2020-09-16 - The Jackass Genie

Blog post by Ravn Abildgaard, September 15, 2020:

Three wishes: The Genie is a Jackass

Happiness does not come easy through making wishes. This is the moral of a number of stories, from "The Monkey's Paw" to Disney's "Aladdin". The hero needs to earn his happy ending. If he does not -- or can't be bothered to try -- even the most innocent wish earns a hellish outcome. Every time.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Our culture rewards a hero who makes his own destiny. A hero who does not try to obtain something undeserved through cheating. Every man is responsible for his own fate. This is a view of life that permeates our culture. It serves to justify the unfairness of life; unfortunate circumstances are essentially the outcome of not having put in enough effort. This is a fundamentally Christian view of life: God does not give you a greater challenge than you can overcome.

The wise hero

Aladdin knows better than to let himself be tempted by the riches and the treasures of the magical cave where he comes upon the magic lamp. These do not belong to him -- he has not earned them. One mustn't envy others their wealth; not even if one happens to be a poor street urchin who subsists on stealing bread from almost equally poor street vendors. The rich have; the poor have not, and if this is to change, a hero must earn his own reward. He doesn't get to just point and say, 'I want that too.'

In Disney's version of "Aladdin" from 1992, the urchin tries to cheat his way into a better life at first. He pretends to be a prince from a distant kingdom. He dresses up in finery that does not belong to him and claims a prestige that he has no right to. The princess is decidedly unimpressed. Fortunately, the urchin returns to a more appropriate mindset where everyone gets what they deserves. He earns the princess and the kingdom in the proper way -- and when he does spend his third and final wish he does so in an unselfish fashion (wishing freedom for Genie) and thus ascertains that his happiness will last.

Aladdin earns his happy ending. He obeys the rules of society in the end. Everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

The less than wise hero

Things don't turn out quite as well for Mr White in "The Monkey's Paw" from 1902. When obtaining the magical monkey's paw that fulfills wishes he is warned that the wishes will sour on him. Nonetheless he makes a wish for money -- and that's where his misfortunes begin. The money appears -- in the form of a financial reimbursement from his son's employer when his son is killed while working. He then wishes for the son to return from the grave -- but what actually appears on his doorstep can hardly be referred to as his son. The final wish is used in a somewhat more wise fashion, asking for the son to be returned to his grave.

Many folk tales and fairytales follow a similar pattern. "The Fisherman and His Wife" by the Brothers Grimm, dating to the first half of the 19th century, is probably the best known example. In this story, a fisherman catches a magical fish who promises to reward him if he lets it go. The honest but poor fisherman does as the fish asks and as a reward he is granted a slightly nicer house than what he already has. He gets to take a small step up the rungs of society, as a reward for his actions.

His wife, however, is not satisfied; she wants more. She spots an opportunity to cheat and acquire what she has not earned, and she takes it. First she wants to be rich, then she wants to be king, and finally, she wants to be God. In the end it all turns sour: The fish -- who acts as a stand-in for actual God -- is fed up. Wife and fisherman end back in the dirt where they used to be. She is punished for her ambition, he for not being able to control his wife.

Not only do you need to know your place in life; you also need to make certain that others remember theirs.

The Genie is a jackass

The seducer in these stories is the being who seems to be handing out easy shortcuts in the form of wishes. Regardless of whether this being appears in the form of a lamp genie, an enchanted monkey's paw or a talking fish, it fulfills the same function. It is the devil himself, out to lure good people astray. He seduces the foolish, telling them that they deserve more and better than they actually have earned, and he laughs when their pride convinces them that he is right.

And then he screws them over. When the fool agrees to the bargain the fool has placed himself outside God's protection. The devil can punish as he pleases.

This is why the story always takes a wrong turn when the supposed hero of the story tries to better his circumstances by magical means. There are no shortcuts to success. Happiness and fortune are not random. You get no free lunch unless some higher power decides that you have earned that reward.

Break the code, find a loophole

Regardless of what form the devil takes in a folk story or fairytale, he's not as smart as he wants you to think. He can be cheated -- usually by the hero living up to society's perception of the Christian ideal of a good man.

That's why Aladdin does not fail. Even if his first wishes are selfish, the third and final wish is the decisive one: Instead of wishing for himself, he tries to make someone else happy (the Genie, who gains his freedom -- Disney steps outside the classic interpretation here, in that Genie does in fact not represent the devil).

The same mechanism saves Elliot Williams in the movie "Bedazzled" from 2000. He spends his last wish -- not on getting the girl that the whole story is about him trying to get, but on wishing that she is happy. With or without him. Faced with such selflessness the devil's power is broken.

And that is the only safe way to break the code. Wishing for someone else's happiness and good fortune puts the power over destiny and fate back into the hands of God where it belongs. The hero acknowledges his place in creation. In doing so he is forgiven for having let himself be tempted into thinking that he might just obtain something that he has not earned.

The moral: Know your place, pauper

Stories and fairytales with this moral serve a simple but important function in society: They remind us that everyone is where they are meant to be. When a person moves up or down in society -- as in the example of a poor man becoming rich, or a sick man regaining his health -- it is a reward by the hand of destiny. They have acted in a way that earns a reward from destiny (or God, or whatever one believes), for their cunning, their skill, or their hard work. The rest of us, who seem to be getting nowhere, can only berate ourselves for our lack of success. If we were worthy, we'd succeed.

The moral of the story is not pleasant or kind. This archetype exists with the purpose of justifying a social structure that is fundamentally unfair (we are not all born equal, and we do not all have the same opportunities in life).

Know your place. Don't think you have the right to make demands. If God wanted you to live in wealth and riches, you'd have been born rich.

Ravn looks at the monitor on his laptop. He reads the blog entry. He re-reads it. He hits submit. Then he pours hot water into a cup and makes himself another cup of instant coffee in the small kitchenette of the Vagabond. It's all well and good to sort one's thoughts out on a matter by writing them down. Unfortunately, the only thing he really has managed to achieve by doing so is convince himself that he's about to do something that has the potential to go very, very wrong. He sips the scalding, bitter coffee and looks at the hematite that Quetzalcoatl gave him.

That Quetzalcoatl gave me. Just, the thought.

It's a pretty little stone. It's a magical little stone, or so the Aztec god said.

Because meeting Aztec gods face to face -- nevermind helping to kill one -- is normal.

The one thing he decided to not touch upon in this little essay is the even greater risk of simply ignoring everything. Using the hematite as a paperweight, getting on with his life. It's tempting, so very tempting, to do so. But Quetzalcoatl was real in that Dream, and he might become real again. Ravn reasons that pissing off an Aztec deity by refusing his gift might not be a very wise choice, either.

The trick, then, is to break the code. To make like Aladdin and wish for something good for someone else. An unselfish wish. But also, a wish that is insignificant enough -- on the galactic scale, or whatever scale Aztec deities operate on -- that it's just not worth the deity's time to go to the effort of screwing it up.

Fine. I wish for --

I wish that Itzhak Rosencrantz' hands heal fast and well. He will hate not being able to play while his hands are injured. Let him get better a little faster.

Surely there is no harm in this. No hubris. No statement of pride that can be twisted into some dark purpose.

Surely.

Feel free to imagine the blog entry looking like this with pictures and everything.