Freedom and Choice: The Price of Heroism
Further reflections from The Hobbit Party and Final Fantasy VII
Previous posts have considered much about freedom, starting with a reflection on temperance, moving on to a discussion of freedom’s true meaning, how freedom is rooted in self-awareness, and whether or not one’s freedom ought to be for sale. Today’s subject has, for it’s basis, another point of order from Jay Richards’ and Jonathan Witt’s The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot. (That’s an Amazon Affiliate link, for the curious.)
It is their point that you cannot have heroism without free will.
A great argument raised against faith in a Supreme Being is that if He is all good, how could He create evil? God did not create evil, but this is a question which must be answered deeply and thoroughly, not in a throwaway line. Indeed, The Hobbit Party spends at least one, perhaps two, chapters on it and the Catholic Church wrestles with it here (Catechism of the Catholic Church #310 - 314) and here (Catechism of the Catholic Church#1711 - 1744) among other places. But part of the reason - which Crossover Queen touches on here in her post “The Power of No” - is that without the struggle against evil, where would there be heroism?
This isn’t to excuse evil or gainsay its reality. Evil is a lack or absence of good rooted in the will of the one who commits it, as the philosophers of antiquity and the Middle Ages explained, and not a created thing. But we should distinguish between human moral evil and natural evils, such as earthquakes and fires. The latter are natural processes and while fires can be touched off accidentally or purposefully, there is no human way to control the movement of the earth. When it moves, it moves; that is its nature. It doesn’t notice us atop it or, if it does, it can no more help moving than we can restrain ourselves from stretching after holding a cramped position for hours.
Moral evil, on the other hand, is not only the absence of good but the determination of its individual and seried ranks to engage, pursue, and practice it. It is the turning away from reality, if you will, to serve one’s own desires above the truth in an effort to get something one wants by illicit means. Murder, rape, robbery, theft, and other such actions are obvious ways to go against truth, i.e. reality. The person who does these things is taking something to which he has no right in the first place.
Less clear are the smaller or more subtle signs of putting one’s will above the good of others for self-service. Among Vathara’s examples are “tak[ing] that extra cookie, giv[ing] the finger to the idiot who cut you off in traffic, or be[ing] rude to the bank teller who did nothing to you.” These are all little things and at first glance they don’t seem to be the type of thing to indicate that one is committing evil in some way.
But examine them a little closer and it is not hard to see why they count: Gluttony is listed as a deadly sin not because eating is bad or good food is bad for the soul. It’s not even a deadly sin because overeating to excess is unhealthy for the glutton (though that is part of the punishment reality places on the glutton). It is a sin because the glutton chooses to make the base or animal appetite predominant. It puts food - the nourishment meant to keep a man alive and healthy throughout his life - on a pedestal, where a man worships it as though it were a god. Even from a completely atheist point of view, indulging in overeating or “too much of a good [food]” is a bad idea for this reason.
For the latter two instances, making rude gestures or being mean to tellers who didn’t earn it is putting oneself before others. This assertion of one’s feelings occurs so that one may make oneself more significant than he or she naturally is to feel better about him or herself. Sometimes the cause of this is that someone has had a bad day and they lose their temper for a moment. This means that things have been going “wrong,” i.e. not according to someone’s plan or will, and the person snaps. That makes it understandable and it may mitigate the damage done somewhat.
It does not make the selfish or erroneous action “okay,” though. Furthermore, if one indulges in this type of behavior too often, it can lead to greater and more far-reaching evils. While that might seem hyperbolic at first, consider the example used by Witt and Richards: That of two girls who are supposed to study before playing. The first girl does her work well and is praised by her father for sticking to the task at hand rather than goofing off before she finished her work. The second girl spends the afternoon she should have spent studying watching TV instead, and her father rightly scolds her for it. Even without seeking a degree, where do you think these two girls are likely to end up in the future? The first one will probably keep her self-discipline and lead a fairly happy life. The second, if she maintains the path that she has chosen, will find herself leading an unhappy or at least more difficult life due to her own decisions.
Vathara does a good job explaining how saying “no” to oneself leads to strong self-discipline for characters. Not only does The Lord of the Rings showcase how one says “no” and sticks to that decision, so does Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core.
“I will take the Ring to Mordor!” Frodo says. “Though I do not know the way.”
For most, this scene counts as a “yes.” An acceptance of the “call to action,” as Joseph Campbell put it. Frodo has realized that the task of bringing the Ring to the Crack of Doom in Mordor is his alone and that he cannot take a path away from it. He says “yes” to the quest.
But that means saying “no” to going back to his nice, comfortable home in the Shire. It means saying “no” to soft beds, the regular meals all Hobbits enjoy (yet which fatten few of them), and the safety of avoiding the danger that has plagued the outer world longer than he has been alive. In essence, Frodo is saying “no” to the easy road and “yes” to the harder one. It is a path of deprivation, terror, pain, and the slow erosion of his will.
Willpower is a gift which all mankind possesses. As Vathara says, it is like a muscle one can exercise and strengthen. Research and experiments with willpower show this as well, adding that like any muscle, willpower can be exhausted. You can become “tired” and thus cave to someone else’s desires just because you want them to shut up, go away, and leave you alone. In other words, you become too tired to keep fighting.
This is what happens to Frodo over the course of the trilogy. While he does indeed become one of the strongest willed characters in the series, at the same time, his will is constantly grinding up against the stronger will of the One Ring. The Ring has the power of a fallen angel within it; even Gandalf fears to lay a hand on it, lest it tempt him to use his own angelic powers for evil ends in an attempt to bring about some good.
Frodo holds out against the Ring until the second-last moment, a testament to Hobbit hardiness and his own strength of will. That hardiness, however, is mortal. It belongs not to a being of pure spirit but to a being of flesh, blood, bone, and spirit. When Frodo reaches his ultimate exhaustion point, he breaks.
Tolkien himself stated this, saying in at least one note or letter that no mortal could withstand the Ring’s power. Immortals such as Galadriel and Gandalf were susceptible to it as well. Being incarnate in a fallen world and possessing free will, they couldn’t help it. Gandalf’s position as “an incarnate angel” means he and the other Istari had the ability to choose to turn aside from their divine mission. All the other wizards did indeed do just that, as seen with Saruman and mentioned briefly with Rhadagast.
Only Gandalf held true, and it literally cost him his life to do so.
While Frodo held out far longer than anyone else, even he possessed the ultimate weakness of all beings in this fallen world. His strength depleted, the Ring “pushed” him to claim it, thus making him and it visible to Sauron. Although his exhaustion absolves Frodo of guilt, it doesn’t exactly make him feel better. He promised to bring the Ring to the very Crack of Doom and cast it into the fire.
He failed.
Tolkien acknowledged that this failure is part of why Frodo seeks the Grey Havens at the end of the trilogy. He can’t get over his failure, can’t heal from it, in Middle-earth or the Shire. Only in the Undying Lands, which might be called the doorstep of heaven as it were, can he begin to mend this and the other agonies he bears from his travails.
In a similar manner, Zack Fair is faced with a quandary when he and his catatonic friend Cloud Strife are trying to escape Shinra’s loyal grunts. Cloud cannot fight, and Zack wants to return to the city of Midgar both to get him treatment and to see his girlfriend, Aerith, again. His five years of captivity mean he has never received her letters - not until he accidentally finds the “last one” she has written, believing he has given up on her.
But now that they are finally within sight of the city, Shinra has sent an army to kill Zack and Cloud to keep their dirty secret of human experimentation in the dark. Zack is faced with a choice: Abandon Cloud, who is weighing him down, and go to Midgar to lay low and find Aerith…
…or give his life to save his friend’s.
Zack has always striven to be a hero. It was his motivation for joining Shinra’s SOLDIER program in the first place. Though he did not recognize the company’s true nature despite the long string of various hints placed before him by circumstance or cryptically referred to by those he knew and respected, he has seen it in his five years of captivity. He has seen helpless, wounded villagers turned into monsters. He has watched the experiments render his best friend unresponsive.
Yet Aerith is still there. He still desperately wants to see her, to at least begin to make up for all the time he missed with her. Then there is the fact that Shinra’s evil has to be exposed and stopped. If he left Cloud behind, he could be the hero he always dreamt of being.
But that would mean that Cloud would die.
Personal happiness wars briefly with honor, brotherhood, and friendship. In the end, based on the choices he has made, we know what Zack is going to do. Ruffling his insensible friend’s hair one last time, Zack gets up and walks away -
Right into the teeth of the army sent to kill him and Cloud.
No matter how you play the (original) Crisis Core game, no matter what strategy you employ as the player, Zack dies. Shot to rags, the final scene of the fight has him shot having grazed his head as he lies insensate and helpless on the ground. The final sounds before the last cut scene are of more shots being fired. The Shinra grunts are shooting a wounded and dying man who can’t fight back.
It should be - and it is - an awful way to go. An evil way to go. It is murder, plain and pure. You can’t avoid it.
The Shinra soldiers are “just following orders.” Zack’s been labeled a fugitive along with Cloud by the company. Good soldiers follow orders, right? And this guy literally hacked all their friends to pieces right in front of them. They’ve spent hours fighting to kill him. They have a right to be mad enough to shoot him, then shoot him again and again to make sure he’s dead.
Don’t they?
Now we come to the “exercising willpower” part.
The Lord of the Rings is full of willpower failures and willpower triumphs. Frodo triumphs over the Ring until the last moment, and Samwise Gamgee manages to resist the Ring’s power when he holds it while searching for Frodo. The films - even the Ralph Bakshi animated feature - make Aragorn’s unwillingness to touch the Ring or get too close to it blatantly obvious. This contrasts sharply with his ancestor Isildur’s failure. For while Frodo failed at the last moment, as best we know, Isildur ceased to fight the Ring of his own choice before he even reached the Crack of Doom.
In each case, it is a matter of making a choice and holding to it. Aragorn refuses to touch, claim, or take the Ring. The live action film has a very poignant scene where he closes Frodo’s hand over it when tested by his friend and tempted by the Ring. In addition to all the other self-sacrificing choices he has made over his lifetime, while we fear he will fall, we still recognize that Aragorn’s well-trained will is strong enough to resist his forefather’s folly here and now.
Sam, much loved hero that he is, spends the entire trilogy making decisions he doesn’t want to make in order to do what must be done. He sets out from the Shire when he would rather stay home, travels with Aragorn when he distrusts him, and follows Frodo straight into Mordor (the film even has him walk into the Anduin River - pure suicide for most Hobbits, as they rarely learn to swim). Above all that, he puts up with Gollum as a traveling companion and even spares his life when he might justly take it to save himself and his master.
Each character has scenes where we can see him exercising his will to choose in “small” matters at a rate that builds his will up continually. It is through these “small” incidents with their “in-the-moment” difficulty that the characters strengthen and/or show the fruits of their self-discipline. By saying “no” in little matters, they grow to say “no” in “greater matters.”
Zack follows this pattern as well. Despite the fact that he misses hints to Shinra’s dark nature, he does refuse to do evil. He may become confused, such as when his mentor Angeal Healy sprouts a white wing and seemingly betrays him and all that he has taught Zack. But even when he’s not sure what is going on, Zack does his best to follow the path that hews closest to what he knows is right.
So when he takes a catatonic Cloud out of captivity and on the run with him, it is not a surprise. When he drags his friend through and past fights with Shinra soldiers, it is not jarring for the gaming audience. If someone tries to tempt him to follow them in their much less honorable fight against Shinra during this time, he reacts with predictable anger and refuses.
This is the fruit of self-discipline. It is the result of freedom exercised in a good cause meant to allow one to rule himself in both small matters and great. It is the power to say “no” practiced until the word rings with force and power even if it is only whispered on one’s last breath.
Why do we have freedom? In effect, we have it because without it, we would not have heroes. Certainly, we would not have villains either if we lacked free will….
But are a lack of villains worth a lack of heroes?
Sadly though, many in our modern world wouldn’t say “yes” to this in the way that you might expect. The current loudest voices would aver that a world without heroes and villains - where everyone was equal in outcome rather than before God and/or the moral law - would be preferable. But to state this in plain language means that a majority would not support it nor be confused as to why they should not buy into such an idea.
Thus the world would take Thunderbolt Ross’ tactic of speaking with apparent temperance while driving others to embrace something that not only will not benefit everyone, it will hurt them the most. Remember Vathara’s example of refusing to take that extra cookie? Thunderbolt Ross stands in for the voice - whether one thinks of it as the devil’s or one’s own id - that says, “Aww, but what’s the harm in having another cookie? Haven’t I worked hard all day? It must be mine, it should be mine!”
Kudos if you heard that last line in Bilbo’s voice. The Ring is an apt image or personification of the temptation to allow our wills to be subsumed by something else. Freedom calls on us to face this temptation and disavow it.
It is also worth remembering that every “no” means, alternatively, that you are saying “yes” to something else. “No, I will not cast away the Ring” means “Yes, I will keep this precious Ring as weregild for my father and my brother.” “No, I think I will have that cookie” means “Yes, I will give myself the satisfaction and pleasure - temporary though it is - of indulgence in something I don’t need now and might be better off eating later.”
Just so, every “No, I will not give up” means “Yes, I will keep fighting.” Every “No, that’s wrong, I won’t do it” means “Yes, I will pay the price for doing the right thing, no matter how much it hurts.” It means, in short:
“I will take the Ring. Though I do not know the way.”
And:
“Boy, oh boy. The price of freedom is steep.”
It is steep. As steep as the path to the Crack of Doom and as hard as that last battle with the Shinra grunts. You wouldn’t think so, glaring at the guy who cut you off in traffic or with that last cookie calling your name….
But the price of freedom is steep, and it is a price we are faced with paying in a million small ways every day. Like Frodo, we do not always know the way, and like Zack we can be blind to the hints all around us that something is actually wrong. What makes a hero - and builds willpower - is practice or “exercise” in the discernment of when to say “yes,” when to say “no,” and what may be implied in each of those answers in specific situations.
It will be hard. It will be difficult. There is no guarantee it will make you a hero.
Yet it will mean that you are free and exercising that freedom. So when it comes time to say “no” or “yes” to the big things, you will have the foundation to do so. But only if you take the time in “normal” circumstances to do your calisthenics of willpower. ;)