• Heroes, who are strong, decisive, strategic winners who deserve the spoils of war
• Victims, who need to be rescued (and who should celebrate the conquering hero)
• Enemies, who are seen as bad and evil and hence in some way unfathomable
• Wimps, who lack the strength of will to win today or who whine about the plight of people who lose out in the contest
  
  Journalism professor Jack Lule conducted a systematic analysis of major news stories from the New York Times in the 1990s, and of the seven archetypal story patterns he found, all but one fall into the pattern identified above, suggesting that Americans were resonating to the Hero plot during that period. With the exception of several stories about the Good Mother that seem to be related to cultural expectations about women, the articles all focus on archetypal characters and situations typical of the Hero plot. Lule particularly highlights stories with both a Hero and a Victim. His archetypes of the Scapegoat, the Trickster (his news story example is Mike Tyson’s rape trial), and the Other (Evil) World all are versions of enemies. His archetype of the Flood (meaning any natural disaster) is one case of the difficulties the Hero surmounts.
  
  An additional challenge that we as citizens face is that our news is being fed to us by the media consistently through the lens of the Hero/Warrior archetype. Unless we can correct for this, we will not be able to hold our politicians accountable for acting in ways that might solve problems that do not fit this plot. The results are often not pretty.
  
  The Hero Trance in the Vietnam Era
  
  Surfacing this unconscious operating system in the groupthink within the U.S. explains some of the most important failures of our foreign policy. In the documentary The Fog of War (widely available on DVD), former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara reflects on the story the U.S. was telling itself that got us bogged down in Vietnam. He argues that our leaders saw what they believed, not what actually was happening. In fact, he claims that the attack on a U.S. Navy ship that led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and the first bombings of North Vietnam likely was not an attack at all. More importantly, the administration’s view that the North Vietnamese were pawns of Communist China simply was inaccurate. McNamara maintains that our belief in the domino theory was so strong and our real knowledge of the North Vietnamese so meager that we misread the situation, with devastating results for Vietnam and for our own country.
  
  In archetypal terms, the domino theory was the Hero (us against them) plot of the time. This us/them thinking caused us to engage in questionable activities, because we tended to support anyone, however oppressive, who was anti-communist and fight any group who called themselves communists. Similarly, we helped to train Osama bin Laden and his ilk to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, never thinking that eventually he would turn and use what he learned from us—on us.
  
  Of course, not everyone in the 1960s and 1970s was in Hero trance—hence the protests against the war. Many intellectuals recognized the real complexity of the situation, demonstrating the clarity of mind of the Sage archetype. Many younger protesters, in fact, carried signs announcing a more surprising, competing archetype (the Lover), saying, “Make love, not war.” Eventually, the sheer weight of evidence, along with the emergence of these counter-archetypal forces, caused the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam.
  
  But now, the Hero trance seems to have grabbed the American people by the neck once more—or, at least, it has grabbed the Bush administration and the media. So once again we are mired down in a war that is clearly a mistake, if we are to take seriously the reasons President Bush gave us for invading Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, nor any connections to al Qaeda, except ones now forged by Iraqi resistance to the American occupation. How could this be happening? And, how is it that Senator Kerry’s opposition to the Vietnam War, following his heroic service in it, is now being painted as unpatriotic or even traitorous? What happened?
  
  Are we so lacking in cognitive complexity, as Robert Kegan fears, that we escape into simple answers? And, do we, as Chris Hedges suggests, so desperately need to identify as the “good guys” that we retreat into war psychology rather than grapple with thinking about why others in the world might hate us?
  
  The Bush Administration and the Hero Trance
  
  We can see the Hero archetype at work in the Bush administration in a very pure but trance-like way. When the nation was in shock after 9/11, most Americans were asking questions about the terrorists: Who are they? Why do they hate us? What are they seeking to gain?
  
  These questions reflected real cognitive complexity, the kind Professor Kegan says we need to survive in the modern world. But almost immediately, Bush defined the situation for us, telling us that we were at war with the terrorists, that they were evil, and that they attacked us because they hated freedom. He then challenged the world to support our side, saying that other countries were either with us (Heroic allies), or against us (our enemies).
  
  Complexity of thinking would require us to truly grapple with questions about how to protect the nation from terrorists. Fighting terrorism is not like traditional warfare. Terrorists are not from any one country, so there is no single place to invade. They do not wear uniforms, so you do not know whom you are fighting. The paradigm simply is different than what our military was trained to respond to.
  
  Other cases of terrorism—the Oklahoma City bombing, for example—have been treated as crimes, which involves a different way of thinking than does war. If we had chosen this path, it would invite cooperation from other countries, many of which are engaged in keeping their own people free from terrorists as well. It also would encourage us to learn from countries with more experience fighting terror than we have had.
  
  Once we were “at war,” the predictable, but largely irrational pattern of behavior was evoked. While it was logical to invade Afghanistan, to go after Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, it was not at all logical to substitute Saddam Hussein as public enemy number one, other than the fact that the Bush administration had always planned to depose him. In trance, you do not fit your actions to the situation, you impose your plot, whether it fits or not. And, you expect outcomes that seem logical because they fit the narrative, but end up being revealed as erroneous. For example, senior administration officials predicted that the Iraqi people (the victims) would greet us as great liberators, that they would love us and pay for the war with their oil. Long after Bush had his photo-op declaring “Mission Accomplished,” the resistance to the U.S. occupation continued to mount, and with it, casualties on all sides.
  
  Kegan points out that cognitive complexity is different from intelligence. You can be very smart but still lack complexity in your thinking. Many people demean Bush’s intelligence, but he clearly would not be so popular if he did not know how to assess situations and influence people. However, the Hero story implicitly focuses intelligence in a narrow and preordained way. Within the story, people can be extremely strategic and clever, but they will miss much of what is going on. To them, complex thinking appears as a weakness.
  
  How Trance Breeds Tony Soprano Ethics
  
  While the healthy Hero fights for the people and tends to be very honest and truth telling, the Hero in trance has a more ruthless quality. We can see this in a too-quick willingness to bomb cities and injure or kill civilians, or in character attacks on one’s political opponents (e.g., Bush’s refusal to repudiate unsubstantiated attacks on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, or his distortion of Kerry’s distinguished war and Senate record to paint him as soft, a fake, a flip-flopper—in short, a wimp).
  
  A recent article in the Washington Post ascribed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s attacks to a desire for revenge against Kerry for his testimony before the Senate after his return from Vietnam. In their view, by opposing the war and relating atrocity stories he’d been told, he broke the soldier’s code of honor, a code that requires veterans to hang together, showing loyalty, no matter what.
  
  It struck me that this is an example of Tony Soprano ethics. On the TV show The Sopranos, Tony and the other mobsters see extortion and drug dealing simply as the way they make their living. To them, it is not immoral. Yet, they live by a code that tells them never to rat on one another; the punishment for doing so is death, which they enforce without question. I’m not suggesting that U.S. soldiers are in the same category as the Mafia, but I do maintain that being complicit through one’s silence with any kind of atrocity is hardly heroic.
  
  People often go into trance when they are unwilling to look at themselves and what they are doing. We all see this in organizations that are on a slippery moral slope, where the unwritten rules say that whistle-blowers will not be tolerated. People stay silent precisely because they know that if they speak the truth, they will be scapegoated.
  
  Moreover, while the healthy Hero tends to be careful to use violence only as a last resort and with care to be certain that the real enemy is targeted, the Hero in trance tends to act out the Hero story somewhat mindlessly. That may help to explain why the administration rushed to attack Iraq before the inspections were concluded, and why it was easy for it simply to substitute an enemy with an address (Saddam) for one it could not find (bin Laden). Indeed, it seems almost as if the Bush administration has forgotten bin Laden entirely; the uncontested fact that the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center were from Saudi Arabia and had no connections with Iraq now goes unmentioned.
  
  When a trance is in play, the inevitable killing of civilians that happens in modern wars is downplayed as “collateral damage,” and abuses of prisoners are blamed on a few sadists far down the line. Citizens and candidates who question such actions are discredited as unpatriotic, weak, or wimpy. To the degree that we remain in trance, our detractors—in Iran, in Europe, and at home—seem like villains. In trance, we are permanently heroic—whatever we actually do.
  
  It is not too late, however, for the Bush administration to break this trance—for itself and the public. Bush has all the experience he needs—through his knowledge of the global financial dealings of his family—to think more complexly about foreign relations. Instead of hiding or deemphasizing the fact that much of his family fortune comes from dealings with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family, Bush needs to think about what his interdependence with them means. He could recognize that the whole country is in bed with these same people because we all are dependent on Middle Eastern oil. And, of course, he could acknowledge that the U. S. trained bin Laden, who was then our friend, to fight the Soviets, reflecting on this and other historical tactics that have backfired.
  
  If Bush would think about these issues for any sustained period of time, he would understand that we are not living in the simple universe of the 1950s cowboy western. The world today is not made up of us and them. We are all potentially us. Our lives are intertwined in ways that preclude simple answers. And, no one permanently appointed us to be the good guys. Like all individual human beings, the U. S. is imperfect and needs to learn from its mistakes.
  
  Not All Heroes Wear White Hats: Kerry and the Media
  
  Kerry was a real Hero as a young man, both in the war and in opposing the war upon his return. What is hopeful about Kerry is that he has seemed to live that story in a healthy way and then grow, experiencing other archetypal stories as well.
  
  Kerry’s natural advantage, at this time in his life, would be to lead with the Sage archetype, taking, as he does, a more complex and educated approach to issues than we would expect in a Hero story. Even though Al Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, Kerry’s advisers may have concluded that Gore’s more scholarly, Sage-like affect is what kept him from winning enough states to carry the electoral vote. Could it be that the American people are so locked in a Hero trance that they see this as a negative? Certainly Bush paints it as such.
  
  Pollsters also might have advised the Kerry campaign that the American people wanted a Hero. And, of course, his advisers were influenced by what seemed like Kerry’s ace-in-the-hole war record. He was a real hero challenging a president who sat out the Vietnam War and may have been AWOL during some portion of his National Guard service. How could the American people prefer to be defended by a man who partied through the war rather than one who showed heroism both in the war and in the anti-war movement?
  
  And, of course, Kerry was dealing with a news media in Hero trance, obsessed with the horse race while avoiding digging into deeper policy issues. As we were hurtling into the war in Iraq, news organizations were focusing on how to brand their coverage of the war in ways that increased their ratings or readership, rather than checking out the President’s reasoning and sources. How do you introduce a new narrative when the news media itself hears the news through the lens of only one story, and that story expressed in its more stereotypical, shallow form, reported as sound bytes?
  
  To the degree that the media are concerned primarily with ratings, they become an arm of the entertainment industry. Wars are entertaining. Moreover, when the Hero/Warrior mental model is evoked, everything is a contest. So, we have dueling pundits hurling insults at one another rather than providing in-depth coverage of the news. When the media cover attack ads, they treat them all as if they were verbal grenades, analyzing how much damage they inflict with only passing attention to whether or not a negative ad actually is based on demonstrable truth. Suddenly, Kerry’s actions in Vietnam are characterized as “disputed heroism,” even though military records and eyewitnesses substantiate his version.
  
  Given the current journalistic bent, it is difficult to get coverage of issues presented in a complex and serious way, but Kerry would do the country a service if he were to try. Kerry clearly has the experience—in the Vietnam War, after the war, and in the Senate—to tell a story deeper than the Hero narrative to the American people. If Kerry could talk with the sincerity and passion of his testimony as a young returning veteran before the Senate and combine that with the wisdom of experience over decades in public life, he might be able to seduce Americans out of the trance and the intellectual laziness it induces. I believe that he could—if he would just take the risk to trust that we are up to the challenge.
  
  Can Reporters be Real Journalists Again?
  
  People and nations tend to stay in trance when they do not want to look at themselves. But coming to grips with one’s own inadequacies is part of what wise individuals do as they mature. Facing and learning from one’s failures is a prerequisite to developing real wisdom. If we can do this as individuals, certainly our country can, too. We tend to see the enormous virtues we have as a country, but often miss our shortcomings.
  
  Of course, others see them. A study released in March by the Pew Foundation tells us that many of our allies—in the Middle East and in Europe—now have negative images of us, and that this was much less true just four years ago. If we hope to regain our prestige in the world, we have to be willing to see ourselves as others see us and learn from their perceptions. Rather than making fun of the French and other allies, or demonizing the entire Islamic world, it would be wise for us to pay attention to why we are perceived so negatively. Perhaps others are aware of factors we are not tracking, and maybe there are also ways we need to change.
  
  The good news is that facing facts, rather than living a false story, increases our ability to recognize and solve problems. The news media easily could help the country out of trance by doing what psychotherapists do to help individuals locked in a counterproductive story.
  

• The first step is to surface the underlying logic of the story, just as a narrative, not necessarily the truth. In this case, the news media could analyze the archetypal patterns inherent in the candidate’s reasoning.
• The second step is to stop reinforcing an unproductive way of thinking by playing into that story. For the media, this would mean de-emphasizing coverage of the “horse race” aspect of elections. (An alternative would be to think of political campaigns as dialogues around issues, with candidates contributing in different ways their ideas about how we might solve the great issues of our time.)
• The third step is to track as carefully as possible the real facts happening in and around the individual, calling attention to those that do not fit the logic of the story that person is telling. For the news media, this might require highlighting the facts that do not fit our national script. For example, many reporters, in the wake of the unexpected setbacks in Iraq, immediately began interviewing people about whether this would work in Kerry’s favor. Instead, they could ask the people they interview what might have been faulty in our country’s thinking about the war, and what other meaning we could make from what we are learning there—i.e., what other story could we tell? (Had such an analysis been given wide coverage after Vietnam, we might not be in Iraq today.)
  
  My challenge to reporters is to spend some time thinking about what stories they really want to tell. Do they want to encourage people to fiddle while Rome burns, or are they willing to cover the deeper problems we face and their possible solutions? Are they willing to try to discern not just the “what” that needs reporting, but also the “how”—and to see how the stories they unconsciously assume (and thus tell) bias the news and limit options?
  
  The media consistently feed us a shallow version of the Hero story partly because it sells and partly because they are so in it, they think it defines reality. But there are many archetypal stories out there that touch the human heart—and not all of them shut down the mind in doing so. The news media could lead the way to real change. Indeed, if they do not, it may well be that no candidate has a chance to do so. For good or ill, the messages of our political leaders are filtered through the consciousness of the people covering them. Unless they are willing to change, we will remain cognitively “in over our heads,” with a national debate over issues that has no chance of achieving the depth and complexity required to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
  
  What Can We, As Citizens, Do?
  
  But what if the media remain in trance? What then? As citizens, we can exert paradigm vigilance, recognizing that “whatever fits the Hero story, they print.” It is possible (by reading the inside pages of newspapers; listening to or watching actual congressional hearings, not just reports about them, on C-Span; gleaning information from the Internet and, through the Internet, following coverage by foreign newspapers) to piece together something resembling a more adequate truth. But it is not easy to do so.
  
  Ultimately, we may need to supplement the fourth estate with some other institution that does what journalism was supposed to do. Right now, journalists confuse impartiality—just reporting what each side says—with objectivity. We need institutions that are also less concerned with the horse race than with solving the very real problems of the world. The technology exists for us to free ourselves from our dependency on journalists in trance. If the news media do not change, we need to find other sources of information. Even then, we will only replicate the problem if we do not develop enough archetypal awareness to stay out of trance ourselves.
  

Carol S. Pearson is a Senior Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland College Park and the author of numerous books, including The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes and The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By.