-image. I do believe in the power of hormones. I believe that men exist and women exist, and are biologically different. I think there is no cure for the culture’s ills right now, except if men start standing up and demanding that they be respected as men again.

Peterson:

Okay, okay, so I’ve got a question about that.

We did a research project a year ago trying to figure out if there was such a thing as political correctness from a psychometric perspective, to find out if the loose aggregation of beliefs actually clump together statistically. And we actually found two factors, which I won’t go into. 

Then we looked at things that predicted adherence to that politically correct creed. There were a couple that were surprising.

One was - being female was a predictor. The personality attributes associated with femininity - so that would be agreeableness and higher levels of negative emotion - were also both independent predictors.

But so were symptoms of personality disorder, which I thought was really important.

Because part of what I see happening is that. . . I think that women whose relationship with men has been seriously pathologized cannot distinguish between Male Authority and Competence and Male Tyrannical Power. They fail to differentiate because all they see is The Oppressive Male.

And they may have had experiences that. . . Their experiences with men might have been rough enough so that differentiation never occurred. Because it has to occur. And you have to have a lot of experience with men - and good men, too - before that will occur.

But it seems to me that we’re also increasingly dominated by a view of masculinity that’s mostly characteristic of women who have terrible personality disorders, and who are unable to have healthy relationships with men. But here’s the problem.

This is something my wife has pointed out, too. She said, ‘Well men are going to have to stand up for themselves.’ But here’s the problem.

I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassing against me. And the

reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is:

We talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical.

If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is.

That’s forbidden in discourse with women. And so I don’t think that men can control crazy women. I really don’t believe it. I think they have to throw their hands up in. . . In what? It’s not even disbelief. It’s that the cultural. . . There’s no step forward that you can take under those circumstances, because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away. Or at least the threat is there.

And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation. It keeps the thing civilised to some degree. If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone [for] whom you have absolutely no respect.

But I can’t see any way. . . For example there’s a woman in Toronto who’s been organising this movement, let’s say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event. And she managed to organize quite effectively, and she’s

quite offensive, you might say. She compared us to Nazis, for example, publicly, using the Swastika, which wasn’t something I was all that fond of.

But I’m defenseless against that kind of female insanity, because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me. So I don’t know. . . It seems to me that it isn’t men who have to stand up and say, 

‘Enough of this.’ Even though that is what they should do, it seems to me that it’s sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, 

‘Look, enough of that. Enough man-hating. Enough pathology. Enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender.’

But the problem there - and then I’ll stop my little tirade - is that most of the women I know who are sane are busy doing sane things. They have their career. 

They have their family. They’re quite occupied, and they don’t seem to have the time, or maybe even the interest, to go after their crazy, harpy sisters. And so I don’t see any regulating force for that terrible femininity. And it seems to me to be invading the

culture and undermining the masculine power of the culture in a way that’s, I think, fatal. I really do believe that.

Paglia: I, too, believe these are symptomatic of the decline of Western culture. And itwill just go down flat. I don’t think people realize that masculinity still exists in the world as a code among jihadists. And when you have passionate masculinity circling the borders like the Huns and the Vandals during the Roman Empire. . . That’s what I see. 

I see this culture rotting from within and disemboweling itself, literally.

Now I have an overview of why we’re having this problem, and it comes from the fact that I’m the product of an immigrant family. All four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy.

So I remember from my earliest years in this factory town in upstate New York, where my relatives came to work in the shoe factory.

I can remember, still, the life of the agrarian era - which was for most of human history - the agrarian era where there was The World of Men and The World of Women.

And the sexes had very little to do with each other. 

Each had power and status in its own realm. 

And they laughed at each other, in essence. 

The women had enormous power. 

In fact, the old women ruled, not the young beautiful women like today. 

But the older you were the more you had control over everyone, including the mating and marriage. 

There were no doctors, so the old women were like midwives and knew all the ins and outs and [had] inherited knowledge about pregnancy and all these other things.

I can remember this. And the joy that women had with each other all day long. Cooking with each other, being companions to each other, talking, conversing. 

My mother remembered, as a small child in Italy, when it was time to do the laundry they would take the laundry up the hill to the fountain and do it by hand. 

They would sing, they would picnic, and so on.

We get a glimpse of that in the Odyssey when Odysseus is thrown up naked on the shores of Phaeacia and he hears the sound of women, young women, laughing and singing. 

And it’s Nausicaa, The Princess, bringing the women to do the laundry. 

It’s exactly the same thing. So there was. . . 

Each gender had its own hierarchy, its own values, its own way of talking. 

And the sexes rarely intersected.

I can remember in my childhood in a holiday - it could be a Christmas, it could be a Thanksgiving, whatever - women would be cooking all day long, everyone would sit down to eat, and then after that the women would retire en masse to the kitchen. 

And the men would go. . . I would look at them through the window and see all the men.

The men would be all outside, usually gathered around the car - at a time when cars didn’t work as well as they do today - with the hood up. 

And the men would be standing with their hands on their hips like that. 

Everyone’s staring at the engine. 

That’s how I learned men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and mechanical after being with the women during the dinner.

So all of these problems of today are the direct consequence of women’s emancipation and freedom from housework thanks to capitalism, which made it possible for women to have jobs outside the home for the very first time in the nineteenth century. No longer to be dependent on husband or father or brother.

So this great thing that’s happened to us, allowing us to be totally self-supporting,

independent agents has produced all this animosity between men and women,

because women feel unhappy.

Women today - wherever I go, whether it’s Italy or Brazil or England or America or Toronto - the upper-middle class professional women are unhappy, miserable.

And they don’t know why they’re unhappy. They want to blame it on men. The men must change. Men must become more like women. No. That is the wrong way to go.

It’s when men are men, and understand themselves as men, are secure as men - then you’re going to be happier.

Peterson: Well, there’s nothing more dangerous than a weak man.

Paglia: Absolutely. Especially all these quislings spouting feminist rhetoric. When I hear that it makes me sick. 

But here’s the point. Men and women have never worked side by side, ever. Maybe on the farms when you were like. . . Maybe one person is in the potato field and the other one is over here doing tomatoes, or whatever.

You had families working side by side, exhausted with each other. No time to have any clash of this. It was a collaborative effort on farms and so on. Never in all of human history have men and women been working side by side. And women are now. . . The pressure about Silicon Valley - they’re all so sexist, they don’t allow women in, and so on. Men are being men in Silicon Valley.

Peterson: Especially the engineers.

Paglia: And the women are demanding that. . . ‘Oh, this is terrible, you’re being sexist.’ Maybe the sexes have their own particular form of rhetoric, their own particular form of identity. Maybe we need to reexamine this business about. . . Maybe we have

to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the sexes in a work

environment.

I don’t mean harassment — I’m talking about women feeling disrespected. Somehow their opinions, when they express them, are not taken seriously. Even Hillary Clinton is complaining ‘When a woman writes something online she’s attacked immediately!!!’ —

Everyone is attacked online!

What are you talking about? 

The world is tough. The world is competitive. 

Identity is honed by conflict. The idea that there should be no conflict, that we have to be in this bath of approbation. . . It’s infantile.

Peterson: That’s right. It’s absolutely infantile. 

CAPS

CJ.circulates around the room. Danny approaches C.J.

DANNY

C.J., look....

C.J.

Yeah. You're not going to want to miss this.

The crowd applauds again.

REPORTER

C.J., what is this? What's going on in there?

C.J.

The President's going to throw his cap over the wall.

REPORTER

What does that mean?

C.J.

You're about to find out.

CUT TO: THE PODIUM - CONTINUOUS

BARTLET

My Father was very fond of the analogy of the Irish lads whose journey was blocked by a brick wall, seemingly too high to scale. Throwing their caps over the wall, the lads had no choice but to follow. 

How many times in the great history of our country have we come to a wall seemingly too high to scale only to throw our caps to the other side?

FADE TO: INT. A DARK ROOM - NIGHT

The Senate Majority Leader is inside with his staff. Steve Onorato is watching Bartlet from a TV screen.

SENATOR

This was given to me by a constituent who read in Time Magazine that I like Cognac.

The problem is, that this is Brandy and not Cognac. Anyone know the

difference?

ONORATO

Senator?

SECRETARY

The Cognac is supposed to come from the...

SENATOR

...The Cognac region of France. That's right.

ONORATO

Senator?

SENATOR

Steve, sit down with us over here, would you? The man's not going to say anything we're interested in.

ONORATO

I think he is.

SENATOR

What are you talking about?

ONORATO

Listen.

BARTLET

[on T.V.] Tomorrow... tomorrow morning, we're going to begin to change the way elections are supervised in this country.

ONORATO

He's going to name two finance reformers to the F.E.C.

SENATOR

What the hell are you talking about?

ONORATO

Listen.

SENATOR

You said it wasn't going to happen.

ONORATO

I was wrong.

SENATOR

You were wrong?

ONORATO

He's going to name... damn it! Somebody....

SECRETARY

John Bacon...

ONORATO

John Bacon and Patty Calhoun.

SENATOR

You told him, they take on campaign finance reform, I roll out a legislative agenda that'll make his boss sit down and cry.

ONORATO

I made it very clear.

BARTLET

[on T.V.] I am proud to nominate John Branford Bacon and Patricia Calhoun to the Federal Election Commission.

SENATOR

Get him on the phone.

SECRETARY

Who?

SENATOR

Josh Lyman. Get him on the phone. I'm going to reach down his throat and take out his lungs with an ice-cream scoop.

CUT TO: INT. SHERATON HOTEL/MONITOR AREA - NIGHT

Josh, Toby, and Sam are all decked out in tuxes.

SAM

You're about to get a call.

JOSH

Yeah.

SAM

Big call.

JOSH

Yeah.

SAM

Powerful guy.

JOSH

Yeah.

SAM

I'm just saying you're probably rocked back from your meeting last week.

JOSH

A little.

SAM

They threatened you with a legislative agenda.

JOSH

Yeah.

SAM

They made you feel powerless and you're a little off your game.

JOSH

Yeah.

SAM

A little gun shy.

In the background, a phone rings. Toby had sidled up by Sam.

TOBY

Leave him alone.

SAM

I'm bucking him up.

TOBY

Leave him alone.

SAM

You asked me to buck him up.

TOBY

Now, I'm telling you to leave him alone.

JOSH

Guys, I'm trying to watch this speech.

DONNA

Josh.

JOSH

The call?

DONNA

On the cell. [hands him the cell phone]

TOBY

Josh, if you need us, we're standing right here.

Josh turns away to answer the call.

JOSH

[into phone] Hi, Senator. Why don't you take your legislative agenda and shove it up your ass.

He closes the phone as the crowd applauds again. He turns back to everyone.

JOSH

Turns out I was fine.

He tosses phone to Donna, who catches it as we--

SMASH CUT TO: MAIN TITLES.

END TEASER

* * *

FIVE VOTES DOWN

THE QUEST IS THE QUEST

“The World as Forum for Action is “composed,” essentially, of three constituent elements, which tend to manifest themselves in typical patterns of metaphoric representation. 

First is unexplored territory – the Great Mother, nature, creative and destructive, source and final resting place of all determinate things. 

Second is explored territory – the Great Father, culture, protective and tyrannical, cumulative ancestral wisdom. 

Third is the process that mediates between unexplored and explored territory – the Divine Son, the archetypal individual, creative exploratory “Word” and vengeful adversary. We are adapted to this “world of divine characters,” much as the “objective world.” The fact of this adaptation implies that the environment is in “reality” a forum for action, as well as a place of things. 

Unprotected exposure to unexplored territory produces FEAR. 

The Individual is protected from such fear as a consequence of “ritual imitation of the Great Father” – as a consequence of the adoption of group identity, which restricts the meaning of things, and confers predictability on social interactions. When identification with the group is made absolute, however – when everything has to be controlled, when the unknown is no longer allowed to exist – the creative exploratory process that updates the group can no longer manifest itself. This “restriction of adaptive capacity” dramatically increases the probability of social aggression and chaos. 

Rejection of The Unknown is tantamount to “Identification with THE DEVIL,” the mythological counterpart and eternal adversary of the world-creating exploratory hero. 

Such rejection and identification is a consequence of Luciferian Pride, which states: ‘All that I know is all that is necessary to know.’ 

This pride is totalitarian assumption of Omniscience – is adoption of “God’s place” by “reason” – is something that inevitably generates a state of personal and social being indistinguishable from HELL. This Hell develops because creative exploration – impossible, without (humble) acknowledgment of the unknown – constitutes the process that constructs and maintains the protective adaptive structure that gives Life much of its acceptable meaning. 

“Identification with the devil” amplifies the dangers inherent in group identification, which tends of its own accord towards pathological stultification. Loyalty to personal interest – subjective meaning – can serve as an antidote to the overwhelming temptation constantly posed by the possibility of denying anomaly. 

Personal interest – subjective meaning – reveals itself at the juncture of explored and unexplored territory, and is indicative of participation in the process that ensures continued healthy individual and societal adaptation. 

Loyalty to personal interest is equivalent to identification with the archetypal Hero – the “Savior” – who upholds his association with the creative “Word” in the Face of Death, and in spite of Group Pressure to Conform. 

Identification with The Hero serves to decrease the unbearable motivational valence of the unknown; furthermore, provides the individual with a standpoint that simultaneously transcends and maintains the group.