Fighting Grendel, the Risks of Change, and the Great Sacrifice

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** June 29, 2020 | DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON
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** The Death of Grendel and the Rise of Chaos
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The following is taken from a draft of my upcoming book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

Imagine the case of someone too polite and too socialized and consequently bullied at their office job. Imagine, as well, that they dream consistently about being chased and trapped by a monstrous figure, something gigantic, faceless, devouring and malevolent. Nothing but terror emerges in the course of the dream, and they wake up sweating in fear.

A careful and informed therapist might note that a similar theme manifests itself in the epic poem Beowulf, source of inspiration for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The Spear-Danes, led by King Hrothgar, find themselves threatened by a terrible male monster, Grendel, a man-eating demon. Every night Grendel tears more Danes limb from limb and feasts on their corpses.

A therapist might ask of his client, “what might you do if you genuinely found yourself in such a situation?” The client might, first, indicate the impossibility of running. That’s part and parcel of being trapped. That might leave open the possibility of fighting. So then, perhaps, the therapist might ask the client to imagine the dream situation, to pick up something that could be used as a weapon. That might work at the symbolic level, dramatizing two ideas: one, that it is often better to stand and fight than to run; two, that the dreamer could be he who chooses, voluntarily, to stand and fight (the second idea is arguably of more crucial import than the first).

This all appears well and good. To suggest that to stand and fight is the proper strategy, however, is little more than cliché, even when true. Someone trapped in a counterproductive bureaucracy and wishing to improve the functioning of the bureaucracy itself has to develop a very detailed strategy, rather than acting impulsively or carelessly (even if motivated by, say, a perfectly understandable anger at the surrounding misbehavior). Why? Well, the consequence of standing up might be defeat, and that is not obviously an improvement. That means that the attempt to sacrifice pathological order might merely engender intolerable chaos. That’s the devil you don’t know, instead of the one that you do. Even if you stand up and win, your troubles may be just beginning.

The Beowulf epic was written by people who were anything but naïve. Bad as Grendel and his ilk might be, there is always the possibility of something even worse lurking behind. If is for this reason that the poem presents a further caution. When the hero, Beowulf, kills Grendel (which seems to be a praiseworthy act), the mother of the monster enters the scene, outraged at her son’s death. What does this mean? Precisely this: If the hero arrives, and slays the monster of order (the dark and pathological manifestation of the social structure itself, the Tyrannical King, the symbolically masculine, in its negative guise) then the monster of chaos is likely to make her presence known. Even pathological order may be keeping a substantive degree of chaos at bay. If Grendel was a monster—and he certainly was—then his mother is the mother of all monsters, and Beowulf’s heroic action, culminating in the destruction of his murderous foe, has merely called forth something worse.

We see the same terrible drama constantly replayed on the world stage. We depose Saddam Hussain—describing him quite rightly as a tyrant who should be opposed—but do not realize that the mother of all tyrants, chaos herself, is always waiting in the wings. We destroy Saddam, and reap Isis (whose very name recapitulates the Goddess of the Underworld, in an uncanny and unpleasantly synchronistic manner). It’s forty years in the desert, and not the Promised Land, that follows the escape from tyranny, optimism be damned. The Iraq war did not bring about the immediately successful clamor for freedom, despite the relatively educated population of the nation. It did not produce democracy. It destabilized the Middle East, instead, with consequences that have not yet fully manifested themselves.

The moral of the story? Even the most genuinely terrible of Grendels should not be fought and destroyed by the naïve—or, even by the heroic—without due and terrible caution.


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