THREAD: What’s wrong with Harry Potter?

The first problem is the sharp division of humanity into the elite and the muggles. Some of the elite care for muggles and some do not, but the muggles are a pretty ignorant lot either way.

You can’t move up from muggle to elite. Either you are magical or you are not. Muggles don’t really matter.

How do you know if you are elite? You get accepted to a special school.

In the real world, Potter devotees either try get accepted to these special schools. Or if they can’t, they at least affect the views of the experts at these special schools.

If you don’t have the right views, you are forever a muggle.

Having the right views and doing the right things gets you accepted into the Ministry of Magic—basically a government job. That’s the only place where you can make a true difference.

You become a member of the managerial elite.

In the real world, you can tell the Harry Potter-ites by the way they act:

-They are clique-ish. If you haven’t been to Hogwarts, your opinion doesn’t matter

-They value peer review studies, papers by Hogwarts professors, they often deify Science

Compare this with the view in Lord of the Rings. In LoTR, there are elites, but the only person who has the qualifications to accomplish the mission is the middle class guy with no credentials—Frodo.

Gandalf and Aragorn don’t look down upon the Hobbits. They accept them as equal members of the Fellowship.

Your place in the fellowship is not based on something you did in the past but what you can do now.

Harry Potter characters also lack magnanimity. Harry is touchy and unpleasant. Hermione is an insufferable know-it-all. Ron is just kind of a screw up.

There is heroism but the overall theme is smug mediocrity.

Again, compare this to LoTR. The members of the Fellowship often risk their lives for the other members. They carry on their mission at great personal risk with no hope of glory.

Indeed, none of them expects to survive.

There are other issues but they are stated more clearly by Roger Scruton