Our Unconscious Mind and the Ancient Myth of the Antihero — 3

We can also see this ancient myth repeatedly in our own myths, as in the story of Rostam and his brother Shaghad. In that story Shaghad resents Rostam because Rostam, as he does elsewhere, takes annual tribute from Kabulistan, the land where Shaghad lives. But if we look more deeply, Shaghad’s resentment and hatred have deeper motives. He sees himself as the child of Zal who most closely resembles the great Sam, yet he does not receive the love of his father, the king, or the people. Rostam, by contrast, is the greatest hero and the most beloved of all. Shaghad believes that he was treated unjustly because, on the basis of what the astrologers said about the ill omen of his birth, he was separated from his family and sent to Kabulistan. He carries this resentment, rooted in his perception of injustice, to the point of the crime of killing his brother Rostam by exploiting Rostam’s trust in him and setting a trap.

We may imagine that this ancient myth is merely a narrative structure used to explain the motives of an antihero. Yet our actual history too repeatedly reenacts this fall—from resentment into anger and hatred, and from anger ultimately into crime. At the root of many murders and even genocides lies a deep feeling of victimhood and resentment, because only such a force can make violence, in its most extreme and demonic form, appear sacred. It is this sanctification of demonic violence that can lead any revolution toward mass executions and any war toward genocide. Ask the war criminals and the Robespierres of every revolution how they came to commit demonic crimes and they will tell you how wounded and enraged they were by injustice and oppression. What they cannot see is how this anger and resentment destroyed their highest ideal: justice and goodness.

French revolutionaries sent hundreds of innocent human beings to their deaths in the name of fraternity and equality, driven by hatred and anger toward monarchy and injustice. The Bolsheviks in Russia, after the 1917 Revolution, sent thousands of men, women, and children to their deaths in the cold of Siberia in the name of the struggle against the bourgeoisie and capitalism. This is the bitter story of every revolution.

Hitler nurtured hatred of Jews for years after the First World War, giving his reasons in detail in Mein Kampf, until he ultimately transformed this aversion into the Holocaust and genocide. Behind the mask of violence worn by every terrorist there is a human being wounded by injustice and captive to hatred, a hatred that gives that person a hellish faith with which to commit crime. Wherever you turn, you can find resentment and hatred being transformed, from one direction or another, into violence and crime.

In truth, this archetypal antihero does not exist outside us. If we look carefully within, we find it there. Each of us carries a Cain within, part of the dark side of our personal and collective unconscious. This inner antihero is simply a reminder of the dark side of humanity within every one of us, the side we prefer not to see but to which we repeatedly open the way in our thoughts. The more we allow it entry, the closer we feel darkness and hell within ourselves.

Once again, think about these words and the feelings they produce in you: Persian, Arab, Turk, Hezbollah supporter, reformist, Revolutionary Guard, Basiji, monarchist, Mojahed, taghuti, liberal, conservative, homosexual, rich kid, dervish—and continue for as long as your mind can construct groups of people who, according to your own beliefs and personal experiences, may produce in you a feeling of resentment or even aversion. Whatever your own thinking and orientation, go more deeply into that feeling and find there Cain, the demon Akoman and Shaghad; Koba and Darth Vader and Magneto and Hitler and the guard at Auschwitz—even the enemy whom you hate.

Think about your past and about every resentment you carry against those whom you believe have wronged you. What do you wish for them in your heart? Is it not true that the more anger and resentment we carry from the past, the less capacity we have for love in the present? And so the blossoming of a flower in our hands is no more than a mirage if our heart is a hell. This is precisely why hatred of evil must never be extended into hatred of human beings who do evil. As Nietzsche rightly says in the Persian rendering quoted here, whenever you stare into a dark abyss, that darkness stares back into you. We must therefore take care that, in fighting the monster of darkness, we do not ourselves become a monster.

Aydin Areta