What Hero Can Defeat the Hydra with a Thousand Faces?

Writer Joseph Campbell is most famous for his idea of “the hero’s journey.” After studying mythology from around the world, Campbell became convinced that heroes in all times and places undertake the same kind of journey. It’s the foundation of his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In its simplest form, the hero’s journey involves separation, initiation, and return. In a classic example, the hero leaves his village, fights a dragon or some other monster, and then returns to his village bearing gifts, literal or metaphorical.

Campbell thought of myths as metaphors that help us make sense of the world. He saw the hero’s journey as one of Jung’s archetypes: It was an underlying aspect of how humans interpret everything. Once you see the pattern of the hero’s journey, you see it everywhere. It’s there in The Hobbit, Star Wars, and The Lion King. We can also find it much further back in time, even as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh. If you need more examples, you can find plenty of Campbell talks on YouTube. Academics typically look askance at Campbell, and not all non-academics subscribe to his views, either. Yet the idea of the hero’s journey has held on. It seems relevant to the stories that shape our notion of reality, because there are always stories about heroes.

Campbell also feared that the old stories just didn’t stand up very well to life in the late twentieth century. He thought the myths were essentially broken. In the absence of a compelling mythos, he counseled people to “follow your bliss.” Arguably, following your bliss has also not stood up very well as a substitute, but Campbell seems to be right that the old stories have fallen on hard times. It seems almost impossible to have a classic hero’s journey in this day and age.

That may be because today we are up against a hydra with a thousand faces. The forces we are up against are impersonal and often leave us exhausted and discouraged. We are not up against nature or the gods like Odysseus and our other forebears. We are not quite up against society, like those in earlier centuries. But we are not only up against ourselves, either. The hydra we face is not only hard to defeat; it’s hard to define.

One face of the hydra would be the multiplication of tasks that has divided our time into unrecognizable segments. For example, it’s not a simple thing to check your work email. You have to do two-factor authentication and then wade through listserv emails and phishing messages sent by your own institution to test you. Many things are this way. Simplicity is often unavailable. You have to choose multiple settings to start the dishwasher or any household appliance designed for convenience. You want to watch a show, but first you must log in and perhaps authenticate yourself again and then choose a profile and once you settle in with your show, it will be broken up by ads probably four times. You want to pay your bills using the app your bank insists on, but it needs to be updated first. All of life begins to feel like pauses of calm between interruptions. No wonder whole books can be written and sold on the argument that you should do things for sustained amounts of time with directly applied attention.

In his famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace told the audience that “There happen to be whole parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.” These are some of the most familiar faces of the hydra: boredom, routine, and petty frustration. They surely existed in other centuries, but they have gained new strength in ours. We encounter petty frustration when we want to order food at a restaurant, only to be directed by a waiter to a QR code. If you are too impatient to sit down, you still need to be prepared for petty frustration—fortunately there is an app to tell you which McDonald’s ice cream machines are working. Foster Wallace describes the experience at the end of the workday. You want to go home and eat, but you remember there’s no food and now you’re off to a miserable grocery store, through bad traffic. And “the store is hideously lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out.” After escaping the line with crying children and yelling parents, “you take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.”

In the hero’s journey, the hero often faces something that wants to kill him. Our environment lacks this personal antagonism. The marvels of engineering and technology have vanquished many of the more obvious dangers. Our astronauts conquer space, yet even they are bedeviled by Outlook. We can orbit the moon, but we cannot avoid the inconveniences that accompany the modern tools allegedly designed to help us.

Plastics and other environmental toxins could be another head of the hydra. A study warns us about how each serving of soda or red meat or bread or eggs or milk or soy takes minutes off your life. How many cups of coffee or glasses of wine should be avoided, or accepted, to extend life five extra years? Climate change and environmental destruction operate in the long durée, but are never inactive. Could these slow killers ever be defeated by a hero? The answer is certainly not in attempting to become immortal through obsessive bodily programming, which is its own rejection of life.

You can add Paul Kingsnorth’s “Machine” as a third head. We all exist under the gaze of big tech. AI extends its fingers into our homes and hobbies after grabbing up workplaces. AI is now allegedly powering youth baseball bats. LLMs steal human writing from the past, and then we pay them to replace human writing in the present.

Another hydra would be the constant threat of obsolescence. You need to quit your job to learn to code. Then AI takes over coding and you need to try something else. You should skip college, but then manufacturing dries up. You should pick your college major based on a career, but the job market shifts. Obsolescence may have always stalked the old, but now it even lunges at the young. Will there be a workforce for the young to enter? Even if you are gainfully employed, with long-term prospects, people seem to delight in predicting the end of your industry, whatever it is, regularly and publicly. And if it’s not your job, it’s your town or your alma mater that may fade to black. What sword can we use against obsolescence?

Such nebulous enemies challenge the basic elements of the hero’s journey. With our ability to be contacted at any given hour, almost anywhere on the planet, how can we achieve separation or departure? Sometimes we bring the challenges home with us, as we keep checking work emails. Sometimes we use technology to bring everyone with us, narrating our alleged adventure without achieving separation.

Maybe seventh sons never really fought dragons and married princesses, but it seemed like a good story. It was a welcome narrative. It’s hard to even imagine a hero triumphing against the hydra with a thousand faces. Could you tell a good story about a hero facing this hydra? Does the hero make it to work without traffic, get to inbox zero by lunch, avoid an unproductive meeting, manage to exercise and eat in the same day, remember every password perfectly, always get the insurance company to come through, and never run late taking kids to soccer practice? Even if victory is won for a day, could a hero triumph over the hydra without permanently abandoning modern life? Initiation was always a challenge, otherwise we never would have taken notice of Beowulf, but it seems difficult in new ways.

The hydra with a thousand faces laughs with all of them. Our world is one of unnecessary complication and unclear opposition. Even much of our manmade environment is slyly hostile to humans, from the benches designed to annoy the homeless to the highways Robert Moses cut through New York to the chairs that may be slowly killing us with sitting. Our own tools are against us. We have created the handheld devices that give us depression. Screens did not force themselves on our children.

No doubt the actual people of the past often felt the enemy seemed impossible to kill or permanently defeat. Even if a farmer had an unprecedentedly good harvest, he could not defeat the weather. Every year he would face the same opponent. Rome and Carthage fought more than one round against each other. Gilgamesh lost the magic flower to a snake. However, victory was imaginable.

Arguably, the hydra of modern life has infiltrated our imagination. Can we imagine something like a hero of our time? Lately, many of our fictional heroes are not quite human; they are more Marvel than man. Our politicians and celebrities and tech CEOs seem not quite human sometimes, too. The hydra with a thousand faces curls itself up atop our captured imaginations.

David Foster Wallace suggested that if we learn how to see and interpret our circumstances differently, “it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.” This will involve decentering ourselves from our mental conception of the universe. And it will be characterized by “attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” This doesn’t look like what we typically celebrate as heroism. It doesn’t even seem to resemble much of a main character.

Perhaps this, then, is where fighting back begins: with imagination. Narratives are powerful. Even in ancient Greece, Odysseus could make his way back to Ithaka to slaughter the suitors, despite angering Poseidon. Odysseus could only escape the hydra, but Hercules could kill it. The gods were not conquerable in those days and fate could still overwhelm anyone, but victory was imaginable. Poets may not quite be the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley suggested, but storytellers may help us face this hydra of a thousand faces and provide an image of a hero of our time—one who does more than escape modernity. Perhaps some models are already emerging of characters who are not overwhelmed by the hydra but model the compassion and love that Foster Wallace commends. I have in mind the quotidian fidelity of John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter. If we attend to such exemplars, we may be better able to imagine the kind of heroism to which we are called today.

Image Credit: AOL