Saint George slew the dragon. Luke Skywalker defeated Darth Vader. Sherlock Holmes outsmarted Professor Moriarty. The underdog Hobbits proved their worth in Middle Earth. Jesus Christ hoodwinked Satan by escaping death in a tomb.

We relish the tales of our heroes since we achieve catharsis in their struggles and long to emulate their adventures and triumphs. But the so-called hero's journey, the model that picks up on patterns in classic literature shows that these stories have been propagandistic for centuries. Specifically, these stories compromise with the unheroic prerequisites of large societies.

Notice how the literary hero's crucial moment is when he or she battles the unknown, and how this confrontation turns into a circular journey, as the hero returns home to social familiarity. The point of the heroic journey outward into the wilderness beyond the familiarities of civilization is to invigorate life at home, to improve your skills and to enrich your perspective by engaging with something alien and undomesticated. The hero strengthens social conventions by providing fresh stimuli to be culturally incorporated.

Luck and absurdity

When we think existentially about life, setting aside comforting simplifications and stretching our mind to engage with unflattering probabilities, we're sure to notice that the hero's journey is idealistic as opposed to realistic. For instance, the hero is backed by destiny, supernatural agents, and magic or miracles, whereas real-world successes are always supported largely by sheer luck.

What is luck in this context? It's the face of life's underlying absurdity, the indifference that's at the heart of the foreign unknowns from which we seek refuge in society itself.

Here, then, is the epic tale's propagandistic role: the hero is supposed to dip into the waters of the unknown without losing himself or herself in them. You're supposed to engage with the unknown and return to the known. You venture out into the dark woods or into the final frontier, battling monsters and maturing in the process, but without betraying your social obligations. Ultimately, the hero serves society, so the imperatives of domestication are left intact and indeed are only strengthened, despite the hero's encounter with their wild antitheses.

Let's imagine, for a moment, what would happen if the protagonist were to decline to return to society, to remain forever engaged with the unknown, bereft of the reassuring social niceties and assimilations. We'd have in that case the tragic hero who verges on villainy. Think of Ahab from Moby Dick who can't forgive the white whale. Or King Lear whose trials overcome him so that he can't regain the throne despite his enlightenment. Or Oedipus who is horrified by the revelation of his identity, and who blinds himself and wanders the countryside, shaken beyond redemption.

Indeed, if we imagine the essence of the villain's journey, which must be a perversion of the hero's adventure, the villain represents the unknown in opposition to the known. That is, the villain might begin as a neutral character or even as a brave hero, sallying forth into some unknown, only to be consumed by that mystery, and to emerge as a chaos agent or as a threat to the social order. Returning home, then, the villain seeks to subvert social conventions, to overwhelm culture with an apocalyptic confrontation with what lies beyond, rather that respecting those boundaries and enabling society to absorb the unknown piecemeal.

Thus, the triumphant hero is only an enriched citizen, whereas the villain goes native and defends not society's mission to civilize the wilderness, but the wilderness's inevitable resurgence against all anthropocentric conceits.

The villain's lair

In comic books and the like, supervillains are brash in their challenge to society. They wear costumes to brand themselves as crazed agents of some transcendent power, rather than swearing allegiance to the laws of the land. Their superpowers signify their enlightenment, these being proofs of their engagement with life beyond the infantilizing reassurances that keep the peace despite the structural injustices that prevail in any large society.

Then there are the villains who lie in waiting, hidden in countercultures, a trope that's familiar from cinema.

Think of the depiction of the villain's lair in Se7en (1995). Recall that the detectives discover this dank, sickly lair and break in, discovering a trove of cynical, hand-scrawled writings by the killer himself. The pessimistic detective who's played by Morgan Freeman almost admires the killer's uncompromising engagement with the depravity to which the city has sunk in its corruption since he, too, is nearly overcome by this dire realization. But as the semi-tragic hero, this detective is committed to protecting what's left of civility. The villain, meanwhile, has surrendered to the apocalyptic insight that the society isn't worth protecting, that its dignity is sustained only by illusions which he means to dissolve by demonstrating the predominance of the seven deadly sins.

This depiction of the villain's dark lair is like that of Shakespeare's office in Anonymous (2011). That film dramatizes the conspiracy theory that the real author of Shakespeare's plays was the courtier Edward de Vere, and that his identity was covered up due to political intrigue, the details of which don't matter here. What matters is that the real author's office is depicted as a dark, mysterious, wizardly lair, as full of odd scientific paraphernalia, animals, and of course shelves and a desk overloaded with hand-scrawled parchments.

Although the author of Shakespeare's plays isn't exactly a villain, the movie presents him as a subversive power, as an enlightened being whose secular humanism transcends petty conventions and delusions.

Likewise, Radagast the Brown in The Hobbit (2012) and its sequels is shown as a psychonaut, as a Hippie-like wizard who lives in a treehouse in the forest. His shack, too, resembles the stereotype of the underground lair, the unkempt living quarters of an obsessive counterculturalist who's a parasite, predator, or some other borderline figure with few social commitments. Radagast is allied to nature, not to society, so the interior of his home looks like a sci-fi alien spacecraft, furnished in biotech.

In all three cases, the lair belongs to an enlightenment figure who has a dubious social standing. Knowledge in this case isn't enriching but threatening, so this antihero must retreat and sublimate his disgust with social degradations. That is, this antihero only superficially returns from the unknown since he infects society with otherworldly doubts. The stereotypical lair signifies this parasitic disloyalty since the lair lacks the furnishings of a well-adjusted lifestyle. On the contrary, the lair is a harbinger of the apocalypse that this outlier would unleash.

Perhaps the paradigm of this trope is the ancient Zoroastrian and Jewish myths of the fallen angels who reside in underground, fiery caves, plotting vengeance against God by corrupting his creation.

Existential heroes

Who is the hero and who is the villain?

Of course, each would be inclined to demonize the other. The model of the hero's journey testifies to society's standpoint from which we idolize the servant who reforms but doesn't overthrow the social status quo. Given the heroic obligation to preserve society in the face of the dangerous, wild unknown, the villain is anyone who's overcome by that unknown and who threatens society as an alien agent.

But again, if we think existentially, we're practically on the road to villainy since we'd have set aside social presuppositions in being as objective as possible. Objectivity is the dehumanizing prospect of stretching our mentality to encompass the inhuman otherness that society means to civilize.

Roughly speaking, there's the wilderness, the heart of the unknown with which the hero famously tangles, and then there's the known quantity of home, the cultivated domain of artificialities that runs on human-made laws, dreams, and conceits. Again, the hero journeys into the wilderness and returns without subverting the home territory. And the villain fails in this double task of venturing beyond the familiar borders and returning in a constructive fashion.

When we combine philosophy, science, and spirituality into one searing, existential, quasi-mystical perspective, the civilizing enterprise can hardly be taken for granted, which means the normativity of the hero's journey is questionable.

And this is hardly an original insight since the Eastern conception of heroism is closer to what the Western world regards as villainy. The Eastern hero is often the mystical ascetic who withdraws from society and loses himself or herself in the antisocial experience of being one with the cosmos or with the ineffable ground of being.

Should an existentialist side with the conventional hero or with the villain, or perhaps with some hybrid of the two? It's not an easy question, but here are two beginnings of an answer.

First, existentialism upholds the integrity of deep choices, regardless of the outcomes. This emphasis on authenticity is consistent with what society would regard either as heroism or villainy. And this raises the question of whether the villain ever lives in good faith, or whether this embrace of antisocial, "higher" laws would be merely maddening, the latter scenario being a staple of H.P. Lovecraft's weird tales.

Second, an existentialist might skirt the question by looking forward to a transhuman state in which technological advances force society to embrace conventions that would once have been deemed villainous. For instance, these advances might subvert capitalism, together with its liberal rationales. Contemporary heroism might be a stage in the development of more inhuman ways of thinking and of antisocial, more artistic values, as technology would empower us as creators.

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