Easter is just around the corner; the holiest day of the year. Celebrate when it gets here! Eat some Peeps! And by that I mean the marshmallows, not people. Also please don’t throw eggs at people. Easter is part of the inspiration for this Note, but I also was thinking about Dune, Wheel of Time, and this video from Breaking in the Habit.
Here’s a couple of links about Easter, by the by.
I just finished reading Carpe Jugulum, and next is a book of short stories, I think.
On Messianic Figures
People are happy to use the terms ‘messiah’ and ‘messianic’ a lot, and I wonder if people really know what the word means. It seems that to many, they generally use it to say “heroic savior figure” which doesn’t quite cover everything. The word is derived from the word for ‘anointed’ or ‘anointed one’, which is used in the Old Testament a few times–quite a lot of whom don’t really stay heroic. The video I linked above goes into some of those examples.
Now there are writers who play with this idea interestingly. Frank Herbert’s entire schtick is showing off the horrors of a messiah to the world order. Paul Atreides is a messiah to the Fremen of Arrakis, which in turn leads to a holy war across the universe that kills billions of people. I think it’s worth noting that Paul doesn’t really save anyone, not really, unless you count himself. He promises a paradise to the Fremen, which he doesn’t actually deliver. And for him, being the messiah figure just sucks–he’s constantly weighed down by being responsible for launching an interplanetary holy war and all the deaths he’s caused, and how the people he loves are suffering because of the choices he feels he has to make.
This last thing is a thing I liked about Wheel of Time, as well. That series is often stereotyped as ‘typical, by-the-numbers epic fantasy’, which I think isn’t quite fair. Rand al’Thor, for instance, is the Chosen One, the Dragon Reborn, He Who Comes with the Dawn, and he is destined to either save the world or break it. As the series goes on, it’s clear that being the Dragon Reborn absolutely sucks. He’s got the voice of his previous incarnation talking in his head, using magic is slowly driving him insane, he’s surrounded by people who are trying to control him, and that’s not even getting into the Dark One’s explicit agents! Robert Jordan understood this idea that if a messianic figure was to appear and save the world, it would not be easy for that person.
And not easy for the world, either! Because like Paul, Rand makes a mess of things. Unlike Paul, he does actually save the world (spoiler, I guess?) but all the prophecies make it clear that he will change things, and there will be destruction in his wake. In the series he reshapes nations, breaks cultural traditions, and at one point does the magical equivalent of nuking an enemy position. All of his loved ones become pretty shocked by how he changes over the course of the series.
There’s also a fantasy series I liked by John Gwynne called Faithful and the Fallen in which the world has a prophesied messiah and an anti-Christ figure. And while it’s pretty obvious to the audience how things are going at the end of the first novel, to the characters it isn’t, because one guy is told he’s the messiah, that he’s going to save the world, only for us, the audience, to realize that no, he’s the opposite, and he’s being lied to and manipulated by the forces of Hell. I think there’s a comic book out there with a similar premise, but I don’t recall the title, and I haven’t read it.
When the world thinks of Jesus, they try to stereotype Him as a hippie who would never do harm, but He did promise unrest and division. “Not peace, but a sword,” after all. C.S. Lewis goes into this, especially in the last book of the Space Trilogy, that when the world is saved, a lot of chaotic things have to happen first. Yeah, we’ll be liberated from oppressors, but that means things are going to break, and the people who have ingrained themselves in the unjust systems will suffer greatly for it.
This is part of why socio-political messianic figures trouble me so much. There’s this weird idea that if the right person becomes President, he or she will fix everything to become a utopia to whatever our political alignment is. We see this with our current president, who some people seem to actually believe can just fix everything “woke” with the world and we’d all be happier for it. And to be fair, when the election wasn’t decided yet, I saw an editorial article claiming that if Kamala Harris won, we could have a progressive paradise in a few years, which seemed at best, really naive. People did this with Obama, too! Yes, having a black president was a fantastic sign of how things have changed in a good way, but let’s not act like the country was suddenly perfect for eight years. I’ve even seen people act as if way back when he was running, if Al Gore had become president then we’d have colonies in space or something.
If a politician is going to fix everything, in a short amount of time, you have to accept that there will be suffering for a lot of people. And if the point of that figure’s plan is to cause suffering, they’re probably not planning to save anyone to begin with.
[I’ve posted enough links already, but the phrase “The Cruelty is the Point” came to mind.]
What’s absolutely worse is when people push objects as messianic. The absolutely insane push of AI into every facet of our lives is nothing short of zealous. The people selling AI are acting like it’s going to solve all the world’s problems, when it hasn’t been shown to be able to do much of that. Bill Gates recently declared that one day replace doctors and teachers, as if it were a good thing, and not that replacing every aspect of humans’ professional lives and hobbies with machines isn’t the most dystopian thing imaginable. The people selling this crap are acting like we should be happy to be replaced by the thing they’re selling, because it’ll fix all the world’s problems, don’t you know?
These hustlers should each be smacked with a fish. Perhaps more than once.
I kind of veered off of fiction to talk about real-world ideas, but I think I made my point: people really do want a messianic figure to believe in, and will often put in places where I think a reasonable person would question someone’s motivations and methods. They don’t seem to understand what being a messiah means, though: it involves saving the world, or a country, or something, sure, while also at the same time going through a lot of personal pain, and causing a lot of pain for the people around them.
If you write a messianic figure, or heck, look for one in the real world, don’t expect things to go hunky-dory if they get their way. In fact, expect things to get rough real fast.
And also, you know, don’t expect idiots or robots to be your messiah. That’s just stupid.
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