Modern Life is Orc Life
Slay your inner-orc: act like an elf
Everyone loves Tolkien’s elves.
People liked Legolas so much in Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson prostituted the Hobbit trilogy to elves. Well, that and political correctness, plus perhaps a measure of lasciviousness (female elves are hot, female dwarves, not).
Regardless: Everyone loves elves.
Except Orcs
Well, orcs didn’t love elves. Far from it.
Orcs and elves were sworn enemies from the beginning. Morgoth ensnared a few of the earliest elves and tortured them to create his earliest orcs. I don’t know if he twisted the elves into orcs, meaning that the orcs are elves, just so distorted that they’re unrecognizable, or whether he took the body parts from the elves to make the orcs.
I’m thinking it’s the latter: Morgoth made orcs from elf body parts.
When it came to the brain, I imagine Morgoth only took the left hemisphere functions and put them into the orcs. That’s why orcs are decent at left-hemisphere activities but have zero capacity for right-hemisphere ones. They can fight, make crude weapons and buildings, prepare battle plans.
All activities of the left hemisphere: measuring, dividing, calculating, manipulating, and controlling.
But they have no capacity for right hemisphere functions, like empathy, holistic thinking, and beauty. To the orc, every tree, no matter how beautiful, is meant to be chopped and cut for a task.
The Elf Kills Quickly So He Can Wax Poetically
Shift back to the elves.
They are the paradigm of balance between the right hemisphere and left hemisphere approaches to the world.
They laugh, tell stories, walk through woods, long for the sea, and play music. They are, in a word, useless. They’re so dominated by their right hemispheres, they’re impractical.
Except when they’re not.
Because here’s the thing: They’re dominated by right-hemisphere functions, but they can instantaneously mobilize their left hemispheres. Elves would prefer to sit on the grass and play the lyre (literally, musing). But if an orc approaches, they put down the lyre, pick up a sword, and kill.
Their left hemispheres are fully developed, just like their right hemispheres, but their right hemispheres are in control. This allows the elf's right hemisphere to dispatch the left hemisphere to deal with practical matters as efficiently as possible, so he can return to right hemisphere pursuits.
We All Need Less Orc and More Elf
There’s a reason we love Tolkien’s elves.
Western civilization has gone to the orcs. Each of us has orc blood. Â
Modern culture is all left hemisphere all the time.
We intuitively realize it’s a problem. We intuitively realize that each of us needs to be more like the elves.
We, in other words, intuitively realize we need a stronger right hemisphere: one that will reassert its hegemony over the left.