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