Archetypal analysis of the Gatekeeper

“Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.” – Luke 11:52 In the theory of communication and contemporary mass media, the notion of gatekeeping has already emerged since the 1950s (White, Gieber) understood as the filter or “internal censorship” that in the world of journalism and information would be exercised towards certain contents, for ideological, political or opportunity reasons. This concept has been taken up and developed since the 90s. In the technical lexicon of communication theory today we mean the control of information that can be exercised in the coding of contents, in the dissemination, in the exclusion of the whole message or its components. Newspaper editors (bodies increasingly controlled by global private networks, pyramidal and centralized in the hands of a few decision-makers biasing the flow of news) today determine this filtering action, according to lines of censorship that are not dictated so much by the directives of governments (as in the past decades) but by private interest groups now more influential than the residual nation-states. So far nothing new. However, it is significant that a nuance of meaning has spontaneously asserted – but, evidently, vox populi, vox Dei - which unexpectedly broadens the semantic field of what the term “gatekeeper” describes. Usually today, especially in the field of independent communication linked to the Web, social media and blogs, an increasingly important sector that has become an alternative to traditional media, the gatekeeper takes on a more sinister and subtly suspicious tone

The communication connected to the main circuits of the information networks (television and journalistic publications, mostly followed by the general and adult / elderly public) defines the so-called mainstream: it is the field in which traditional gatekeeping is naturally practiced. The large field of independent information (personal blogs and websites) has offered space for alternative narratives, bypassing the censorship of the media-oriented in a pro-system key. The year 2016 was a shock because the election of Trump and the victory of the referendum on Brexit, attributed to “bad information” (fake news), undermined the control capacity that the system itself exercised through traditional media. Today, social networks and the internet have increasingly become the battlefield to censor and hinder the dissemination of crucial elements in determining the representation of social reality, which is potentially alternative and inconvenient to the global power agenda.

After all, 2020 with the electoral fraud in the US and the censorship in the false covid pandemic saw the recruitment of Big Tech and the main social media in the dome of controlled information.

However, the network, with its blogs and independent sites, with its video makers, still remains an open field, without rules, and with the possibility of circulating a large amount of content that would otherwise be censored. Here, then, is the new meaning of the figure of the Gatekeeper: in everyday language, he is the one who acts in the alternative information sector, however conveying a narrative that is only partially true, a sweetened and controlled version. A fake “alternative”, possibly very popular and accredited, to better carry out the task assigned to him which is to help create apparently alternative narratives, but substantially not uncomfortable for the dominant power, at most also misleading and useful to the system itself. This meaning, not created by academics and theorists from communication, but spontaneous and popular, is truly singular: more than the academic ones it intercepts an even “archetypal” function, which illuminates its etymological meaning even better.

The Gate-keeper in English is, literally, the “controller of the gate”, so he is finally the Guardian of the Threshold, the Obstaculator who carries out an action aimed at preventing access to awakening, to higher knowledge.

If we were to interpret user groups according to esoteric categories, and in particular according to those of Gnostic systems, the public of mainstream communication are the material men destined for damnation, the stupid, the ignorant gullible, who trust blindly because blindness is their innate (and almost “ontological”) existential condition. There is no redemption for them. The users of alternative information are already psychic, that is, those who, even within their limits, have understood the limitation of the system in which they are immersed: they are the applicants to the initiation, those for whom there is a certain degree of indeterminacy, who can still save or sink. They, their consciences, are the real battlefield, what will make the difference, because the only who can escape the deception. Because nothing but deception is the whole reality to which living beings are exposed, and therefore the world of conventional information will necessarily be equally deceptive. And conspiracy is what keeps it up. A conspiracy that, for the Gnostics, is not only political but above all “cosmic”.

The gatekeeper is therefore an agent who plays a role in this conspiracy: he is a figure who by analogy also has the traits of the Trickster, that lesser god or intermediate entity, which the historians of religions define as a “deceiver”.

As L. Hyde writes (Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, 2010): “Each community has its own boundaries, its own sense of outside and inside, and the impostor (“trickster”) is always there at the gates of the city or at the gates of life...”

And here this deceiver is precisely on the threshold. Those who do so play a crucial role in the Conspiracy (cosmic or political) because their action intercepts those who are animated by the desire for awakening, by the Nostalgia of the Origins, those who aspire to the Exodus beyond the Red Sea of ​​Disinformation. This archetypal function, in the narrative universe of the famous Matrix filmography, is played by the Oracle, a character who is only initially “alternative”, only to turn out to be almost as old as the Architect, towards whom he cyclically directs the Chosen of each generation of Matrix.

This is therefore an essential function for perpetuating the cosmic deception, intercepting as many souls as fall under its feigned evolutionary and revealing action. On the other hand, it is on the numbers and on the critical weight of those who escape their meshes that the duration or closure of a “System” or an historical-political cycle will be determined, at the end of which, for the many, the maximum possibility of escape from the Scheme. In this great cosmic-political analogy, those who consciously assume this function, take on an enormous karmic weight: if, on the one hand, this function is inevitable - being part of the cosmological order that governs the world of manifestation - on the other hand, those who fulfill this thankless, misleading and anti-spiritual task, take on a very great weight, which damns up to the collapse of the System or Cycle... For them, the evangelical warning we have mentioned applies: they will be cursed because they are those who, standing on the threshold of truth, concealed the keys. They did not want to enter and prevented many who wanted to do so.

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Original column by Matteo Martini:

https://www.poliphylia.com/analisi-archetipica-del-gatekeeper/

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo