Archetype vs Humanist
Darth Vader is one of the greatest villains in cinema. The mask, the breathing, the cape. He is Hades, he is the Sheriff of Nottingham, he is every fairy tale wolf dressed in technological armor. He’s the Dark Father (it’s literally his name). You felt the chill when he walked on screen because your nervous system has been responding to that silhouette for ten thousand years.
And then the prequels came along and tried to explain where Vader came from. A scared kid. A forbidden romance. A slow seduction by a patient fascist. On paper, this is a great tragic backstory. In practice, it’s famously awkward, and not (just) because of the dialogue about sand. The awkwardness runs deeper than craft. There’s something about Darth Vader that actively resists being a specific person with a specific childhood. The character was built to be mythic. Giving him a psychology is like giving the Grim Reaper a therapy session. George Lucas wasn’t failing to make a humanist story. He was making one on purpose, and the material kept bucking him, because the material is archetypal at its foundation.
What’s funny is that someone did pull off a humanist Darth Vader, and it wasn’t a film studio with $300 million. It was a blogger.
In 2005, a writer published The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster, narrating the events of the original trilogy as Vader’s personal diary. And it’s astonishingly good. Vader has middle-management frustrations. He writes passive-aggressive condolence letters to the families of officers he’s strangled. He ruminates on the Force with a philosopher’s weariness. He has specific, petty, recognizably human reactions to the comedy of errors unfolding around him. The blog works because it doesn’t try to replace the archetype with a person. It layers a person on top of the archetype, so you get both: the mythic silhouette, and the guy inside it who is tired and angry and a little funny about it.
That difference (the archetype vs. the person inside it) is much bigger than Star Wars.
It’s the disagreement between the fairy tale and the novel. Between theater and film. Between Greek tragedy and prestige TV. Between the stories that survive 3,000 years and the stories that make you cry on the couch at 2 AM because you recognize your ex in a fictional barista. Both of these are real forms of power, both of them work, and almost no one has a vocabulary for talking about the difference (which is ironic, given how much of the internet is devoted to arguing about fiction).
An archetype is a pattern that recurs across cultures and centuries. The Trickster. The Mentor. The Threshold. Archetypal storytelling treats characters as roles in a cosmic drama, and the power of the story comes from how perfectly those roles are executed. A great fairy tale doesn’t need you to know the woodcutter’s childhood traumas. The woodcutter is the role of the woodcutter, fully and completely, and the story would be worse if you gave him an inner monologue about his marriage.
Humanist storytelling is nearly the opposite. It’s grounded, particular, psychological. The power comes from specificity: this person’s specific memories, this person’s specific way of being awkward at parties, this person’s specific terrible decision that you would also have made. A great humanist character feels like someone you’ve met (or someone you’ve been). The pleasure is recognition, not resonance.
And people who love one of these approaches are often baffled, even offended, by the other. The archetype lover watches a three-hour character study and thinks nothing happened. The humanist reads a myth retelling and thinks these aren’t people, they’re action figures. They’re both right from their own frame. They’re both missing something huge from the other’s.
Like every binary in this blog: two tools. Not two tribes.
Agency vs Innocence
[Author's note: I decided to move to a three post a week schedule (MWF) for the first two weeks. After the first six posts, I will return to MTh.]
“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
(Thucydides, who was having a bad day)
The word “agentic” has escaped the tech industry and is now loose in the wild. You see it in LinkedIn bios and self-help threads and the kind of podcast where a guy in a baseball cap tells you that your failures are a mindset problem. “You can just do things,” the agentic whisper goes. Your job is boring? Start a side project. Want to live in a castle? Land is cheap in Portugal. There is surprisingly little you actually need permission for.
There’s something genuinely thrilling about this. It’s also the exact same pitch used by every multilevel marketing scheme in history.
Because here’s the opposite framing, which is equally true: your entire life was substantially determined before you were born. Your parents’ zip code predicted your SAT score. The economy you graduated into shaped your career more than your resume did. Your brain chemistry is not something you chose at a character creation screen. You were, in many measurable ways, dealt a hand and then told to smile about it.
We have a nice word for when something isn’t your fault. Innocence.
(I hear in VC interviews they ask founders if they are “agentic or mimetic.” As if there could be anything more mimetic than answering agentic because it’s the answer you know they want to hear.)
Agency versus Innocence. Two words that are both, on their face, desirable. Nobody wants to be described as lacking agency. Nobody wants to be guilty. And yet the two perspectives are almost completely at odds, and most people lean hard toward one without ever noticing they’ve chosen.
The Agentic person looks at a failed business and asks what the founder did wrong. The Innocent person looks at the same failure and asks what structural forces made it inevitable. Both of them are usually correct. Neither of them finds the other’s answer satisfying even a little bit.
This binary shows up everywhere once you start looking. Nietzsche called them herrenmoral and slavenmoral (he was a terrible marketer). Psychologists split them into internal and external locus of control. The Exploring Egregores blog mapped them onto the Lovecraftian twin gods Yeb and Nug (yes and no, optimism and fatalism, the pyramid scheme and the subreddit). I find “Agency” and “Innocence” more useful because neither word sounds like an insult. Though give it time.
The existing terms are all pre-loaded. “Master morality” makes you think of Nazis, even though the person most likely to be destroyed by their own agency is themselves, not some oppressed underclass. “Victim” makes you think of weakness, even though solidarity among the wronged has toppled more regimes than any lone wolf ever has. The connotations steer you toward picking a side before you’ve even understood what the sides are.
The failure modes are symmetric and predictable. Too much Agency and you’re the founder burning through your spouse’s credit cards on a doomed app because you believed hard enough. You’re the fitness influencer who tells a clinically depressed person to just get up earlier. You’re the gambler on a streak. Too much Innocence and you’re the person with a graduate degree and a podcast about why it’s pointless to try, who hasn’t applied for a job in eight months because the economy is “structural.” You’re the gaming subreddit that escalated from mild critique to full existential outrage because a sequel was on mobile phones. Both of these people exist. You probably know one of each. (You might be one of each, depending on the topic.)
And that parenthetical is the whole point. People are not all one or the other. On most days you’re some mixture, and the mixture shifts depending on whether you’re talking about your career, your relationships, or your Elden Ring playthrough. The question is not “which one are you.” The question is which lens is useful right now.
There’s a reason I’m putting these up as tools and not identities. You are not an Agentic Person or an Innocent Person. You are a person who sometimes needs to grab the wheel and sometimes needs to forgive yourself for the crash. Agency is fire magic: it gets things done and it burns the caster. Innocence is ice magic: it protects you and it freezes you in place.
Innocent people are more often right. Agentic people are more often happy.
Make of that what you will.
Linear vs Harmony
Captain Planet and why everyone you argue with is a hypocrite, and why they’d say the same about you.
There are two ways to think about whether something is worth doing, and both of them are absolutely certain the other one is either stupid or evil.
The first one, which I’m going to call Linear, goes like this: you pick a goal, you figure out the most efficient path to that goal, and you execute. Every step should demonstrably bring you closer. If it doesn’t, cut it. If something does bring you closer but makes you uncomfortable, too bad, because we’re being rational here. Linear thinking gave us the moon landing, double-entry bookkeeping, and every self-help book that tells you to write your goals on a whiteboard. It is the voice in your head that says “but does this actually work?”
I love Linear thinking. I use it all the time.
The second one, Harmony, says: actually, we’re not trying to make a single number go up. We’re trying to grow a whole organism. A civilization (or a person, or a community) has many values at once, and those values feed each other in ways you can’t capture on a spreadsheet. Art makes people more creative, which helps the engineers, whose innovations fund more art. Health, wisdom, beauty, solidarity, play: they aren’t competing line items in a budget. They’re dimensions of a shape, and the goal is volume.
I also love Harmony thinking. I also use it all the time. That’s going to be a theme here.
You’ve already encountered these two, even if nobody labeled them for you. Linear is the energy of a spreadsheet, a flight plan, a calorie-tracking app. It’s Moneyball: ignore the scouts’ gut feelings, the data says this guy gets on base, sign him. And it works. It works so well that when you watch the movie you think “why didn’t everyone do this already?” (Because they were thinking in Harmony, is why. But we’ll get there.)
Harmony is the energy of a grandmother’s kitchen. She doesn’t measure. She’s tasted it a thousand times. Everything goes in by feel, and the soup is better than anything you could produce with a recipe, because she isn’t making soup. She’s maintaining an organism called “feeding this family” that includes the soup and the table and the gossip and the kids doing homework nearby. Take the grandmother out of the kitchen and hand the recipe to a line cook and the soup will be fine. But whatever that kitchen was is gone.
Harmony isn’t always cozy, though. It’s also the logic of an ecosystem: no organism in a forest is “trying” to optimize anything, but the whole thing sustains itself through a web of mutual dependency so complex that every time we try to manage it with Linear tools (plant these trees in rows, harvest on a schedule) it eventually collapses. A forest isn’t a tree factory. A kitchen isn’t a soup factory. A civilization isn’t a GDP factory. Harmony says: stop treating living systems like machines with separable parts, because the parts aren’t separable, and you will discover this the hard way.
And I genuinely do think Linear thinking works better in a lot of cases. If you need to win a war, land a spacecraft, or ship a product by Tuesday, you want a plan where every step is justified and nothing is wasted. Harmony-brained organizations tend to produce gorgeous community centers where twelve different stakeholder groups all got their little room and none of the rooms are quite big enough to use.
But Harmony is how most people actually live most of the time, and it’s how every civilization that lasted more than a couple centuries organized itself. So maybe the people who built the Parthenon and maintained the Silk Road weren’t all just confused utilitarians who hadn’t discovered spreadsheets yet.
Both of these are tools. Like fire spells and ice spells. You cast whichever one the situation calls for. The only mistake is thinking you’re a one-school wizard.
Welcome to Alt Binaries
LADY: People are not the same. There are two kinds, utterly distinct.
THIGPEN: What would those be, madam, the two Kinds?
The above is from the Coen brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I recommend watching it, especially the story at the end, where five people answer the above question. What categories you divide people into say as much about you as which side you perceive yourself on.
These days, all discussions of “two kinds of people” get drafted into the culture war. STEM vs wordcels, low-trust vs high-trust — everything gets mapped onto left vs right (very awkwardly.) That has kind of ended the art of making new, odd dichotomies completely off the political spectrum. Which itself opens an opportunity for anyone creative and paying attention to come up with fresh ones and reap the sweet sweet clout.
That’s what this blog is. Every post will be about a particular binary. Mostly new or obscure ones that don’t already have a billion posts arguing about them, though if I have some insight on an old reliable dichotomy, I’ll cover that too. My comparative advantage is in new ideas, not fresh insight porn about left/right, top/bottom, or extro/introverted.
If I’m really ambitious, I want to add an interactive element where readers select which half of the binary they’re on each post, tracking them over time to create some sort of cyclopean MBTI with infinite coordinates. Some day.
But first, three caveats:
1. Yes, I know “the map is not the territory” and “all models are lies but some are useful.” Ideas will fall between the poles, or off the spectrum, or combine elements of both. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t central anchors that contain most of the data points. I’m going to speak in absolutes (because it’s shorter), when the correct verbiage would be “for most people, with many exceptions.”
2. I’m only putting up binaries I find interesting, which means I find both options sympathetic. I could see myself feeling either way depending on context. This is not a secret way to smuggle in my biases or ego-inflate you for being on the side all the good and smart people are on. That said, I remain an imperfect and subjective writer — if my description comes across as favoring one side, comment on what I may be missing.
3. These binaries are not really about people. They’re about ways of thinking. Think of them as opposing tools, like voice and writing — sometimes you use one, sometimes the other, and their advantages depend on what you want to accomplish. Some people write more, others talk more, but you’d rarely call one person “a writer” and the other “a talker.”
However, over large groups, you get a uniformity based on just the parts of people that are 1 or 0, and that has a consistency of its own. Someone might only be 70% right-wing, but those parts of them that are rightist combine with the similar parts of other people to form a group entity that entirely follows right-wing logic.
Ideally, from reading this blog, I want you to see these binaries as two different tools you can consciously choose depending on your goals.
Format
Each post follows the same structure. First, a short casual piece explaining the duality. Then a three panel comic. You can stop there, if you get the idea.
But if you’re still confused (or just interested enough to keep going), click “Read more” for a longer effortpost with more examples and a thoughtful conclusion, followed by some citations of useful source material. Then a back-and-forth between two characters arguing different sides of the binary as a humorous coda. You don’t have to read any of the extra substance to get the idea, but it should be fun if you do.
I’ve got over a dozen entries ready to go on a semi-weekly schedule (Monday and Thursday mornings). I’m starting with the three I consider most meta and perspective-defining.
But first, the controversy that must be addressed and even why I am making this blog…….
Alt Binaries 