Aren’t we allowed to make up new stories?

Mar 10th, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Belinda Luscombe interviewed Jordan Peterson for TIME. One thing they talked about was Peterson’s view that Disney’s Frozen is propaganda, as opposed to for instance Sleeping Beauty, which instead is Archetype. Luscombe asks him why he calls Frozen “deeply propagandistic.”

It attempted to write a modern fable that was a counter-narrative to a classic story like, let’s say, Sleeping Beauty — but with no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics. You could say that Sleeping Beauty was raised out of her unconsciousness via a delivering male. Another way of reading the story is that unconsciousness requires active consciousness as an antidote. And the unconsciousness is symbolized in that particular story by femininity and active consciousness by masculinity. I could hardly sit through Frozen. There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Awesome. So a story that paints women as unconsciousness and men as active consciousness – note the active, which reminds us that women are passive as well as comatose – is not propaganda at all, it’s Underlying Archetypal Dynamics, while rejecting that not very flattering portrait of women is the subjugation of art to propaganda. How convenient.

She asks him if it’s more propagandistic than say The Little Mermaid, he says the old movies are based on folktales that go back 13,000 years.

Aren’t we allowed to make up new stories? 

Not for political reasons.

Oh? Who made up that rule?

God, what a yutz. No, we have to take all folktales as they are, no questioning allowed, no parody allowed, no improvement allowed, no counter-stories allowed, because the only “political reasons” permitted are the ones that are already in place.

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