363 — Reading Barbie as a Text of Culture: The Tragic Rejection of the Universe: A Love Story — Part 1 The Mocking of the Hero
Culture claims through Barbie Movie that the love story is an illusion; only separation is real.
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [September 24, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.
Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
A new narrative of desire in response to the meta-crisis
We are going to spend the next two or three weeks on culture: on Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Let me see if I can step back and create a context. There is so much to do today that I barely know where to start.
We are in the summer, early fall of 2023. That’s where we are right now, let’s just place ourselves.
We are in this moment that we have framed as a meta-crisis.
A meta-crisis means
that there are cascading risks in various sectors that interplay with each other,
and, at its very core, that two systems — the civilization and the substrate of the biosphere and physio-sphere — are clashing with each other in such a way that the civilization may essentially self-terminate, resulting in the death of humanity.
The energy substrates, and the resource substrates, and the systems upon which it is all built have crossed the planetary boundaries. They are now exceedingly fragile, and subject to imminent collapse; whether imminent means 10 years, 20, 30, or 40, is an open question, but there is a serious and significant possibility that the thing could collapse. That’s called the meta-crisis, and I started talking about this intensely in 2011, when people were laughing. It is extremely important — it is beyond important.
There is a second form of the meta-crisis, which is not the death of humanity, but the potential death of our humanity, which can happen because we respond to the fragile global systems animated by exponential technologies by closing up society — either in an obvious totalitarian way, an obvious closed society, or an invisibly closed society, where you don’t realize it’s closed, but it begins to be guided by a system in which —
everyone is a number,
everyone’s opinions are controlled,
the feeds that we see are controlled,
and how we respond to those feeds — at least enough of a percentage of us — is invisibly controlled,
and so every election and every decision is made by the way we optimize the web and the way we optimize new forms of invisible control.
That’s what we call the death of our humanity.
And yet, we are not here in this mad depression, we are not here to be doomers, we are not here to be deniers, and we are not here to engage in domination. We are here to invoke the dawn of desire (link). We are here to invoke the dawn of a new narrative of desire, which is a new narrative of what it means to be a human being, because desire is the desire for new value.
Desire desires value, and we live in a Field of Value.
That Field of Value is also a Field of Eros. Eros and value are one, there is no split between them.
Reality is ErosValue, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.
We have unpacked what that means in many One Mountains, so I am not going to unpack these sentences, I’m alluding to them now.
Our context is: actually, there is good news.
The Gospel means ‘good news.’ There is a new gospel; there is good news — but it comes not from the revelation of just one person. It comes from the deepest read that we have of the interior sciences and the exterior sciences, and their coming together in a new superstructure.
A new superstructure means
a new set of worldviews,
a new set of dreams,
a new set of values,
and a New story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values.
We are here to be extremely pragmatic and filled with wild celebration. We are celebrating because you can only change the world if you are willing to already live in the world that’s already changed. You’ve got to change the world —
not from a place of resignation,
not from a place of depression,
but from a place of extreme sobriety, extreme seriousness, extreme gravitas, and extreme joy — the direct experience of the joy of Reality, accessing the full aliveness of Reality, moving in me, as me, and through me.
The full Eros of Reality, moving in me, as me, and through me. The full desire of Reality, living in me, as me and, through me — because Reality is desire, Reality is Eros, Reality is value.
There is a Field of Value, that Field of Value reaches for a new possibility, and a Field of Value generates a new world and a new vision, and this new vision generates a New Story of Value, from within which we create.
We are here to respond to the meta-crisis — like da Vinci and his cohorts did in the Renaissance — by enacting a New Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values that enact a new grammar of value.
That’s our context. We are doing a big day today.
Are we ready? Let’s wake up. Let’s do this. This is not ordinary. We are going to inconvenience ourselves. That’s my line for today to myself: inconvenience myself.
The way you build a new world is you inconvenience yourself —
— not in the way that you don’t sleep. Sleep eight hours a night generally, eat well, exercise, take good vitamins. We take good vitamins — and we inconvenience ourselves.
I want to ask everyone today: inconvenience your heart!
We are going to stretch today. We are going to stretch open. The way we are going to stretch open is, by looking at two cultural stories over the next three weeks (approximately). One is Barbie, and the other is Oppenheimer. We did a first meeting on Barbie in August.
The most dangerous movie ever made
We are going to take a look at two stories.
One is a story that culture made up, Barbie. Barbie is a story. It’s a story about Barbie, and about Barbie and Ken, and it’s a story incarnate in a doll.
And then, Barbie as a movie, which is a story about the story.
Culture told a story — and Barbie is breaking box office records all over the place, so it’s resonating all over the world. People are watching it all over the world. It is entering into the heart stream and the bloodstream of culture. We are going to look at that story, and we are going to see:
How does that story relate to an accurate story of Reality?
What is the story that’s being told in culture now?
— and use that as a mirror to get us to a deeper story, to a more profound story, which blows our hearts open.
As we are going to see, Barbie is, I would say, the most dangerous movie ever made (or at least recently). Seriously, the most dangerous movie ever made. And not dangerous in a good way — as when Lao Tzu, the great Chinese sage says: I come to speak dangerous words, I ask only that you listen dangerously (that’s my favorite citation. We come here in One Mountain to speak dangerous words, and we ask only that we all listen together dangerously.) No, not those kinds of dangerous words. They are dangerous words —
which are insidious,
which undermine the joy of Reality,
which are empirically not valid, but pretend to be valid,
that have hosts of hidden assumptions which are actually dogmatic, and which are setting the agenda of culture.
That’s where the story of culture is told — the story that culture makes up around itself, in its cinematic form, and tells around the campfire of celluloid.
Around the celluloid campfire, we tell our stories, and it’s those stories that define culture.
If we actually understand that the meta-crisis is real, and that the response to the meta-crisis has to be a New Story of Value out of which we generate a new reality, then we’ve got to go look at those stories of cultures. We need to know how to read these stories, so we are going to look at this story of Barbie today, and we are going to look at it slowly, one step at a time.
Okay, so are we ready? Are we ready to play a larger game? Are we ready to play a larger game? Are we ready to play a larger game?
And if you are asking, Why is he asking that? What is he doing? Is he a cheerleader?
Yes, of course I am a cheerleader. What else is there to be besides a cheerleader? Go team! Of course we are cheerleaders, and we need to be cheerleaders. Cheerleaders means —
that I choose joy,
that I choose to step in,
that I choose to be excited,
that I choose to be excited about the Field of Value which is the Field of play,
and I’m excited for the great unfolding that’s about to happen.
Of course I’m a cheerleader — because I choose joy. I’ve got to step into joy. Yes, I am cheerleading! Myself, and you, and She — we are cheerleading. We are cheerleaders, yeah. To be a cheerleader is to open up the Field of blessing.
Are we ready to play a larger game?
Are we ready to participate in the evolution of love?
That’s what we want to do now.
THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
Barbie is the most dangerous movie ever made. And not
dangerous in a good way. Not in the way of Lao Tzu, who
writes: I came to speak dangerous words, I ask only that you listen
dangerously.
Barbie has one message: there is no love story. Barbie and Ken
are an ontological illusion. Einstein wrote, separateness, the
separate self, is the great illusion. Culture claims through Barbie
that the love story is an illusion; only separation is real.
Barbie is wrong. There is a love story. Barbie and Ken love each
other desperately, Barbie and Ken need each other, and Barbie
and Ken are fully unique and autonomous.
The great contradiction of autonomy and communion is
resolved in ecstasy.
The love story is real.
We love Barbie. We love Ken. We love Ken and Barbie, and
Reality is Ken and Barbie, Barbie and Ken all the way up and
all the way down the evolutionary chain.
The old relationship style demonized as patriarchy
How does the Barbie movie open?
We see these Barbie dolls, which are the old-style Barbie dolls, which stand for the old relationship style (when I say ‘the old relationship style’, I am not going to look at the last 5,000 years or 10,000 years, just at the last few 100 years as a snippet of culture).
In the old relationship style world, you had the old Barbie dolls, who were, in some sense or another, what we would call role mate:
Men were out there making a living. They were being protectors and providers.
Women were being child bearers, and they were holding the baby, and they were nurturing; they were creating the household.
You had this relationship. It got broken in many ways; there were moments where women were extremely involved in commerce at different moments in history, etc. This is not a full historical read — but in general, you could easily and accurately say that over the past thousand years, there was a core relationship deal, Amazonian Queens notwithstanding and Wonder Woman movies notwithstanding. Those are exceptions (that’s why the movies go wild), but the basic model has been some version of this relationship deal.
There was a polarity. There was a movement between the men and the women in the world, in which they each needed each other in a particular way. This relationship field may have started in the world of farming, or maybe the world of early agriculture, maybe early agrarian, which is farming with plows, maybe even horticultural, maybe even earlier in history — it’s not clear. I’m not going to do the anthropology now, though it’s quite an interesting conversation — but there is some version of this relationship deal in place forever, and this relationship deal has been demonized as patriarchy.
This is what’s called patriarchy — but of course, that’s not quite accurate.
This relationship deal was not a bunch of weak women dominated by a bunch of bad men who forced women into this agreement, as Janet Chavez and other feminist scholars point out. No, this relationship deal came into being for many reasons, including
the need for safe childbirth, the difficulty of having safe childbirth once we moved from early horticultural handheld tools to heavy plough tools in which miscarriage became far more possible, the natural upper body strength of men being naturally stronger.
Women have breasts that feed babies and lactate and wombs that actually grow babies, so there’s a difference in structure between men and women.
This difference — combined with socio-cultural issues, combined with economic issues, and also combined with interior senses — created this relationship deal. There was much that was beautiful in this deal and there was much that was terrible, that was a horror — and that is fairly critiqued by people who label this deal patriarchy.
This critique is absolutely true.
Obviously, in this relationship deal, the feminine, after a certain amount of time, was disenfranchised. Until 120 years ago, women didn’t vote in the world, and — let’s just be dramatic — the most sophisticated Western men in the world, even 120 years ago, who supported women emerging, still said women can’t vote. That would be absurd to have women vote! That’s just to give you a sense of this, one fragrance; this is the tip of an iceberg.
There was a lot to critique about this relationship deal — but it is also true that it emerged because of a set of economic, social, interior, exterior factors that came together. This became, for a period of time, the way to create a stable unit called a family, and that family held together society and allowed society to evolve.
That’s about where we are.
The very beginning of Barbie is alluding to all of this. Does everyone get what I’m talking about? The first few seconds in Barbie are alluding to this whole world.
Ken in the world of idealized feminism
Then Barbie says: No, no. There is a new world that’s emerged, which is the emergence of first-wave feminism (although the movie doesn’t call it that), social feminism, in which women are empowered. Now, who on this One Mountain is a social feminist?
I hope all of us.
Social feminism is this notion —
that women need to claim their place, that their place has been split off from them,
and that women should be winning Nobel Prizes.
And women should be, if they want to be, doctors.
And if they want to be, they should be researchers.
If they want to be, they should be presidents.
If they want to be, they should be senators.
If they want to be, they should be pharmacologists.
It was a very beautiful emergence, and there is this sense that we all agree on that. This is what we might call liberal feminism, and there is the sense that all problems have been solved. That’s what the beginning of Barbie is: everything has been solved, it’s all good.
Women are doctors and entrepreneurs, and we see a whole set of scenes in the beginning of Barbie, where you have women in the White House, and then you have one of the Barbie dolls give a speech where there is no contradiction between logic and feelings, they are both perfectly integrated, and play beautifully in the world. There is this idealized sense of a successful feminism, represented by the entire new line of Barbie dolls, all in emancipated positions in societies. It’s all good, we’ve arrived at this great liberation and this great new world.
That’s how Barbie begins.
Now it starts to get interesting. We get to this strange moment: there is something wrong. I want to take a look at a couple of scenes, where you begin to realize something’s gone wrong here.
The first clip is about Ken, the other Mattel doll. There’s Ken, and there’s Ken&Barbie.
It’s basically Ken at the beach, and Ken says:
I only feel okay, Barbie, when you look at me.
It’s this very, very subtle and beautiful moment. And then Ken says:
Hey, Barbie, look at me, look what I’m about to do.
And he takes his surfboard, and he runs headlong into the water while Barbie is watching him. Of course, he’s not exactly looking out, and he smashes into a concrete barrier and is taken to the hospital, and Barbie goes with him to the hospital and says:
Ken, you’re so brave!
What is Ken saying? What’s happening here?
Barbie is in Barbie land. Barbie goes down to her car — she goes out of her house, falls perfectly into her car. Her makeup is perfect. She looks beautiful. But if you notice, something has shifted:
She is not that concerned with Ken looking at her. Although she is being perfect, but she’s not being perfect so much for Ken. There’s this advancement — she is being perfect for herself — and in some sense, that’s a very deep and beautiful advance.
Barbie is not getting dressed to be alluring to Ken.
She is not being sexy to be alluring to Ken.
She is not picking beautiful colors of clothes to be alluring to Ken.
She’s actually not interested in Ken, as we’re going to see.
On one level, that’s an advance. That’s an evolutionary step forward: I am being beautiful because I want to be beautiful, and because I want to feel my beauty, and I want to feel my delight. It’s a beautiful step forward. It feels great.
Barbie is no longer concerned to be in the gaze of Ken
There is also a tragedy here.
Because here is the story. Do you really get dressed up the same way when you are by yourself? Occasionally we do — but do we regularly get dressed up the same way when we’re by ourselves?
The answer is, most of us don’t. Sometimes we do, because we want to feel good. I try to put on good clothes every day that feel good, that are relaxed — but if I’m utterly by myself in the house, I’ll still get dressed, but I’ll pay a little bit less attention. Is it wrong that I’ll pay a little bit less attention? Is it that I am disconnected with my own individuality? Well, maybe, in part.
It is important to get dressed up, and it’s important to have a sense of self-love, and it’s important to individuate. That’s all true.
And it is not wrong that we live in a relationship. It’s not wrong.
I just want to just track this:
There is a level one where the woman gets dressed up for the man — and that’s insidious, and that’s tyrannical, and that’s a tyrannical cosmetics industry, and that’s an oppression of the feminine, and it’s degrading to the feminine, and the feminine needs to move beyond that. That’s a big yes. There’s a level one of role mate, where the woman is being beautiful for the man. She’s not connected to her own power, she’s not connected to her own Eros, she’s not connected to her own sensuality. It is all for the man, which is in some sense degraded and pathological. Yes, big yes on that, big yes.
And there is a level two where individuation happens, where I move beyond that, and the woman is saying: Hey, I’m not going to do any of those things which I am doing for the man. It might have to do with my dress, and it might have to do with my clothes, and it might have to do with makeup or no makeup. The first generation of feminism is anti-lipstick and anti any sort of cosmetic. There’s this rejection of the degraded notion of the feminine. That’s level two.
But then, level two can pathologize — it’s already in the beginning of the movie. I am getting dressed up irrespective of my relationship to other, whether it is to the man or to my beloved.
The Barbie movie, by the way, ignores the LGBT world. That’s the one sense in which the Barbie movie is politically completely incorrect. It’s all about Ken and Barbie, and it freeze-frames on the classical — what we would call normative — heterosexuality. That’s Barbie’s frame. But let’s talk about a wider frame. Let’s not talk about just Barbie and Ken. Let’s just talk about a love story. It’s Barbie and Barbie, it’s Ken and Jack, it’s Barbie and Melissa. In other words, there is a love story, and so there is some sense in which I do get dressed for my beloved. There is a sense that there is a relationship, and there’s a sense of Reality’s relationship.
To sum up the first point: already in the beginning of Barbie, there’s this sense in which Barbie is no longer concerned to be in the gaze of Ken. She has liberated herself from the male gaze, which is super beautiful and important — but there is a shadow to it.
Now, by itself, you can’t tell if this is a shadow or not — but you have this first insidious sense, I got it as soon as I watched the movie: this is a great step forward, but Barbie is completely unconcerned with her beloved, whoever her beloved is, whether her beloved is Melissa or Barbie two or Ken.
She is not concerned.
She is just in her own self-referential Girls’ Night all the time, never stops.
Constant delight, no relationship to other, no notion of Reality as relationship — or at least, of Reality being a yearning love story, where I reach out beyond my biology.
I reach out beyond my biology, and I’m yearning for someone that’s not my daughter, that’s not my brother — not my biology.
I am yearning to love because love moves in me.
It transcends race and transcends biology, that notion of loving.
And I get all dressed up for you sometimes. That’s part of what that relationship is — not in its pathological sense, but its beautiful sense — that’s already wiped out.
It’s very subtle.
Barbie dismisses the ontology of relationship
Do you see how it has now been reversed? Ken has now become what used to be the level-one or role-mate woman. Ken now says:
If you’re not looking at me, Barbie, I don’t exist.
Wow! So Ken has now adopted and internalized the pathologized version of relationship level one. If you’re not looking at me, Barbie, I don’t exist.
Wow, that’s not quite right!
Ken gets relationship, he gets that relationship is real — but he is a caricature and pathologized version of relationship.
These are literally the first scenes, if you’re reading carefully. In the first scene, Barbie dismisses the ontology of relationship. It seems like an evolutionary move forward, but there’s also a deep shadow to it. There is a stepping out of Reality’s relationships — and then, Ken appearing in that old pathologized version of feminine level one.
Barbie is going to correctly say to Ken later, you’ve got to be Ken — and that’s true, that’s a partially right thing. You do need to be Ken, and Ken does not only exist in relationship to Barbie.
There is a notion of autonomy. There’s not only communion.
Communion is one dimension of a love story. Intimate communion is one dimension of a love story.
But there is a second dimension of a love story, which is: I am individuated, I am self-loving, I am committed to my own perpetuation, the perpetuation of my own Unique Self. That’s self-love, that’s autonomy.
Ken’s got to be Ken, and Barbie has got to be Barbie, that’s absolutely true — but that’s only one dimension of the love story. As we are going to see, what Barbie is going to do is basically say — I’m going to give you just a little foreshadowing — Barbie is going to say, the only true love story is a feminine love story between biological mother and daughter. The second version of the love story is a contrived love story.
Love is not real — this is what Barbie is going to say. There is no real love story between people who are allured to each other. Allurement is not real in Cosmos, attraction is not real, intimate communion is not real.
What is there?
There is autonomy.
There is me being me.
And there’s this contrived sense which we’re going to call self-love — but it’s really just, be me, because everything else is made-up and the only thing that seems to be real is that I am here, so I should love me in some way.
There is no Barbie + Ken, there are only Barbie and Ken, only autonomy. It’s not even framed as a genuine self-love story; there is no coming back together. The overwhelming message of this movie is going to be that Barbie + Ken are not real; there’s no ontology to Barbie + Ken, there is no real love story.
I am going to show it to you scene by scene, you’ve got to see how it’s constructed. We’re going to go into the laboratory of culture and see how culture speaks.
The way the movie does that in the beginning is it pathologizes the notion of Barbie existing in Ken’s gaze (which is in part correct), and then sets up Ken as the inverse of that original Barbie: Ken only exists now in Barbie’s gaze. It doesn’t create this next step, when
I do get dressed up for Ken, and Ken does get dressed up for me,
and we do live in relationship to each other,
and we do want to be in relationship to each other,
and we do want to be moved by each other’s beauty and depth,
and we do want to be aroused by each other’s voice.
We actually do live in relationship, because Reality is allurement, and Reality is relationship — all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain, but that is subtly denied, already in the very beginning of Barbie.
It’s going to get much more dramatic.
Ken wants to be a hero, but doesn’t know how
Right after Ken smashes into a concrete barrier, trying to impress Barbie because he only exists in Barbie’s gaze, Barbie goes with him to the doctor and says: Oh, Ken, you’re so brave. And we wonder, what does Ken do? But she is not really relating to Ken, she is just being polite.
She is not really moved by Ken.
She is not aroused by Ken.
She is not allured to Ken.
She does the ‘polite society’ thing because she is the perfect woman who does the polite society thing, but there’s no depth to it. There is no resonance to it. There is no sincerity to it. Ken is not really a hero to Barbie. This is really important.
There is this mocking line, where Ken says to Barbie, did you see what I did for you? And Barbie says, you are so brave. But it’s a mocking line, it’s not real. She is mocking him — not directly, but it’s a mockery.
He is not being brave.
He is not being courageous.
He has done something insanely stupid and idiotic. He ran headlong into a concrete wall, essentially a concrete barrier without looking, like an idiot.
And she says to him, you’re so brave. It’s a condescending, lovely thing to say, but with no reality and no depth.
Who wants to be a hero? Ken does — but Ken doesn’t know how to be a hero.
Ken doesn’t know how to get wounded for real.
He doesn’t know how to get injured for real.
There is a subtle condescension. He doesn’t know how to be a hero, but he desperately wants to be a hero. In whose eyes? In Barbie’s eyes. And Barbie says you’re so brave, but she doesn’t mean it, it’s a condescending mockery. (And the reviewers didn’t even get close to any of this.)
He desperately wants to be a hero. He wants to be seen in her gaze, and he feels like I don’t exist out of your gaze.
Now, is Ken right that he doesn’t exist out of her gaze?
He’s absolutely wrong, and he’s absolutely right.
If Reality is relationships, we actually don’t exist out of relationship. That’s actually true. Ken is not wrong, he is just a pathologized version of that truth.
The entire movie is going to caricature the notion that Reality is relationships. It’s going to caricature the notion that there is a real love story, and place that notion in the eyes of an idiotic Ken. The notion that Reality is relationship, that I only exist in your gaze — the idiotic Ken says that.
We will see that the notion that the love story is real is going to be the demonized claim of patriarchy. Patriarchy is going to be the voice for the reality of The Universe: a Love Story. That there is a Ken and Barbie love story — that’s going to be patriarchy’s voice. Do you see how subtle that is?
That begins already at this, in which this male desire to be a hero is mocked, because there are no heroes. There is a book (I referred to it about a month ago, when we did our first One Mountain just beginning to look at Barbie), by Hanna Rosin, who is a writer for Slate, and it’s called The End of Men. And one of the themes in the movie is the ridiculousness of the male desire to be a hero, the mocking of the male desire to be a hero.
Lovers want to be heroes
This is so deep, my friends, and this is going to get deeper and deeper. It’s going to get crazy.
See, I want to be a hero — but I want to be a hero for you. I want to be a hero for you. Stay close with that. I want my heroism to be received. There’s this enormous desire to be a hero.
Now, Barbie doesn’t want to get dressed for the masculine (a great step forward), but she also doesn’t want to be a hero for the masculine.
She wants to be creative.
She wants to have a full life.
She wants to be successful.
She wants to be a great entrepreneur, and she wants to be fulfilled, and that’s beautiful.
That’s beautiful, that’s a great evolutionary step forward — but she loses the truth of Reality is relationship. Then the pathologized version of that truth appears in Ken.
Ken stands for the desire of the beloved to be a hero. He is the line expression. He is the engendered masculine expression, but it lives in all of us.That desire to be a hero is an essential dimension of a love story; there is no love story without our desire to be a hero for each other. The love story means we want to be a hero for each other.
Lovers want to be heroes.
If you are a lover, you want to be a hero. That’s the nature of being a lover.
Ken wants Barbie to look at him, and he wants to be a hero — but Barbie doesn’t see any hero, and she blithely, superciliously, condescendingly praises him, as he idiotically smashes into this brick barrier.
And what does Ken do for a living? Nothing.
What does Ken create? Nothing.
What does Ken do? He beaches. (It’s a verb, he beaches.)
He doesn’t do anything. He just shows up. Ken is always looking great, but he is not doing anything. He beaches. He’s not a hero, and she’s like: Oh, you’re so brave. Wow!
Now just check this out for a second. At level one, we’ve got this old pathologized role mate, and that role is: the man is the hero; he is the protector-provider. The woman tries to look beautiful for the man, and she is the nurturer. She creates the family, she bears the children — but the man is still called the hero. That is correctly rejected by Barbie: The man is the hero, but so is the woman.
First off, the woman has got to be in her own beauty for its own sake. She gets dressed up for herself. Yes, that’s beautiful.
But then it pathologizes the very notion of the relationship between Barbie and Ken, and we are going to see that pathologizing of that relationship deepen in ten ways. We’re just getting started. You can’t look at this episode by itself, we’re just getting started. The pathologized version of level one role mate relationship, I only exist in the gaze of the beloved, becomes Ken, not Barbie. And then, there is no hero:
Barbie is not a hero, she’s being successful.
Ken is not a hero. He doesn’t do anything, he just beaches. Wow!
That’s where we are.
Soul mates outside the Field of Value
Now, we’re going to do a little foreshadowing; we’re just at the beginning.
Barbie is critiquing level one relationship. It begins to examine level two relationship, but appears to be pathological. There is no sense that we go from role mate to soul mate, this beautiful love story between beloveds: men and women, women and women, men and men. That’s what culture actually did — it went from role mate to soul mate. What Barbie is saying is:
Soul mate is bullshit. There is no love story.
Now, stay really close:
Implicit in the cultural story of soul mate was that soul mate lives outside of the Field of Value.
There is no Field of Value.
We killed all the Gods and Goddesses. We killed value.
But we thought we could kill value and retain only one value.
Which one? Love. We’ll kill all the Goddesses except for Aphrodite, except for the Goddess of Love.
In culture, we move from role mate (which is the last 100,000 years in different versions of it) into soul mate only in the last several decades, mid-60s into the 70s and 80s:
John Grey writes: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, about soulmate relationships.
Harville Hendrix writes his book, Getting the Love You Want, about soulmate relationships. It’s about communication and vulnerability.
Gary Chapman writes a book called The Five Love Languages, which is about soulmate relationship. It’s all about language and communication, which is a whole new quality of relationship.
That’s soul mate. There is the attempt to enact this new field of relation, which is about this great love story, but they try and enact this love story outside of the Field of Value.
At the same time that we move from role mate to soul mate, we also move from modernity to postmodernity, and postmodernity says, there is no Field of Value.
Ah, but something’s got to be real.
What are we going to make real? Oh, the romantic love story. Postmodernity says: all that’s left is the love story.
The actual story that dominates culture, that really drives us in all of our creative lives and all of our status lives and all of our social lives, is the success story: rivalrous conflict governed by win-lose metrics.
We feel its emptiness, so we have a booby prize, the love story — but we don’t really believe love is real. We killed all the Goddesses except for Aphrodite — but you can’t keep Aphrodite alive when you decontextualized her from the Field of Value.
This is deep, friends, this is so crazy deep. If you decontextualize love from the Field of Value and say I love you — there is no I love you without value.
Barbie is an expression of the fact that Aphrodite has to die if all the other gods die.
Value creates responsibility. When I have value, I inconvenience myself, and I recognize that this value of love is huge and beautiful, and it demands something for me.
Intimacy creates obligation.
Intimacy creates radical commitment.
Intimacy creates the willingness to sacrifice, to bracket myself for the sake of your own transformation. I bracket myself in order to give to you — that’s what love means. There is no love outside of the Field of Value.
Postmodernity tries to claim the love story without the Field of Value — but postmodernity is rooted in modernity that made the same move but hid it.
Modernity assumes love is a value. Postmodernity says, no, we are going to say I love you, but actually, love is not real.
Just go to ChatGPT (we did this a year ago in One Mountain), and ask ChatGPT-4, is love real? And ChatGPT-4 will tell you that love is not ultimately real. It’s all made up by each individual. And love is not ultimately a real intrinsic value of Cosmos. ChatGPT-4, the new Oracle of the postmodern sensibility, far more dangerous than Google, because it’s a one-stop Oracle: Love is not real.
That is exactly the point of the Barbie movie, as we’re going to see.
Ken + Barbie is the nature of Reality
The point of the Barbie movie is:
There is ultimately no love story; there is no Ken + Barbie. You thought you could kill all the gods except for Aphrodite, and the great love story of Aphrodite will remain. It will not.
It will not unless it’s rooted in the Field of Value.
The Field of Value is a Field of Eros.
Eros is a value of Cosmos.
Eros, love, and intimacy are the First Values and First Principles of Cosmos.
Eros, love, and value are the structure of Reality —
all the way from subatomic particles,
all the way through the world of matter,
all the way through the world of the biosphere, biology,
all the way through the depth of the self-reflective human mind.
In other words, Ken + Barbie is true not because it’s a human contrivance.
Ken + Barbie is true because Ken + Barbie is the nature of Reality, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.
Reality is ErosValue all the way up and all the way down. You cannot cut off the flower at its root and expect the flower to bloom. The rose wilts after a few years. You can’t cut off love from its roots in the Field of ErosValue and expect love to remain real.
Along comes Barbie and says, you know what, my friends, there is no love story — and it chills the very heart of culture. And because there is no love story, there are no heroes.
It correctly critiques — that’s the paradox — this ascription of the hero to only the masculine, but it does it by caricaturing the masculine desire to be a hero. The idiot man wants to be a hero. For doing what? For beaching.
There is no notion that heroism could be real, that the hero is real, and that there is a new vision in which both men and women are heroes — both lines and circles.
When I say lines and circles, I refer to the notion of line as a geometric quality of Reality, the quality that later got engendered as the masculine:
The line divides,
and the line creates appropriate hierarchies of responsibility,
and the line creates language,
and the line creates the movement forward.
The line is the storyline. The line is a very powerful instrument of Reality.
Then there is the circle —
and the circle goes for depth,
and the circle contains,
and the circle includes,
and the circle also has the circular. It goes round and round until it can go even deeper, and it gets the cycle of life.
And the circle holds.
There are these two qualities which are way before masculine and feminine — lines and circles all the way up and all the way down Reality. We’ll talk about that more in the coming weeks. They begin at the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, where in the first equations of physics, we already have attraction and repulsion, as philosopher of science Howard Bloom has pointed out.
Attraction is a circle quality of allurement: moving towards, encircling, creating relationship with communion.
Repulsion is autonomy: independence, the vector. I am independent, I’ve got my own line, my own direction, my own trajectory, my own plotline, my own story forward.
Those exist in Reality, and at some point they engender in both men and women, masculine and feminine. But it’s not that lines are men and circles are women. Men and women are both lines and circles.
Every man has both line and circle.
Every woman has both line and circle.
That’s the beginning of the vision of Homo amor: the new human and new humanity.
No allurement, no heroes, no love story
Barbie doesn’t have any of that available.
Barbie is a critique — a correct critique — of level-one relationship, of role mate relationship, in which
men have all the line energy, and men are the heroes, and they’re thrusting forward,
and women are the homemakers, but women also need to allure the men, so they’ve got to get dressed up for the men, but often in degrading ways. This pathologizes that quality of the beauty of women. It limits allurement to women, and then pathologizes it.
And then the feminine pathologized version of level one relationship reappears as Ken, who only exists if he can allure Barbie. But the allurement that Ken is trying to enact is absurd and stupid, so allurement itself is considered to be ridiculous.
There is no real allurement.
There is no hero.
There is no hero and there is no allurement because there is no love story, and there is no love story because there cannot be a love story — because love is a value. If I denude love from being a value, if love is not a value, if Eros is not a value of Cosmos, if it’s a human contrivance, then there can be no love story — which is the argument of the Barbie movie. I am going to show that, I stake my life on it. I’ll show it in the text, and we’ll show it in scene after scene — but it’s already apparent just in these first few scenes.
This is a very deep read we are doing, and it’s very subtle. It’s going to get less subtle, meaning it’s going to get more and more clear — but we’re doing an insanely subtle read here, step by step. Can we hold this?
I want to create this model in culture of how we do this, so I want to offer this to you as a gift, as a kind of training. This is how we do this; we’ve done the first several steps here, and we’re going to stay in here.
We are holding. We are going to hold until we know how to read these texts of culture. Then we are going to explode this into culture. This is going to appear as a book, it will appear on our channels, but ultimately, we want to create an entire movie channel analyzing texts of culture — because this is where the culture gets the storyline wrong, and we need to be able to correct the storyline.
But first, we have to see it.
Now I want to ask just two things.
One, I want to ask just anyone, if you haven’t joined One Mountain, join. Make it yours. Make this revolution ours. This is a nonprofit; this is just so we can actually take One Mountain into the world, just to sustain this, so it’s self-sustaining and we can take this next step. That’d be awesome.
Number two, we want to blow our hearts open here. This is prayer. We are pouring our deepest heart’s desire into enacting a new source code and telling a New Story. We’ve got to do it for real, we cannot skip steps, so these next few weeks, we’re going to go crazy, crazy, crazy deep, in Barbie and then in Oppenheimer. Let’s just stay in together and do something unimaginably beautiful.
We are going to literally re-weave, together, the source code of culture. And we’re going to do it not by making something go viral, we’re going to do it by thinking clearly together.
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