When novels, plays, films and fairy stories are based only on praise for the hero and punishment for the villain. When a world-picture is based on the same attitude.
438. Current novels, plays, films and fairy stories which deal only with praise for the hero and punishment for the villain, are in the highest degree imperfect and are untrue pictures of life. They certainly deal with cultural factors, but they do not inspire an acceptance of the commands of Jesus; on the contrary to a very great extent they stimulate progression along the road to "Valhalla". Through their dominating representation of the old nordic concepts of honour from that ancient "home for heroes" – still present in the 20th century – those stories stimulate impulses of the power-principle which promote hero-worship and punishment which, under cover of the formerly accepted concept of the honour of "war", have so long been streaming like a flood of bloodstains, mutilations, plunderings, oppressions, degradations, insults and acts of terror across the world. Most certainly, the morals attached to "hero-worship" and "punishment" from "Valhalla" have been sown with commanding superiority into that "soil" known as terrestrial mankind. And every harvest must be the result of that which is sown. To sow suffering and punishment cannot yield anything but suffering and punishment. If one desires love and happiness, then love and happiness must be sown. Any novel or teaching or scientific work which does not demonstrate just that, consists of an analysis which has nothing at all to do with mathematics or reality. And just as a novel or a teaching remains an unscientific analysis as long as it does not unite the villain and the hero in sympathy and love and in this way illuminate the whole cycle – that is to say the energies ascending into balance or contact with those energies which exist before and after the analysed subject's physical existence – so too, must any picture of life itself, or of the Universe, remain an unscientific analysis devoid of mathematical validity as long as it does not show the whole cycle as is demonstrated here in Symbol No. 9. In this analysis each impulse of energy is seen in its entire cycle. We see that its termination is the beginning of a new cycle and that in this way it continues endlessly, revealing it to be in harmony with eternity and in contact with the everlasting values in existence. Everything that is must always continue to be. Something can never become "nothing", just as nothing can never become "something".
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