Of Tragedy and Comedy

We approach tragedy and comedy today in an unnatural way, both as Frankenstein creations of what they are. Tragedy is considered in relation to sudden and unforeseen death and destruction, the most visceral, obvious and universal experience of tragedy and where we recognise the death of Princess Diana as tragedy the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion is more like disaster with its 7 heroic deaths. Tragedy emerges as a more meaningless event of destruction over its comparable term — disaster.

To tie physical events into tragedy is a mistake. In the challenger disaster the material and physical events were key elements. The o-rings did not perform correctly, some chain of events occurred lead to explosion, and multiple breaches of fail-safes led to a blame of group-think at NASA. The scientific, rational explanation of disaster is supposed to be a sober way to avoid it occurring in the future. But tragedy actually occurs at the subjective, abstract level. If a father suddenly dies it is a disaster for his business but a tragedy for the family. Tragedy is a process of shock.

In spite of the loss of tragedy/comedy as paradigmatic was of perceiving the world, in Western culture we have the instinct that comedy is somehow related to tragedy. The modern concept of comedy is seen as what makes us laugh, best embodied by standup comedy. Stand-up comedy has become so popular in sophisticated realms of society that its mechanics have started to be appreciated — comedy is recognised as a process of creating and managing tension before breaking it.

The stand-up comics tension building proposition points us towards the obsidian abyss. A sense of chaos and uncertainty emerges before being disarmed via punchline, triggering an explosion of laughter. In comedy a less confronting reality is re-asserted and the creeping bogey-man of uncertainty is shunned back to its shadow, beginning its slow creep back to the material world and into our lives all over again. Comedy is a process of relief.

The ancient Greeks were interested in tragedy and comedy almost exclusively as forms of entertainment. In Christian populations this natural dichotomy is replaced by a Christian preferred paradigm. These societies are far more likely to appreciate an event as being ultimately ‘good’ or ‘evil’ (bad) rather than tragic or comedic (tragedy and comedy are used as second order ideas to buttress good and evil). Even in the scientific, rational and logical post-enlightenment Western Society begins much of its problem solving in this way. A ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ (don’t we love problematic) outcome in todays Western civilisation seeks rationalisation along acceptable but false guidelines through which to reconstruct ‘Good’ before reconstructing ‘functional’.

The result is a kind of detachment from Tragedy and Comedy, especially as tragedy is invariably ‘bad’ and comedy invariably ‘good’. But is that what they really are?

The Christian worldview is a psychic religious megastructure built on the natural human psychic structure, more parasitic than symbiotic. The bolt-on Christian ideology operates the levers, functions and processes of the mind in a way that blurs the lines between biological human psychic process (nature), the environmental events that impact the human psyche (nature) and more insidious interventions — deliberate engineering of ideas for purposes such as constructing man-made ideological hierarchy. In suppressing the more natural instincts towards tragedy and comedy, people are protected but further from biological instincts and processes.

And if tragedy and comedy were almost exclusively good enough for Greek cultural expressions and if we are suggesting that they are natural processes, closest to biology, what if Christianity and its offshoots (including social justice intersectionality) is not progress but actually ideology that blocks us from experiencing the world as it is?

Let’s take a deeper dig into Tragedy and Comedy to understand them more.

As conscious beings, we build mental models and structures through which we understand the world. These structures prevent us from being surprised and unaware of what is going on around us — it helps us understand and so prevent anxiety towards the true nature of the universe, these models give us protection from Chaos. From time to time, seemingly random events occur, certainly events through which we can derive no meaning and cannot fit into any paradigmatic view that we develop.

When we are confronted with a physical reality in the world that breaks our models of it, we experience tragedy. Here our carefully constructed mental structures have failed in a dramatic way, the things we have built and rely on for a sense of safety, of belonging, of peace are no longer functional, leaving us in the meaningless depth of the abyss below.

After this a powerlessness and perception of danger dominates us in the depths of our psyche, challenging any self-perception of strength and affecting our sense of control over our lives. However! As days go by our mind begins to put pieces back together; it is never actually the pieces, they have been found wanting. This process starts the construction of new pieces. We rise new from the fall; over and over.

In this process we might gain an appreciation of chaos as the absurd, becoming familiar with absurdity and giving us mechanisms through which to invert the logic of our perceptual structures which protects us from them breaking. From nihilism to absurdity the natural instinct is towards comedy, the rejection of this existential angst in life-affirming, positive and generative events. This is the function of the comedy from ancient Greece.

As Life goes, Comedy follows Tragedy and Tragedy follows Comedy.

On the longer timeline it has been Christianity and not the tragedy/comedy cycle that has been culturally dominant — and so culturally successful — for the last 2000 years.

Christianity is a tragedy ideology where the death of Jesus (as the perfectly moral human who died for the sins of the world) evokes the maximum pity possible. This Christianity steps into tragedy as the preferred mode of existence but never triggering the tragedy event and disallowing the comedic process. Good and evil keep us in inevitable limbo, fully describing all events and always feeding back into themselves neatly and succinctly. Although Christianity has fetishized tragedy it comes short of embracing it fully by promising a guaranteed comedic event on death — eternal life in heaven. The Christian is in limbo, protected from the chaotic abyss.

If we can presume that such a man did exist, Jesus’ own life is only tragedy from the third party perspective — the man Jesus could be considered a higher being by virtue of him living his own life towards his own values and being led by his own higher wisdom (characterised as ‘God’) to suffer a violent death rather than forsake his values. With his enemies making a martyr of him, the Pharisees and Romans showed that it was possible to be a higher being — to live above tragedy and comedy in Jesus’ own subjective experience. But it was his friends who were not ready for this. Jesus death was too much to cope with, and his resurrection 3 days later becomes the comedic event so that the third party perspective could satisfy the demands of the tragedy/comedy cycle.

As the ideology of the slave, Christianity provides a psychological out for suppressed people who have no reason to believe in a comedy cycle and who can no longer muster the vitality to manifest it. Suppression inverts the energy required to experience the tragedy and to create the comedy. Once established in culture it is not easy to see outside of Christians bastardised tragedy cycle — there is no living paradise, no victory of the self, only guilt and the inversion of the natural instincts to avoid ‘bad’ and to promote ‘good’. In one particularly pathological outcome, the inversion of our natural instincts makes us feel ‘bad’ and encourages ‘sin’.

The best one can hope for is to be mostly ‘good’ by an external mechanism that disallows your own instincts to satisfy the potentially vicious and even insidious repercussions of being designated ‘bad’ — by ‘good’ people no less.

This instinct has not been overcome today, where we have struggled with these as well as other medieval social concepts to construct a new and satisfactory paradigmatic reality.

Understanding Tragedy/Comedy as natural, inevitable psychic processes helps us understand the Christian use of and obsession with tragedy and how a continuation of these instincts continues in Social Justice Causes, Marxism and Intersectionality which all share an ideological engine.

Beyond the Christian instinct we can view tragedy and comedy as a cycle that we would experience unconsciously without identifying them. So the first major cultural event is to recognise them as things and secondly as complementary processes. To experience as inevitable partner processes is a highly powerful position to be in.

There are other interesting parts to how we have processed this as a civilisation, revealed in early tension within existentialist philosophers. We can see divergent outcomes in the genealogy of Christianity, its failure, emergent nihilism and the individual pathways of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Existentialists were born in a society where Christianity had failed and began to approach the idea that we must create our own meaning.

By all accounts, what this means cannot be overestimated, if it is not a confronting, terrifying proposition — if you do not wish the cup to pass over — you have not achieved it. Of the giants of existentialism who lived in the abyss, who were struck in the face with the meaninglessness of existential angst, forced into nihilism, only Albert Camus managed to avoid hedonism (Foucault), Marxism neo-Christianity (Sartre) and absurdity as an end.

When Albert Camus pronounced that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, he completed the process of walking Christianity back to the Greek paradigm, advocating overcoming the tragedy/comedy cycle. Sisyphus is in the abstract world (unconscious mind/hell) forever pushing a boulder up a hill and seeing it roll down again— the tragedy/comedy cycle. Comedy is in the process of heaving the rock to the top and realised in the moment of achieving the feat, and tragedy in it rolling down, realised in the moment that it must go back to the top. When Camus said that we must imagine Sisyphus happy he stated that we must overcome the tragedy/comedy process with acceptance.

We are not sure if we should have an even higher goal.

Do we seek to merely replace Judeo-Christian morality with a tragedy/comedy cycle?

Are we able to view the tragedy/comedy cycle from on-top, seeing two halves of a whole? Can we achieve Camus’ aspiration, amongst the highest achievements of modern philosophy?

Or does it suggest that we take another perspective, to live in the chaos, to embrace the abyss that drives tragedy and comedy long enough to love it, to understand and experience these biological realities this way. Does this allow us to transcend the notions completely? Will attempting this project break us or is there an over-man somewhere waiting to love the pain and avoid the hubris in comedy?

For us, it isn’t completely clear of what is possible yet but we think that the question is important, even fundamentally necessary in order to build new cultural pathways that begin to solve the list of dichotomous realities we are confronted with — tragedy/comedy, real/abstract, left/right (politics), logic/emotions, male/female, good/bad ‘things’, and so on and so on. Unlocking the biological processes behind these things, understanding them deeply and re-imagining them could mean that opposing forces become complementary things and will unlock new levels of consciousness. Perhaps the very cultural dilemma we are in can be averted through a transcendent consciousness with no religious architecture at all, just a total optimisation of our natural biological instincts and with what is possible to build ourselves towards.