There's a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."
Key points (most of them found under the subheading "Emulating the Enemy"):
1.) The paranoid's thinking is apocalyptic ("he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values").
2.) His thinking is millenarian ("he is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point").
3.) He thinks he's one of the few who can see the real threat and its real magnitude.
4.) His worldview is black and white ("what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil...the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable [and] must be totally eliminated").
5.) He is "obsessed with inerrable prophecies."
Folks, this is fantasy literature. This is the boilerplate fantasy narrative. It's the first "Star Wars." It's "Lord of the Rings." It's Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising." You bet it's "Harry Potter."
Many fantasy authors, in other words, have created paranoid scenarios. They've created worlds in which everything really *is* at stake, the enemy really *is* "totally evil and totally unappeasable," the battle really *is* a battle "between absolute good and absolute evil," and the enemy really *must* be "totally eliminated--if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention." No one but the small band of heroes can see the real danger. Either they operate in isolation, or the masses have willfully blinded themselves, and their leaders would rather destroy the heroes than have the fragile illusion of safety be shattered. Inerrable (if sometimes hard-to-decipher) prophecies are at the heart.
Fiction is, famously, "the lie that tells the truth." But why does so much fantasy literature use this lie? Especially when this lie is responsible for 90% of the suffering in the world? Is our fantasy literature *wrestling* with this lie, trying to make it come out all right somehow, trying to find terms under which this lie will heal rather than harm? Or is it actively giving in to the lie and indulging a wish that the lie would be true?
A lot of people who read Tolkien appear to love the paranoid lie and to read Tolkien as validation of it. This essay by Gene Wolfe, for example, truly scares me with its romanticization of what I consider to be the worst aspects of the Dark Ages ("they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms," aka everybody knew their place). For contrast, read this pro-modern, pro-enlightenment objection to Tolkien's worldview by the British journalist Johann Hari.
Where does that leave people who love fantasy but don't love paranoia? Ursula K. LeGuin, an enlightened and anti-paranoid thinker, put an entire tortured Jungian interpretation onto Tolkien (the bad guys are the "shadows" of the good, so the good aren't really that simplistic after all) in order to rescue Tolkien from having written what she instinctively understood to be a paranoid narrative.
Other solutions are more direct. Aragorn and Legolas are a favorite pair among people who write and read slash fiction online. Somebody somewhere is imagining those two getting up to no good, which gives me immense hope for the future. (I'm serious.)
And then there are the texts themselves, which can surprise us if we let them. Tolkien may be beloved by a lot of incipient fascists, but in *some* ways, they're reading him wrong--Frodo's story is actually pretty subversive. Hobbits should be a fascist's worst nightmare, being plump, cheery, nonaggressive, and deeply attached to creature comforts. And Frodo is diminished rather than exalted by his triumph--which, of course, isn't a triumph at all. Frodo actually fails. It's important to remember that. (I had an essay in Aoife's Kiss about Frodo called "Frodo and Achilles.")
But at the end of the day, the Problem of Sauron (and Voldemort and on and on) remains. The inhuman enemy. The absolute danger. The necessity of total war. What entertains us is literally what kills us. Is that actually healthy? Is it sad? I don't know. I really don't.
