Why it Matters is back (kind of). This article revisits the Prophet archetype (link to earlier January article) with a bit more passion and (slightly) less bookishness. This article gets into why I care so much about this topic and why I think you should as well.
Back in January I published an article on the archetype of the Prophet. It was a mostly scholarly recounting of the sociologist Max Weber's account of the role of the prophet in history. But after a bit of brooding during my existential crisis this year I found myself unhappy with it. This was a subject that I was so passionate about and yet it just didn't show up in that article; what I found so compelling about the topic was nowhere to be seen.
And so with this instalment, I want to right that wrong and I want to tell you why I find the idea of the prophet so intoxicating for the way I live my life, for what I want The Living Philosophy to be, and how I think we should conduct ourselves in these ages of Culture Wars and social media outrage porn.
It also makes sense of classic personalities like Socrates, Marx, Nietzsche and Jung and 21st-century characters like Trump, Zizek, Contrapoints and Peterson.
The element of the prophet archetype that hits so heavily for me isn't actually from Weber's account — which adds a lot of rich detail — but the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr's tagline for the prophet as being at the "Edge of the Inside".
The Prophet vs. the Priest
Okay, so first of all, what do we mean by “prophets” and by the “Edge of the Inside”? Well, obviously when we speak about prophets normally we think about the Old Testament and characters like Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah or we think about Muhammad in the Islamic tradition (the historical Jesus fits pretty neatly into this category as well but the transformation of that doomsday prophet into a reborn shard of Adonalsium obviously muddies the waters a little so we'll set him aside).
But what Weber and Rohr are trying to get at is the je ne sais quoi that connects all these figures — they try and get at the essence of the prophet. And that is where the “Edge of the Inside” comes in because that is where the prophet comes from.
The best way to understand the prophet is to compare him to the priest. In the Ancient Jewish religion the priest had that nice temple up on the hill at the centre of Jerusalem and that was the centre of the religion and of the kingdom and, like in Ancient Egypt, that religion had a lot of political clout.
The problem with this is the problem with all power structures — it's a straitjacket. It develops its own culture and the incentives and vying interests end up steering the ship rather than the value system that built the ship in the first place (all pretty standard Postmodern observations).
In the same way that all politicians (all?) have to compromise on the way to power, the priest has to compromise on his journey to become priest. You don't become high-priest unless you've learned how to play the politics of the game. This inevitably takes us away from the voice crying in the wilderness — from the desert and the burning bush.
It’s a distinction that dovetails well with Blake's lines in Auguries of Innocence:
"God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day"
The priest very much dwells in the realms of day. He's living a life of service and duty and has to navigate the kings and scholars and common people as part of his work.
The Prophet at the Edge of the Inside
The prophet by comparison is more like a wild animal. They come in scraggly and manic from the edges and they bring some primal truth with them. They aren't constrained by any power structures; they are, by their very nature, powerless; they are rebel voices calling from the wilderness. And yet, there is such certainty and power in their voice that they can shake an entire society.
Now obviously the prophet isn't totally wild. And that is where the “Edge of the Inside” comes in. The prophet is one of us — they are an insider. The prophet was trained by the system, honed by it and then somehow they went into exile. In Weber's account, this bears striking resemblance to the Refusal of the Call stage of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey; this is the stage in which the hero is called on the adventure and says no to it. The hero (or in this case, the chosen prophet who doesn't want it) isn’t a willing martyr but someone ripped from their pedestrian existence.
So the point I want to stress here is that the prophet was one of us — they were born in the tradition; they were classically educated; they listened in class; and loved their parents; they had good hearts but that didn't take them anywhere (or maybe that's the very reason they didn't get anywhere); they weren't willing to corrupt themselves and play the games of power. It reminds me of something anti-spiritual-guru spiritual guru Jed McKenna writes about Arjuna the hero of the Hindu holy text the Bhagavad Gita:
“one doesn't choose enlightenment at all. If anything, one is more likely to be the victim of it, like getting hit by a bus. Arjuna didn't get out of bed that morning hoping to see Krishna's universal form, he was just having a bad day at the office when the universe flashed him.”
And this is how the prophet ends up at the Edge of the Inside. They aren't outsiders — not atheists criticising religious beliefs as nonsensical and logically incoherent. They're part of the same tradition — the same culture and society. They're on the inside but just barely — they are at the very edges.
It is from these edges that they can find their voice. The rest of us are drowning in the chorus — uncertain where the other voices end and ours begins. But at the edge, these marginals as Victor Turner called them have one ear on the inside and one on the outside and that is how they can hear a new harmony.
The Marx Example
Marx is a great example; he fits this prophetic mould in almost every respect. The “Old Moor” came from a good family, got a good education and had good prospects. His wife Jenny was the daughter of a wealthy baron. But despite his father being a lawyer with vineyards and property and providing for Marx's university education, his life didn't work out like the bourgeoise fairytale it should have been.
Instead, Marx spent most of his life in a state of humiliating poverty. Karl and Jenny lost three of their kids in large part to the conditions they were living in in London. When new visitors would come over Karl would send Jenny down to the pawn shop with everything that wasn't nailed down so they could entertain them. There were constant debts and unpaid bills and if it wasn't for the support of Engels and the handouts from other socialists on the continent Marx couldn't have survived.
In the case of Marx, it wasn't a voice from a burning bush that called him on his Prophetic quest but something in his own soul that became possessed.
He studied at the University of Berlin a few years after the death of the great master Hegel whose fame was never greater. In Hegel, Marx found his religious fervour and, taking the work of Hegel, in a new direction he prophesied the end of Capitalism and the rise of Communism.
It was this religious conviction that sustained him through the decades of poverty while he was writing his great work Das Capital. He did everything he could to help this transformation along and dedicated his life and lived in expectation of a soon-to-come transformation. One scholar has found no less than forty predictions of impending revolution between Marx and Engels in those years of exile (Payne 1968: 338).
Marx was an insider — he was from an upper-middle-class family, he was married to a great family he could write he was a genius and he had a heart that dreamed of a better world (with a tyrannical temperament for boot). With this set of traits, Marx could have been an incredibly successful man. But instead of reaping the fruits of his intelligence and background, he became Capitalism's most famous critic. He could speak so well about the corruption of the system because he was an insider.
He was from inside the system — raised inside it and trained inside it. He could have done very well but that wasn't how things played out. He was a prophet in every meaning of the word.
More Modern Prophets
You can see similar elements of the prophet archetype in the likes of Nietzsche — an ex-academic ex-German writing his cryptic aphorisms and oracular Zarathustran passages from his exile in the heart of the Swiss Alps.
You can see it in Jordan Peterson with his doomsday prophecies of the Postmodern Neo-Marxists trying to destroy Western Culture from the inside and of the infamous Orwellian Bill C-16 which as we all know has destroyed Canada (prophets aren't always accurate — their passionate intensity tends to bridge the gap).
Another great example is the father of Critical Race Theory Derrick Bell. Bell was a prominent Civil Rights lawyer who saw the Civil Rights Movement wasn't going to change things and so ended up criticising the movement from the Edge of the Inside. His prophetic impact can be seen in the way of the classic Biblical prophet as steering the Civil Rights movement towards a more systemic critical approach with Critical Race Theory.
Trump also fits in the mould; keep the edge of the inside in mind as you watch Dave Chappelle talking about Trump on SNL:
Trump is a sort of insider-turned-prophet who risked all his business and his comfortable life to do his part to Make America Great Again and to “drain the swamp” of Washington which was destroying the country.
Contrapoints has a similar arc at the start of her channel. Before starting Contrapoints she was deeply involved in the Atheist YouTube subculture but then with the early Contrapoints videos she attacked the anti-Woke bastions of that community.
In some of those earlier videos she described herself as a former edgelord character. Given the power of this position at the Edge of the Inside we've been discussing, it should surprise us little that Contrapoints is the leftist YouTuber who has managed to speak most to those flirting with the alt-right (earning her the title of “Alt-Right Whisperer”). She after all can speak as a former insider of that sort of culture. There is a sense in which she is kin to them — not a complete outsider but certainly not an insider either.
Reflections
And so you can probably start to see what's so important about this idea of the Edge of the Inside. If you're going to argue with a scientist you won't get far citing postmodern deconstructive readings and if you're going to criticise a religious fundamentalist you don't cite scientific evidence falsifying their position. By the same token, if you're going to argue with a 4Chan edgelord then the moralising discourse of the left probably isn't going to get you very far.
The most powerful way to speak to someone is in their own language. You can use the language of an outsider but you won't make an ounce of an impression on your interlocutor (though you may consolidate and galvanise your own base and that is enough for many commentators). And the thing is: only insiders can speak the language.
Those who are speaking the language as outsiders are very easily spotted. Maybe it's a lack of credentials, maybe it's something cringy like someone doing an outsider’s imitation of an insider.
These caricatures are not convincing. They are recognised for what they are and dismissed or mocked accordingly.
I watched Good Will Hunting last week and you can see this Edge of the Inside dynamic in the difference between the therapists that Will goes to see. The first therapists are pretentious elitist bourgeois therapists and they are easily mocked by the working class Will. But the therapist that does connect with him is someone from the same rough neighbourhood who gets his experience and yet moves in a different world now and is able to criticise that worldview from the edge of the inside.
Think of Peterson's language of the Postmodern Neo-Marxists which we looked at in the article on Peterson's Shadow. If you listen to the way he talks about Marx or about Foucault or Derrida it's painfully obvious that he doesn't know the first thing about them. Everything he knows comes from Stephen Hicks's book Explaining Postmodernism which is a tour de force in bad scholarship as Cuck Philosophy showed in his wonderful video analysing it.
Peterson is a Michael Scott among leftists — he is clearly an outsider working with a caricature. He has no understanding of their worldview; he has only demonic caricatures of their thought leaders. As such, do you think he has even the slightest chance of convincing a leftist who knows anything about Postmodernism or about the Frankfurt School thinkers? To anyone who knows the first thing about these traditions, Peterson's words are the most ignorant nails on the chalkboard of knowledge.
What Peterson's words do though is galvanise his base and ignite a passion and fury in them. He's still prophetic only he's not at the Edge of the Inside of leftism but at the edge of the inside of Western culture — raised and educated and an academic but a critic of what Western culture has become and of what academia has done to the world. This is the inside that he is at the edge of.
Personal Reflection
And so for myself, this idea of the Edge of the Inside hit me like an anchor. It's exactly what I've been trying to do. Way back in 2005, Peterson wrote an article called Peacemaking Among Higher Order Primates which has been another titanic inspiration for me in this direction (more on this in the next major article). He distinguishes between what he calls “Local” victories (zero-sum outcomes where one side triumphs over the other) and “Transcendental” victories (where both sides come together into a new synthesis).
The symbol of Transcendental victory is the bridge. We might illustrate such a victory using a Venn diagram where the Edges of two Insides overlap — where Petersonians and Leftists can speak to each other. I think Contrapoints (especially in her earlier videos) does a great job of this and reduces polarity through understanding both sides.
There's a power in the idea of the Edge of the Inside to me because it speaks to a possibility for hope. If we can find the edges where the insides overlap then we can find a way to bridge between polarities. You're never going to get everyone on board but I think we can create meaningful bridges across ideological chasms with this mindset/framing and from there lies to the possibility of these bridgemakers spreading understanding through their bubbles as prophetic figures.
The key idea that goes along with the Edge of the Inside is that we mustn't judge groups we disagree with by the worst of their members. It's the faith that if a group of sane humans believe in a thinker or an idea that there is something in there we can learn. We will never agree with everything they say or believe (sometimes not even a fraction of it) but we can get inside their perspective enough to understand how they got there and with that we can begin to build bridges.
That, at least, is what I see in the Prophet archetype — the outsider who isn't corrupted by the power of the temple (whether that's academia, capitalism or Western culture) and so are free to see the world in new ways — in ways that can renew what is crooked and broken.
I needed this 🙏🏻. It helps to feel like you are Edge of the Inside rather than falling in the gaps or outcast. I advocate for the archnemesis of the establishment...peace...making it very hard to find a place to fit other than on the outside. I will now think of it as Edge of the Inside instead. Very valuable. Thank you for sharing.
This was a good article. I feel if the left could believe in the transcendent, that would renew what is crooked and broken, but I couldn't be the prophet that does that just yet.
Alternatively, the right could take Christianity seriously and take very seriously the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, and that might also do the trick.