The Hero’s Journey is No Longer Serving Us

Classic Storytelling Models Are Faltering in the Digital Age

For many thousands of years we have been captivated by it: A young man faces a great need. He hesitates, but powerful forces push him to commit. He finds a mentor, trains a bit, then crosses the threshold into the great unknown. There he must overcome obstacles, solve puzzles, make allies, and asserts his right against a terrible wrong. At conquest, he wins a great boon, then returns home to grant it to his community. He and his people are saved. Hercules, Luke Skywalker, even Walter White have this in common.

Mircea Eliade called it “the Eternal Return,” Joseph Campbell called it “the Hero’s Journey.” It can be traced to earliest tribal culture. Story back then was truly a matter of life and death. Males departed the safety of the home for sustenance. They entered the wild, risking life and limb. They returned with food, fire, people. Their actions reinforced the tribes sense of rightness, because back then rightness meant exactly the same thing as staying alive.

These deeds were memorialized by tribal storytellers, first in art, then in narrative. That has never stopped.

The Hero’s Journey is locked into the psyche of humanity to this day.

But if being right was a matter of survival, and an individual in the tribe begged to differ, what happened?

Tribe members were assigned roles in early childhood, and performing those roles was the right thing to do; anything else was not. To diverge was to jeopardize the community. It could result in a bad hunt, in crop failure, in betrayal to another tribe. The result could be suffering and death. So, if you weren’t “right,” you could be punished, exiled, or kicked off a very high cliff.

Our stories began to reinforce rightness, first in the face of nature…and then against those whose ways were different.

The Hero’s Journey Polarizes Us

To this day, most communicators feel that the Hero’s Journey helps them do their job. After all, the best way to tell a story is to appeal didactically to our sense of rightness, our fear of wrongness, and the expectation for (and anticipation of) direct conflict that has been hardwired into our brains.

By experiencing these narratives, we are pleased, mollified and inspired. Our way of life and our daily actions are justified and reinforced. We all see ourselves as the heroes of our lives, after all.

But when we encounter those who think and believe differently from ourselves, that conflict expectation fires up. The Hero’s Journey model—particularly as simplified by standard Hollywood storytelling—can often serve to assert and reinforce our rightness over different points of view and different ways of being.

To say the least, the result is not peacebuilding and reconciliation. The villain, after all, must get his comeuppance.

As a child of the 1960s inner city, I was surrounded by conflict and violence. My friends and neighbors were fully immersed in it, even accepting of it. But somehow I was different. I did not want to play the role I was assigned. My tribe was often unkind in response, and I often paid a price for my insolence. I got my ass kicked.

Like anyone else, I embraced popular storytelling. I loved giant Japanese monsters, The Wizard of Oz, and DC Comics superheroes. But having been on the receiving end of a schoolmate’s jeer or bully’s fist, there was always something discomfiting to me about the characters in all these stories resorting to physical or psychological violence.

In all my books, in all the TV shows, in all of sport, in all the world, was there any other way to be?

After decades circling the globe, studying all forms of story from epic poems to religious scripture to Hollywood blockbusters, and surfing the furthest edges of cyberspace, I believe I’ve found the answer.

So, while the Hero’s Journey functions as an engine driving the survival of the fittest (both physically and ideologically), in the modern, crowded and hyper-accelerated world of pervasive communication this process is becoming antiquated, and in some cases divisive, polarizing, and enormously dangerous.

No Longer a Passive Audience

With the advent of the Internet, and vast networks of social media, we are no longer experiencing story as an audience. The gulf between the stage and seats, the screen and the body, the broadcaster and the masses, has been bridged. We can post our opinions to hundreds or thousands of friends. We are suddenly capable of modifying the content. We have become participants.

Like no other time in human history, we each now have a say in any and every story being told; as well as any and every story ever told. To this end, each of us has become more empowered than any common citizen who has ever lived before us.

We also now have an array of tools that have the potential to help us safely become familiar with the stranger, to listen to one another with compassion and empathy, to reframe what we believe to be true and right so that we can produce a greater truth and rightness for all of us.

None of this adheres to the rigid circular structure and ancient tribal underpinnings that signify the Campbellian Hero’s Journey model.

What is required is a new kind of storytelling, a narrative engine that lends itself to our nonlinear, networked, omni-perspective digital age. The kind of storytelling where any audience member can suddenly and at any point start commenting on, participating in, or redirecting the narrative.

It’s a model of storytelling we call the Collective Journey.

Next: If the Hero’s Journey is so powerful, where exactly is it coming up short in these uneasy times?

The Collective Journey Series:

Intro: Why is This Happening?
A New Narrative Model Explains it

Part 1: The Hero’s Journey is No Longer Serving Us
Classic Storytelling Models Are Faltering in the Digital Age

Part 2: When It Comes to Story, You’re Not Getting It
The Drama & Disquiet of Old-Fashioned Storytelling

Part 3: The Collective Journey Story Model Comes to Television
Thrones, Dead, Orange & Others Are Subverting the Hero’s Journey

Part 4: Big Brands and the Awakening of the Docile Consumer
In the Collective Journey the Peoples’ Voice Now Levels the Playing Field

Part 5: Story Can Assert Control Over the Masses
The Power of Propaganda & Multilateral Narratives

Part 6: Regenerative Listening
Collective Journey Narratives Require Genuine Engagement

Part 7: Superpositioning
Each of Us Can Now Be in Five Places at Once

Part 8: Social Self-Organization
Story Can Take What We Imagine and Make It Real