Harry Potter Would Hate You

We're becoming a culture that praises villains, not heroes.

I’ve been seeking a reprieve from the ugly sides of our world lately and I found it in Hogwarts Wizarding School of Magic.

Even though Harry Potter’s world isn’t utopian, the whimsy of magic and the drama of a battle between good and evil helped wash away the ugly banality of the real world’s problems. There was one problem I couldn’t find a reprieve from, though. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry encounters a problem I’m all too familiar with and that lives at the core of many societal issues. At this point in the series, Harry’s known for his infamous past as a child who survived a direct attack from the embodiment of evil, Voldemort, and his battles against evil and chaos conquering Hogwarts. And yet, even Harry Potter in a world of elves and flying brooms can’t escape the ever-present human problem of conformity.

Watching Harry Potter struggle to overcome other people’s desire for conformity and disdain for anyone who threatens it made me realize: many people cheering this fictional protagonist on would fight against him in real life.

Despite having proven his loyalty, courage, and inclination to fight against evil, Harry Potter’s warning that Voldemort has returned is met with annoyance and disbelief from everyone but his close friends and the embodiment of wisdom, Dumbledore. This problem introduces a crucial element of what causes a lot of today’s destructive conformity: motivated reasoning. Similar to confirmation bias, motivated reasoning happens when someone is motivated to either agree or disagree with new information based on their current beliefs, thus letting that motivation shape their response more than whether the information is true.

You often hear people lament how, despite having access to all the information in the world, it seems like people are getting dumber. A big part of why access to information alone doesn’t reduce ignorance is because of motivated reasoning. People today are inclined to fight against information that challenges their worldview, often because it’s just easier than updating it.

It would be easier for his peers and the authorities if Harry Potter was wrong about danger on the horizon, so they decide to believe he’s wrong, regardless of whether he’s wrong. They deride and dismiss him with accusations I’ve faced myself when sharing inconvenient truths; his classmates scoff “he just wants to be famous!”, which our culture has shortened to “grifter!” Harry Potter—the infamous beacon of hope and repeated warrior for good over evil—is accused of grifting by his own classmates simply because it’d be easier if that were true. Unfortunately for them, it’s not. 

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is a masterpiece for many reasons, but one reason is that her characters and the stories they live out are so real despite happening in such a surreal world. Watching the scene where Harry Potter tries to warn people about a problem he’s proven himself trustworthy and competent to assess—only to be shouted down by people who want the easy route today at the risk of hardship tomorrow—felt uncomfortably real.

I criticized the manipulative pressure activists used to make people pledge allegiance to BLM without researching the organization (which turned out to be corrupt) or the movement itself (which turned out to be a guise for spreading destructive ideas in the name of “anti-racism”). When I speak about that today, I’m praised. But then the Israel attack on October 7th happened and suddenly the same message against letting social pressure rush you to pledge allegiance to positions you don’t understand now got me derided for not “using my platform” properly. The pattern repeats.

You can be the same person with the same message, but other people will respond to you differently based on where the winds of culture have blown them this week.

Unprincipled people are constantly shifting their targets because their worldviews aren’t tethered to anything deeper than seeking social approval and avoiding cognitive dissonance. They will wish death on you for not posting a flag emoji while claiming to hold the moral high ground.

Unprincipled people believe their frantic rushing from Current Thing to Current Thing is proof of their moral character, but it’s actually proof of how unreliable the opinions of anyone but your close friends and personal Dumbledores can be. Just look at J.K. Rowling’s experience. 

While the fact that people with Harry Potter tattoos were the quickest to turn on the creator of their favorite story simply because her opinions didn’t sway with the ever-changing winds of culture (she maintains the once-uncontested reality that trans-women are trans-women and biological women are biological women), that’s only one example of a conformist culture that hates heroes. Harry Potter himself is the perfect litmus test for whether we have a culture that praises heroes or villains.

Forget about Harry’s magic abilities. What truly makes Harry Potter a magical character isn’t his ability to wield magic, which most of the magic world can do—it’s his character that makes him stand apart from all others. If Harry Potter were a real, non-magical person in our society today, his unusually strong character would make him a pariah. Unlike most of the magical world’s people, Harry Potter is pursuing a goal far bigger than himself; this makes him the target of both disgruntled plebs and power-hungry tyrants. People who don’t have a strong and honorable mission in life hate seeing people who do—it either reminds them they’re wasting their lives or threatens their ability to fulfill their evil mission. A lot of arm-chair internet activists and government officials would hate Harry Potter. 

It’s not just that Harry has a unique destiny that makes his character compelling—it’s the fact that he has the courage and determination to pursue that destiny and develop the necessary skills to do so that makes his character admirable. Every person—especially in an individualistic culture that valorizes people who make their own way in life—wants to feel like they have a unique life path that leads to greatness. Luckily for those living in a free society, they do. Unlike in centrally-planned economies like Cuba and China, where your destiny is mostly determined by what your government allows, people in free countries can determine the course of their lives.

The government doesn’t dictate what you can study, what businesses you can open, how many kids you can have, or how much money you’re allowed to make. We’re free to imagine a future for ourselves and set out to develop the skills needed to achieve it. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone will.

Businesses fail, personal tragedies happen, and obstacles appear. The people who give up on their journey or never get going but believe they could’ve done otherwise harbor regrets, and those regrets easily turn to resentment. These are the bitter people who see the hope and success of others as a stinging reminder of their failures. People who’ve given up or never tried to forge the future they wanted would hate some as determined and ambitious as Harry Potter.

Despite being an orphan, a victim of neglect by his step-family, stalked by a violent gang of death-eaters working for Voldemort, and a childhood victim of assault, Harry Potter doesn’t wear the label of victim.

In a culture like ours that sees victimhood as a hierarchy that dictates your treatment, an individual who refuses to identify as a victim is inherently subversive.

Instead of demanding special treatment because of his hardships, Harry Potter strives not just to overcome them, but uses his hardships as fuel to make him stronger than he would be without them. One might argue it would’ve been better if Harry Potter’s parents were never killed by Voldemort and thus he would’ve never been fated to fight him—and if your idea of a good life is ease and subsistence, that would be true—but your life would make a terrible story. Harry Potter’s victimization by Voldemort’s evil is what imbued him with the ability to become a hero. With darkness comes light, but in a culture that doesn’t believe in light, many people linger in the dark and resent anyone who reminds them their darkness is a choice.

Harry Potter is the archetypical hero. He pursues a mission that starts with his personal journey of understanding himself and helping those close to him, which leads him to help the world. He goes above and beyond what others do to become worthy of the future he wants. He never identifies with the many ways he’s been victimized, but instead transmutes his hardships into victories. And for all these heroic qualities, Harry Potter would be maligned by our culture as privileged, “alt-right,” and much like his creator has experienced, his efforts to do good would be met with hostility and accusations of grifting from people who care more about the ease of clinging to their worldview than discovering the truth. 

Entire countries end up on the wrong side of history when they stop cheering for heroes.