Occlumency VERY VERY LONG

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 191748

 
> Alla:
> 
> You mean he should have thought about the ways of finding help and coming back to battle like Slugghorn? Thats one possibility, for sure.
> But mostly what I think Harry could have thought of about if Dumbledore did not mess up with his head was to at least think about how incredibly crazy some of old coot's instructions sounded. Three kids fighting Voldemort? Well, when they are seventeen, I sure do not think it is that crazy when they are *among the fighters" against Voldemort. But when Dumbledore makes them to do it alone, do I think it is crazy? 
You bet I do, crazy, evil and all kinds of things. Maybe if Dumbledore did not mess up with his head, Harry would have stopped and think about why is it Okay to tell Hermione and Ron about horcruxes, but not Lupin who is an experienced fighter since the first war? 

Pippin:
Alla,  when did Harry have to be brainwashed to get him to act without thinking? 

Harry expanded his instructions to "Dumbledore didn't want anyone else to know", (DH 6) and that suited Harry just fine because Harry wanted to be the only one who risked himself against Voldemort. You'll remember he didn't even want to cooperate with the seven Potters plan, though if he hadn't he would certainly have been killed. 

But, at the risk of agreeing with Otto, ;) the story is not about the best way to destroy a horcrux. It is about what  weak, seemingly insignificant people can accomplish with courage, stealth, ingenuity and loyalty, in short with the virtues of all four Houses. 

Alla:
> 
> But of course again I know in what genre JKR was writing about and three kids going on suicidal mission and winning looks attractive, but I am convinced that it makes Dumbledore to look terrible.
> 

Pippin: 

Humans and chimpanzees share a behavior called raiding. A small party, usually all males, will venture stealthily from their home territory into the territory of a neighboring group and attack isolated members of it. In the chimpanzee's case, they don't seem to recognize the neighboring animals as fellow chimpanzees, even when they've been friendly in the past. Instead they are hunted and killed like prey. And if all the neighboring males can be killed, the surviving females are absorbed into the original group. 

I'm sure there's  a PhD thesis waiting for the scholar who can link this to the Hero's Journey. But seems to me there could be a reason we all feel, somehow, that we were born to go out into the dark places, kill a monster, and bring back a prize. 

Harry, being a modern hero,  chose not to see his   enemies as monsters, even if they  saw him as one. 

And as part of that, Harry had to learn that being a hero wasn't about winning. It was about giving things up.

 
> Alla:
> 
> Hm, may his not wanting to be a Slytherin has something to do with his upbringing at Dursleys?

Pippin:
The test of an explanation is whether it would help you to predict the event in advance. 

Many people predicted that Harry's upbringing at the Dursleys would make him permanently bitter and angry, even evil -- this seemed to be happening in OOP. 

It follows that the overall effect of the Dursleys on Harry was simply not knowable in advance, and Dumbledore would have been very foolish to think otherwise. There is no canon that he did, only that he regarded treating a child as a "pampered prince" as equally damaging or even more so. 

Knowing that a child is subject to abuse allows you to predict he will be damaged -- that's what abuse means. But Dumbledore couldn't predict how the child was going to deal with the damage. There were  many factors involved which no one (except JKR) could control. 

Pippin