Avenger's Infinity War: The Philosophy and Psychology of Thanos

Avengers Infinity War: Psychology and Philosophe behind Thanos

There is a reason we readily accept some illogical parts of stories and why we feel justified challenging whether the author of a story when we feel they deviate. There is a story that is written inside of us, and it is the same story that has been written and rewritten for millennia, each time accenting slightly different parts. This is a story that goes deeper than the hero’s journey—this is a story of archetypal symbols.

There are many places we could start to explain these symbols, but since they are everywhere, we could start anywhere in any good story, and I will start with Thanos from Infinity Wars

Thanos comes from the word Athanasios which in Greek means “immortality.”

One of the greatest questions we must answer in life, is whether our primary worth comes from who we are or what we do as being part of a larger whole, that of humanity, or whether our worth comes from our potential as an individual.  Priorities dictate that either we distinguish what circumstances or things are relegated to our duty as part of a whole and what is relegated to our part as an individual, or one duty must always take precedence over the other because they are in conflict. We are in a sense always either putting our self first, or humanity.

Our unconscious is composed of all of our self-talk, and we are born with such a profound feeling of togetherness that it is a long time before we can distinguish what others say from what we say. Parents have no doubt noticed how much a child parrots people around them. This is precisely why we have such a difficult time connecting with other people now as adults, we have learned to distinguish what we say compared to what others say so much that what others say always carries a certain foreignness to it.

There are benefits and consequences of life seen through the eyes of an individual and life seen through the collective eyes of humanity. As a group, we can benefit from others in occasions that they might know what we are naïve to, but then again, just as much potential that creates towards being saved from ignorance, it also creates room to be exploited. Similarly, in the process of finding meaning or value in life, our scope of investigation can be expanded by the variations in the collective happenstance, but also can be heavily biased by the pressure to conform with the average or mode estimation of meaning and value.

It seems we are creatures pulled in two different directions, and each comes at the expense of the other. The drive to individuate, as psychologist Otto Rank in 1907 defined it, it is the life drive, as opposed to the death drive which was the death of the individual to become part of the group.

Fredrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil said, “The concept of greatness entails…being able to be different.”

It matches up pretty well that immortality, or everlasting life would be the archetypally symbolized as Thanos. The easiest pursuit to see this “life drive” manifested is the soul stone, which in order to obtain, he has to give up who he loves most. It is near impossible to define ourselves irrespective to those we love most—our lives are so intertwined that when certain people pass away we are completely lost.

Each of the infinity stones represents an aspect of life that we can either hold as an individual or share are a group. The interesting thing about sharing as a group, is that through shared, it each stone is held by a single individual. The character Vision had the vision stone and Dr. Strange had the time stone, and as a collective, certain individuals personify or embody certain aspects of life making what they do or say a focal point for our perception of that aspect of life. So, neither can we completely detangle our perception of life from others, nor can others detangle their perception of life from us.

If our unconscious mind is composed of what we consider self-talk, what percentage of it is ideas we alone formed? We likely have many erroneous assumptions operating in our unconscious that did not form as a result of our conclusion, but as a result of our impulse to join the group by accepting the group assumptions. Those assumptions could be separated into six different categories, for example, assumptions about the nature of reality.

Reality is an interesting thing because it is what is real, but the only way we can approach it is by imagining it. We formulate concepts of reality and then test them against the real thing by setting expectations, but as an individual or even as a group, having a subjective experience of reality, we can’t quite grasp the absolute nature of objectivity.

What are the six infinity stones?

Thanos wanted to decrease life in the universe by half because the “life drive” is only one of the two drives motivating us—the life drive is purely logical, and so the purely logical approach to over-population is to kill half, and approaching the ethical side of it by logic would say that the killing would have to be random. Luckily this life drive in us which when manifested by itself is hostile, and countered by the death drive, which puts aside the individual pursuit of logic for the group search for meaning and value. Dr. Jordan Peterson describes these two drives or perspectives as the world of things and the world as a form of action.

An easier way to conceptualize these two drives is by defining them as the world as logic, and the world as meaning and value. A flower pressed in a book may have very little logical worth, other than to be made into potpourri, but may have immense meaning placed on it—two identical flowers pressed in a book could be almost completely different concepts of their absolute nature in someone’s mind.

C.S. Lewis explains the difference between these two worlds, “we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape; namely, that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first. I am not angry—except perhaps for a moment before I come to my senses—with a man who trips me up by accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does not succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not.”

The world of value and meaning emphasizes intent over results, and the world of logic emphasizes results over intent, and these implications aren’t in the least insignificant, because determining which situation is best seen through each one is not immediately apparent, because most situations are a very complicated blend of the two, where one component should be relegated to the world of meaning and the other to the world of logic.

For example, a person who gets in their car while drunk is not intending to kill anyone, but might do so, which is why the process of law has determined that the intent to be reckless is tantamount to actually killing someone is the heat of the moment, because both result in the death of an individual and neither carried the pre-meditated intent to do so.

The world of meaning is no better nor more justified than the world of logic, both by themselves are dangerous. The world of meaning incites a vindictive tendency without being balanced out by logic, which by itself is hostile. The time should be balanced, is as soon as our logic becomes hostile, meaning should be considered, and as soon as our sense of meaning becomes vindictive, logic should be considered. A grudge is vindictive, and is illogical because it negatively affects the person who holds it often more than the person it is held against. Logically, if someone offends us, either it was an accident or intentional—if it was an accident, they are unaware of why the subsequent grudge is being held against them, and if it is intentional, they don’t care if we have a grudge against them. Hostility is equally meaningless to how illogical vindictiveness is.

In Infinity Wars, young Gamora asks Thanos whether it was worth it, and that was the beginning of the world of meaning being checked by the world of logic. These two worlds polarize everything, on one side you have Hitler doing inhumane medical testing on innocent people, and on the other side, you have stalkers who end up killing the people they claim to obsessively love. 

So why was Thanos doing what he was doing? Well, in the comics it was to win Mistress Death’s love. Interesting that the life drive is balanced by the death drive, and that they both misunderstand each other. Thanos killed half of the people in the universe because he thought that was what Mistress Death wanted, but she didn’t. That is because the death drive is the death of the individual and the life of the group. Thanos was going about things how he saw them, purely and coldly logical, and Death was going about things from the perspective of meaning and intention, passionately illogical. Mistress Death sees the assets of life.

This is our inner story, the archetypal journey, we have our intuition which sees assets, and our intellect that sees the logic.

This shouldn’t spoil the movies, because they seem to be going in quite a different direction than the comics, but a spoiler for the comics; Thanos actually joins the Avengers after Mistress Death rejects him. So, then who becomes the villain? Well, someone named Adam Warlock gets the gauntlet with all six infinity stones. Adam means ground or earth, and warlock means traitor, liar, enemy or devil. Adam warlock uses the infinity stones to purge himself of the concepts of good and evil, becoming a purely logical being… which makes him the good guy right?

Adam Warlock, purging himself of good and evil, as a result, created two extra versions of himself, the evil part named Magus, and the good named Goddess. Magus either comes from the root magi which means learned magician or Magnus which means greatness, either way, that is one of the two things our ego or our identity wants to prove, that we are capable. The other thing our ego wants to prove is that we are selfless. Both Magus and Goddess become enemies, just as our pursuit to prove things instead of doing things is our enemy. Logic has no need to prove itself, logic is self-existent whether or not it is self-evident. Value, on the other hand, is neither self-existent nor self-evident, because value is not finite, and so as we approach it, there is always more to find. For this reason, the phrase, “We hold this to be self-evident” was used in describing what the founding fathers deemed unalienable rights or objective values.

It is a continuous struggle or dance for us to hold onto what value we hold to be self-evident and what logic has become self-evident to us. These two worlds, logic and value, things and forum for action, are the same yin and yang from millennia ago that Lao Tzu described the Tao de Ching. The yin is negative/passive/female principle in nature. Yang is positive/active/male principle in nature. Just as a hole in the ground must be made for a seed to be planted, the making of the hole is the Yin, and the planting of the seed is the yang.

Mistress Death is the Yin energy, which makes room for love by taking out the idea that we will live forever. The sad truth is that tragedy is often the ensign that brings people together more so than success. Give a person billions of dollars and they will buy a private island and cling to their prosperity at the expense of their friends and family. All the Avengers are nice, but particularly there is a quaint kindness to the Guardian’s of the Galaxy, all of which have suffered a lot of hardship and loss. Star Lord chose to kill his own father to save humanity, which was difficult, but not as difficult as when he had to kill his girlfriend Gamora because his dad was out of control, to say the least, and Gamora is a saint.

If we were capable to do everything ourselves, there would be no reason to join together, and the death drive wouldn’t exist. It is sometimes frustrating to need people, and sometimes we don’t even know why we need people, but that is because the reason we need each other is not logic, it is value, and the world of value doesn’t have worlds, it barely has symbols. It is the non-verbal communication expressed through smiles, eye contact, hugs, kisses, and physical touch. Connecting the aspect of value with enough logic in order to decide on an action is difficult, neither what our emotions nor what our logic tells us can be put into action by themselves. We must consider what value is present, or in other words what asset we would like to add to, then consider the logical risks, and then formulate a plan of action to incorporate the best of both we can manage. It is only once we have both value and logic that we will in the face of opposition remain composed and content.

Each Avenger symbolizes a different emotion or a pair of emotions.  The seven emotions and corresponding aspects of value are:

1) Contempt - functionality/purpose

2) Sadness - accuracy/reproducibility

3) Surprise - exploration/perspective

4) Happiness - response/continuity

5) Anger - stability/strength

6) Fear - protection/preservation

7) Disgust - excellence/transcendence.

It is possible to survive life using only one emotional lens, but not to thrive—to thrive we must actually see and understand life, ourselves, and others, and to do that we must to use all seven emotional lenses proficiently. This means we have to take the time to reframe a situation, in order to consider all seven aspects of value instead of just impulsively reacting.

Each emotion is experienced as if through one of the senses. 1) contempt -chills, 2) sadness - sight, 3) surprise - taste, 4) happiness - hearing, 5) anger – touch, muscle tone, 6) fear – stomach churning/twisting, 7) disgust -smell. The general approaches or fundamental actions which our emotions suggest are: 1) to receive, 2) to refine, 3) to expand, 4) to incorporate, 5) to hold, 6) to take, 7) to give.

Each of the seven aspects of value has a component that is part of the world of value, and a component that is part of the world of logic. What we should strive towards is not individuation, but towards integration of both worlds. As we practice we get better. In the Avenger’s we see the clash of value and logic as Captain America and Ironman clash. As the series has progressed, we have seen Tony Stark who was strictly a logical person put logic and individuation behind humanity. In part because of Pepper, and being a role model to Spiderman, and many other experiences. Similarly, Captain America who always put humanity first, to the point where he couldn’t even have a five-minute logical conversation with Tony Stark about the situation with Bucky and choose instead to follow his heart and fight to the death. Tony without his humanity and Cap without his logic were helpful in many circumstances, but ultimately a mess. Infinity Wars was a big step for both of them, and once they can each fully integrate value and logic into their actions, they will be unstoppable.

To learn more, visit conflictandconnection.com or buy my book on Amazon. Conflict and Connection: Anatomy of Mind and Emotion