Steve Jobs has now achieved a state of apple-theosis. For those who didn't attend Sunday school, an apotheosis is the exaltation of a person to divine status. It's justified as Jobs lived an amazing life, and has bequeathed us with a number of remarkable life lessons; he offers hope and promise for any entrepreneur, scientist, or creative artist wanting to put a ding in the universe of their own.
The place to start is Jobs' record of concrete achievements; his accomplishments are arguably unrivaled in the modern history of innovation, with the successful creation of four world-altering product visions and associated industries—personal computing through the Apple II and the Macintosh, the music industry through the iPod, telephony through the iPhone, and the emerging tablet computing industry via the iPad. And for dessert, animated film. But equally important is how he, for decades, fueled a sense of optimism about the future of the American economy. He will now be remembered as an equal of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, the quintessential 21st-century American entrepreneur.
Jobs as Archetype
It's clear now that Steve Jobs wasn't just an entrepreneur; Steve Jobs was really the embodiment of an archetype. Archetypes are symbols that form part of the "collective unconscious," globally understood symbols or patterns of behavior that provide a definitive model of human motivation and existential meaning. Apple was quite clever in how it positioned Jobs as The Magician—a master of intuition, action, and creation—who like the Wizard of Oz, emerged from behind the curtain with "oh, just one more thing." The magician uses esoteric knowledge to bring about transformation and to bring new things into existence. But the elemental Steve Jobs was actually the Trickster, a Jungian archetype, also known as Coyote, Kokopelli, the Monkey King, Kitsune (Fox Spirit), Hanuman (the demi-god who disobeys normal rules and convention). The usurper. The revolutionary. The patron saint of rebellion.
The Appletheosis of Steve Jobs
The Trickster openly questions and mocks authority, encourages impulse and enthusiasm, seeks out new ideas and experiences, destroys convention and complacency, and promotes chaos and unrest. At the same time, the Trickster brings deep knowledge and
wisdom to his people. Even when punished horribly for his effrontery, his indomitable spirit keeps him coming back for more.
The Trickster rebels against authority, pokes fun at the overly serious, creates convoluted schemes, that may or may not work, plays recklessly with the laws of the universe and is sometimes his own worst enemy. He exists to question, to cause us to question, and not to accept things blindly. He appears when a way of thinking becomes outmoded, needs to be torn down, cries to be built anew. He is the Destroyer of Worlds, and at the same time, the savior of all.
If we were Native Americans, we'd be creating an oral tradition about Steve Jobs: "Coyote Jobs took up a handful of mud and made the iPhone out of it. It felt alone, so he made the iPad to keep it company. How he did this, no one can imagine."
Jobs was faithful to the Trickster archetype, down to its dark side. The Trickster is known to act maliciously, for example, like the Norse god Loki, however, to a positive conclusion. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful, petulant, lacking the gene that enables us to revere human dignity, Jobs belittled people, swore at them, and pressured them until they reached their breaking point.
Once this period of reverence has passed, expect to see the tell-all's about the bullying, manipulation, and fear that trailed after his personal reality distortion field.
Often, the Trickster's rule-breaking takes the form of thievery. It started in the spare time of youth, hacking the phone system to rip off Ma Bell. Later, like Prometheus who stole fire from the gods to give to humans, Jobs ascended Xerox Parc to steal the idea of the mouse. And like Prometheus, he gave up his liver for it.
The Great Rebellion
Think about it: What is the most rebellious act recorded in the mythology of humankind? In the Garden of Eden, Eve bit into the first apple, defying God's commandment never to taste the tree of knowledge. The consequences of this rebellion are also automatically connected to the archetypal apple—such as nakedness, sex for pleasure, sin, you know, the fun stuff. This cathexis is churning at a subconscious level in the minds of potential Apple consumers. Whenever we see an Apple logo, we subconsciously hook into this primordial rebellion and delicious mischief.
If this was the first Apple, then the apple that dropped on Isaac Newton's head—the one that launched the scientific revolution—was the second Apple. Envisioning the moon as a giant apple, Newton developed the idea of how gravity works with an irrefutable mathematical definition of the elliptical orbits of the planets, putting the final end to the Catholic Church's effort to enforce Ptolemy's theory of a geocentric universe on divine principles. This prohibition lasted through Galileo's time, when Galileo was forced to face the full Holy Inquisition even though he was ill and 70-years-old, threatened with torture and a charge of heresy for defending the Copernican view of the solar system. So, on June 22, 1633 he knelt before his Inquisitors in the Great Hall of the convent of Santa Maria Minerva and recanted. Broken by the Inquisition, he went blind a few years later (especially difficult for the inventor of the telescope), and died under continuous house arrest by the Vatican. So, when it was finally proven that the Earth was not the center of the universe by Newton, this launched the second greatest rebellion in the history of mankind—the scientific revolution that led to the industrial age.
(There is some symbolic meaning here: Isaac Newton was born the same year that Galileo died, 1642.)
Innovation as Rebellion
This brings us to the third Apple, which was the tipping point of the Information Revolution. If you look at the meaning of Apple's logo, assessed at an archetypal level, everything becomes crystal clear. It is through this symbolism, that Apple reflects its rebellious nature, as a company, as a culture, and in the products it produces. Through its advertising, Apple has presented the ideal of being different and rebelling against conventional wisdom.
The Apple 1984 Commercial
To understand the meaning of Steve Jobs, go back to 1984, when Apple released the commercial "1984," introducing the Apple Macintosh personal computer. The commercial used an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh—as indicated by her white tank top with a cubist image of Apple's Macintosh computer on it. It was a means of saving humanity from
conformity, aka Big Brother.
It is now considered a watershed event and a masterpiece in advertising. However, Apple's board of directors hated the commercial and ordered Jobs to kill the ad. He tried to do so, but Apple couldn't sell off one of the 60-second spots it had already purchased, so the ad had to run once but never again. The rest is history.
What's meaningful is the back story. Even within Apple, the powers of conformity restrained Jobs from success. In hindsight, he needed John Sculley to oust him, and bring the company to the brink of bankruptcy, for Jobs to remove the deeply embedded forces that resisted his vision. Cleaning house after his return, he was able to rebuild a new Apple that could execute his vision.
Note: This is the first part of series titled, "Unleashing Your Inner Steve Jobs." If you can't wait to read it all, just send me a note and I'll email you a PDF of the entire series. Or you can click below to go to the next part of the series.
Go to Part I...
