Harry Potter: The Psychology and Philosophy Behind the Sorting Hat
Harry Potter: The
Psychology and Philosophy Behind the Sorting Hat
We all put on many different hats
in life as we address the different aspects to it we find, but they are not all
as different as we would think, because they all contain a common thread. The
lens we see life through, whether we choose a telescope, eye glass or
microscope, each brings a specific distortion to everything we see. There are
two worlds, the physical world of logic, and the invisible world of meaning,
and what we perceive from the world of meaning not only can’t be described with
worlds, but can’t even be perceived consciously. What we are conscious of is
the world of logic, which can concretely compare and contrast one thing to
another. Aristotle came up with a list of thirteen logical errors or types of
bias, and these are a conscious common thread in our thinking, but because it
is a conscious process, it is a lot easier to be aware of its influence or
bias. We have unconscious assumptions about the world of meaning and value that
are harder to detect, and therefore harder to understand the influence and bias
they create.
There seem to be four possible
fundamental differences in value, meaning or morality, which C.S. Lewis
illustrates well when he said, “I know that some people say the idea of a Law
of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different
civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this
is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these
have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take
the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians,
Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him
will be how very like they are to each other and to our own… but for our
present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different
morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running
away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who
had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where
two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be
unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or
everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first.
Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should
have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply
have any woman you liked.”
It is easy to say that we wish
everyone had enough to eat, and that it would be great is no one had to starve,
but given enough food for the whole world, to distribute it, we couldn’t start
everywhere simultaneously, someone would receive the first bite of food, and
who we pick that first person to be has a great influence on our life.
When C.S. Lewis says we differ in
who we ought to be unselfish to, he lists family, which is probably what a Slytherin
would say, right? The selfless act of Severus Snape was for whom he wished was
part of his family, Lily. Thought the pourer qualities in those of the Slytherin
house were emphasized because all three main characters in the series were
Gryffindors, to say that all twelve-year old children sorted into Slytherin are
hopelessly evil, is a dangerous idea—it either leads to the idea that we are no
better than the society we happen to be born into, or that some people are just
born evil. We have seen people come out of horrible circumstances and become
great people, but do we have evidence that the people who committed the most
heinous criminal acts were anything but evil since birth?
I think it is very necessary to
draw lines between what is counter-productive, what is inconvenient, and what
is evil. If evil is defined as willfully opposing what is good, someone would
have to know exactly what good was in order to exactly and willfully oppose it.
Knowing the good, why would anyone pick evil?
Referring again back to C.S. Lewis,
“I conclude then, that though the difference between people’s ideas of Decent
Behavior often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behavior
at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really
prove just the opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people who
exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between
differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one
man said to me, ‘Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches
to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’
But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there
are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going
about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers
from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive
them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved
the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of
moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be
a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral
advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would
not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he
believed there were no mice in the house.”
A notorious serial criminal was in
the hospital dying from cancer, and refused treatment because of suspicion that
he would be poisoned. There is blatantly reckless, and then there is pitifully
crazy, and this person was as pitifully crazy as they come. When I take a
moment to really consider what would have to be operating in my mind for me to
think the way someone like that, I feel overwhelmingly sad for their miserable
existence, and immensely grateful for all that’s operating in my mind that
allows me to have a somewhat functional relationship with reality. It is pretty
easy to take for granted what assumptions about life we were given. Though
false, like the assumption that a man with a white beard and coca-cola
endorsement lived in the north pole and delivered toys to well-behaved little
girls and boys, is at least better than other assumptions we are taught, like
the idea that we should beat ourselves up for our mistakes, or worse, that
emotionally or physically hurt others for theirs.
I am not making a case that serial
killers shouldn’t be held responsible, but saying they are born evil, which is
impossible, doesn’t fix the problem. What is the problem?
Why do we do mean things?
All things come at a cost. Paramedics
come to accident scenes, and sometimes there are more injured people than they
have the capacity to help, and they have to pick someone to help first—it’s the
idea of triage. What criteria we use to triage each situation comes at the cost
of all the possible outcomes that a different triage criteria would or could
have enabled. Did Dumbledore really consider and understand all of the possible
ways to solve the problem of Voldemort before he let Draco Malfoy kill him? I
mean, I don’t was to stir controversy, but I think Professor Mcgonagall could
have taken Voldemort on one on one even without the elder wand, and so
definitely tag teamed with Dumbledore, it would be a guaranteed win, right? Nothing
is guaranteed, because we have almost no idea what we are buying with our
actions, and so even if life offered us a guarantee, we wouldn’t know where,
how or win to claim it.
Imagine that you are on a sinking
ship, and there are four people besides yourself and only one lifeboat. There
is a family member, there is a person that can’t get into the boat by himself, there
is a stranger who offers to help the others in and has the physical strength to
be most helpful in the boat first, and a child. Who do you let into the boat
first?
If you picked the stranger, imagine
that the second he gets into the life raft, he takes off with the boat to save
himself.
If you picked the child, imagine
when lowered into the life raft, they lose their balance and fall into the
water, and now you are torn between helping your family member and the person
who can help them self into the boat and jumping in the water to save the
child.
If you picked the family member,
imagine that after they are lowered in the life raft, that as soon as the
stranger then is lowered into the life raft, he knocks your family member out
and pushes them unconscious into the water and takes off with the raft.
I don’t illustrate this to be
pessimistic, but to say that four different people could justify which person
in the boat to lower into the life raft first, and all have an equally meaningful
rationale, and yet have completely different results, it could be that all four
ways would work, but it also could be that none of the four would work. If it
were possible to see the future, and you knew that all four would fail, that
the only way anyone would survive is if you jump in the life raft first and
take off with it, would you?
Now imagine that you did take off
by yourself, or maybe easier to imagine, your family member throws you into the
raft first and despite your selfless desires, you end up in the raft by
yourself and are the only one to survive. Paddling to shore you feel horrible,
but then come across another sinking ship out in the middle of the ocean, and
safely help eight people into your raft and you all paddle to shore. If you saw
the future from the beginning and knew that was the only option, would that
change how you felt about doing it? And would you still do it?
You would be justifiably selfish or
even evil for sinking with the ship when you could have saved eight people, but
you would also be justifiably selfish or evil for taking off in the raft by
your self without trying to save the others. If good and evil, moral and
immoral were very clearly delineated, there would be no reason to be evil or
immoral. It’s not a matter of immediate gratification versus long-term gratification,
because the only reason someone would pick immediate gratification is if they lacked
the ability to actually understand long-term gratification.
Imagine that you are stranded on a
deserted island, and all you have is one bag of chips, and a bag of beef jerky,
and you know you won’t be saved for at least a month and there is no other
sources of food on the island, literally it is just sand and salt water; would
you have the self-control to count the chips and ration it out, or would you
just eat both bags? Well, it’s a matter of life and death that you do muster
the self-control, and I think out of all the times to resist having a cheat
meal, that would be the time it would be the easiest to make the right choice. Now,
imagine you eat your daily ration, and then fall asleep, and since there is
nothing but sand, you have no where to hide the chips, and seemingly no reason
to, but while you are asleep some seagulls come and eat it all.
I think life is to complex and
convoluted for pure good and evil to exist, I think it is mostly ignorance and
imprudence. Either way you look at it, there are many arguments for who we put
first, family, country, or everyone, and each comes at a cost. So, Slytherin’s rationale
may be improbable, but especially if the setting of Harry Potter is the
nineteenth twentieth century, the mass witch hunt by muggles hadn’t completely
disappeared, and had tortured and killed an estimated 200,000 alleged witches. If
a mob of people concluded that Dobby the house elf was evil, and were going to
kill him, would you rather the mob die who falsely is accusing Dobby of evil,
or let Dobby die?
We typically hate these messy
lose-lose scenarios so much that we attempt to find some way to reframe the
situation to make it not seem like a lose-lose situation. Who we are fighting
in real life is almost never an actual Voldemort or Ted Bundy, but someone else
trying to rationalize the criteria of their triage as passionately as we are
trying to rationalize ours.
The four triage criteria are
Slytherin-like blood relation first, Ravenclaw-life intellectual/logical patriotism,
Gryffindor-like Emotional/meaningful patriotism, or Hufflepuffian
indiscriminate first-come-first-serve policy. We can conceptualize life as just
blood relation because who we are in not contained in our blood. We can’t conceptualize
life as purely logical, otherwise the only logical way to enforce logic would
be with hostility. We can’t conceptualize life as purely meaningful, otherwise meaning
without logic ties us in a vindictive manner to everything, because we can
project or impose meaning for the positive or negative on anything if logic is
not there to check it. Indiscriminate triage leads to those who need the most
help not getting help first, and even if that is factored for, defining who
needs the most help is not as clear as it may seem, because we can’t understand
how much help someone needs until we take the time to help them.
So how does the sorting hat so
quickly determine which house a someone fits into?
It is very easy to be oblivious of
the negative qualities or bias we have, that anyone who has spent more than
five minutes in the same room can notice. Harry like most other students
entering Hogwarts approached the sorting hat with no actual knowledge of what
being in any of the houses was like, but with pre-conceived notions of which
house they would like. Is it really only that the horcrux in Harry was what
caused the sorting hat to suggest that he would do well in Slytherin? If so,
then something that easily fooled is not worth the analysis it makes. What was
the one thing Harry wanted most? His family, or at least a sense of being part
of a family. We all long for a sense of belonging, and there are different
feelings of belonging, those who have felt a sense of belonging in our family
may take it for granted how important that feels. In my many years of school I
have seen how much some people long to feel a sense of belonging in some kind
of intellectual circle. I have also seen in different humanitarian or charity
causes, how people long for that feeling of belonging in a group with a good
cause. The last, is society, the feeling of belonging in the world as a whole.
I think this is the definitive sorting
that happens. We long for what we lack. Harry never had the opportunity to put
family first, and that desire is what prompted the sorting hat to suggest
Slytherin. For me, I think the house that would be suggested to me, would be
Hufflepuff, because of family, intellectual circles, service-oriented groups
and society as a whole, the sense of belonging that has eluded me most is being
part of society as a whole. I’ve put family first on many occasions, I’ve put
school first, and service, and though in some ways I am glad I have not been
carried along as much with the crowd, there still seems more to explore in that
area. “Michael, why do you always have to think outside of the box?” Growing up
I heard that several times, to which my reply was usually, “What do you mean
box? And How do I find it?” That’s what Hufflepuff are known for, being kind,
and fairly smart, but just kind of odd, but odd in an authentic way, not to get
attention.
Understanding where someone is
coming from helps shed light on what they are trying to do. If a Slytherin is
doing something odd, it is likely a way to distinguish themselves from others.
If a Ravenclaw is doing something odd, they probably testing a theory. If a
Gryffindor is doing something odd it is probably in solidarity or to lighten
the mode with a joke. If a Hufflepuff is doing something odd, chances are the
authentically see value in it. Yes, my inner Gryffindor sees value in bringing
some light-hearted seriousness to a popular fictional story, but my larger
inner Hufflepuff authentically sees value in looking into a story to find that
invisible world of meaning that drives us to tell stories. It is so interesting
that we love telling or sharing stories, and palpably feel a lack in our life
when we don’t have the opportunity to.
Every story is the same, it is the
human journey to find belonging in both the world of meaning and the world of
logic, both because and in spite of what makes us an individual. It’s hard to
know what to do, because it’s hard to use what we know while there is so much
we don’t know, and so much we don’t know that we don’t know. We should cut
ourselves and other a little more slack, we have to feel life out sometimes,
and sometimes we have to learn things the hard way, and that’s okay. It’s hard
to know in this convoluted emotionally charged experience what is important and
what is not, and apart from whatever in life you are seriously trying to figure
out, seriously trying to figure out why some stories resonate with so many
people, and what deep drives push us to share and read stories is worth it.
We can help each other in the core
journey we share, to love and be loved, by putting the puzzle pieces of the big
picture of life each story brings.
For more please visit my website,
Conflictandconnection.com or buy my book on amazon. Conflict and Connection:
Anatomy of Mind and Emotion http://a.co/aUuAeeg
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