u/Ar-Zimraphel

About 14 days ago, I posted about my interpretation of Frieza's unique psychopathology using an archetypal psychological lens. Then, about 3 or 4 days ago, I posted about Frieza's empire, using a sociocultural and philosophical lens. With this post, I'm continuing this trend of archetypal interpretation by looking at the collective psychology of the Saiyans of Vegeta before and during their servitude to the empire, and the sociocultural conditions that emerged as a result. I hope that people engage with this post and do so with some depth to their thinking. I was somewhat impressed by some of the comments on my first post, but disappointed with the comments on my second post. I hope to begin to shift the type of conversation around this story, its characters, and its world away from talking about who would beat up who to an appreciation of the elegance and depth of what Toriyama and Toei accomplished.

King Kai explains that the Saiyans were a primitive people who lacked civilization and technology until beings from other worlds encountered them and provided their technology in exchange for the Saiyans' ability to conquer civilizations, as evidenced by what they did to the Tuffles. There is a lot of missing information about their history, but we can infer a few things. While it isn't explicitly stated, we might assume that their encounter led to the development of their kingdom as well as their encounter with the empire. We might also assume that the kingdom was developed before their encounter with the empire, for reasons I can discuss in the comments if anyone's curious. Eventually, their work with the empire became an informal type of servitude. Although formally a sovereign kingdom ruled by a king, practically speaking, they were ruled by Frieza.

Here I begin my interpretation. The depth psychologist, Sigmund Freud, developed a model of the psyche in which he declared the ego, which is the self-referencing and identifying conscious aspect of experience, as being a mediator between the id, which is the experience of instinctual drive, and the superego, which, among other things, can be thought of as the experience of culturally constructed values that people orient themselves around. I argue that for the Saiyans of Vegeta, there is very little conflict between the id and the superego. They have an immense instinctual drive to fight. They built their civilization and, by extension, its culture on the foundation of their fighting abilities, as that is what provided them with external technologies as a means to do so. This means that they had a society and a culture built on fighting, in addition to their instinctual drive to fight. This pattern only compounded their collective worldview that it is acceptable to destroy other civilizations, because neither internal nor external influences were causing pause and enabling reflection. Their transformation into Ozaru is a fitting archetypal image of their level of moral awareness, as chaos monsters can be thought of as archetypal representations of the unconscious. This is not to say that the unconscious is evil. It's neutral. However, how the Saiyans chose to act was evil. According to the depth psychologist Carl Jung, the unconscious is both individual and collective. This further supports the idea that the Saiyans were psychologically and morally underdeveloped as a whole, and that moral heroes likely didn't exist. It was almost like a hive mind insofar as everyone shared the same instinctual drives and values, or lack thereof. No one stood out as an individual, which is why they viewed themselves as expendable, as evidenced by their practice of sending relatively weak infants to alien worlds, knowing there's no guarantee they'd survive.

Their lack of development may have contributed to their genocide. Bardock's newly developed abilities to see the future and his son's heroism fundamentally changed his worldview. He finally contextualized his experiences beyond his hedonistic savagery, leading him to confront Frieza alone. Had the rest of his species shared his contextualized worldview, they might have overthrown Frieza. Tragically, they were the source of their own downfall.

I have more to say about this, but I'll stop here. I want to know what you think.

I tentatively believe in the existence of an objective hierarchy based on an artwork's ability to promote/sustain the development of individuals and societies into greater versions of themselves. That starts with elevating consciousness. I think some works are more effective at cultivating awareness in the people engaging them than others are. I also think it's possible and even likely for works to move up and down a hierarchy based on the changes in the cultural and psychological constitution of the people engaging with them. However, I can't think of any method for measuring that effect, so as of now, these are just my thoughts.

Some people are going to naturally gravitate towards certain works over others, perhaps due to their particular aesthetic or medium, which is a subjective preference and not necessarily a result of the quality of the work being any better or worse than a different work that the person may not be interested in. This said, I've noticed for a long time that there seems to be a consensus on what is considered high-quality work and what is not. This consensus can be found both within artistic circles and among mainstream consumers of the work. I want to understand where this comes from.

Take music, for example. Jazz seems to be almost universally respected in the music industry. I suspect that even people who don't consume jazz rarely have anything negative to say about it. For them, it's just not their particular taste. I don't see this being true of nu-metal. There are a lot of people in the music industry who I suspect would never collaborate with nu-metal artists because they may view their music as lower quality, and/or they fear audience backlash. People who don't listen to nu-metal really dislike it in a way that you generally won't see with people who don't listen to jazz. However, many nu-metal artists have an incredible range and are often classically trained musicians and vocalists. Where did this consensus come from?

I'll give one more example. This one is close to home for me because I'm a mythologist with a fascination with contemporary fantasy. My favorite story is Dragon Ball (Z). I find it aesthetically captivating, profoundly archetypally deep, and spiritually moving. However, despite its enormous fanbase, I can't find anyone to talk to me about it the same way readers of Hemingway, Morrison, or Steinbeck can find one another and talk for days about themes. Neither fans nor anyone else views Dragon Ball (Z) as anything worth thinking about. People generally don't think of it as high-quality work. Where does that come from?

Are these and other related consensuses based on anything objective, and if so, what? If not, how did they come to be in the first place, and what's sustaining them?

Ten days ago or so, I posted about Frieza's psychology, which people seemed to like, so I'm deciding to continue posting about archetypal interpretations of the characters, story, and world. Today, I want to talk about Frieza's empire. Please remember that this is just my interpretation. You are free to disagree.

In my post on Frieza, I talk about how he identifies himself as synonymous with power. In his mind, that makes him of ultimate value because nothing is more valuable than power, therefore justifying his status as emperor, as well as his selfish actions. Basically, he views himself as a god. This worldview structures his empire: Frieza is a god, and those who are powerful can justify their actions through the belief that might makes right.

The empire's purpose is a reflection of the emperor's purpose: the accumulation of power. This is an unexamined value, as power by itself is quantitative, not qualitative. It's not actually valuable, because it's not in the service of anything but itself, just as Frieza serves nothing but his own desires. This manifests in the pathological behavior of his empire. Instead of embodying actual value by improving the circumstances of people's lives as a result of recognizing their intrinsic value, everything and everyone is viewed as either instrumental in the accumulation of more power or an obstacle to that accumulation. This worldview is morally, existentially, and spiritually bankrupt. It has no foundation apart from Frieza's ego, which is itself unstable. This is why when Frieza is defeated, the empire loses power.

When I think about the empire, I think of the poem, The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot. Both Frieza's empire and The Wasteland are reflections of what happens with modernism at its extreme, unguided by transpersonally informed value.

It's poetically appropriate that Goku is the one to defeat Frieza instead of Vegeta, let's say, because Vegeta, being brought up in Frieza's empire, also values power for its own sake. Having Vegeta defeat Frieza wouldn't be as thematically interesting. Part of what makes Frieza's defeat at the hands of Goku so rich is that Goku embodies a worldview that could not be more alien to Frieza's worldview or the worldview of his empire. It isn't just one person beating another. It's an entire worldview undermining an antithetical worldview that everyone else lives by, and has caused incalculable suffering. In winning that fight, Goku doesn't just physically beat Frieza. Goku flips the entire empire on its head by completely undermining what it represents.

Let me know what you think of this. For my next post, I'll talk about how the Saiyans of Vegeta fit into this.

When I see discussions about great players, people are almost always talking about points. Does anyone else notice that? If you do, why do you think that is? There’s more to the game than that. There are more factors that determine the value of a player than their goals or assists. What about defensive play, power play kills, face off wins, turn overs, body checking, puck handling, completing passes, and other factors? You’d think those aren’t important given the way people talk about players. Some players may not put up many points but the way they play the rest of the game is invaluable to their team.