Eric Cartman – The evil genius you pitied at least once
Hey everyone, in today’s story time we’re taking a break from books and turning to the world of South Park, which left those who watched at least one episode with strong feelings and attitude. Be those feelings closer to love or those closer to hate we have to admit there are some strong messages being sent in almost every episode of this popular show.
Tonight we will be taking a look at one of the core components of the show – Eric Cartman.
We will be looking at Eric on the Maslow’s Pyramid of Hierarchy of Needs.
As South Park after all is a cartoon, we can hardly say anything about Eric’s physiological needs, since there is no point in a cartoon giving any importance to physiological needs. However, in this specific case ,concerning food, by observing Cartman’s fondness of Pot Pie and Cheesy Poofs and knowing he has a house to live in, we can conclude that as far as for the lowest bar of the pyramid Cartman is safe.
But what about the next step? As for the safety needs (personal security, employment, resources, health, property) we can say that Eric is a quite adroit (Crack Baby Basketball). We can see Cartman on a manager position more than a few times. It is not quite clear how he gets to that rank, but I suppose it is through presenting himself very authoritative, primarily through his deeds. (by doing what he did to Scott Tannerman for instance).
The third step of the pyramid is what we are really interested in. Love and belonging (friendship, intimacy, family, sense of connection). Nothing from this list is akin to Cartman’s state or lifestyle. He has no true friends. Stan, Kyle and Kenny are his friends, but it is clear that this is not a kind of friendship based on true values. Butters is often in the role of Eric’s best friend, but Butters being really naïve can’t be counted in, he is manipulated too easily. As for family, Cartman only has mom, who seems not to show any particular interest in raising a child properly (wanted to abort him in his 8th year of life), and as a conclusion of the two-episode long “Who is the father of Eric Cartman” question we only conclude that the father is, ironically, his mother. Cartman doesn’t have any sense of connection based on real values either (sympathy with Nazism cannot be counted in here).
As we move towards the top of the pyramid, we see signs of self-actualization, though not enforced in situations that do have real-life value. We can claim that Cartman both has a lot of self-esteem and has none. However, looking long-term, we could say that his unstableness springs from his lack of self-esteem.
Therefore, we conclude that when it comes to real human values, Cartman has almost none of the traits which make a reasonable human with developed sense of compassion (He actually never showed real compassion, but pretended a lot of time having other goals in mind). We can only say he achieved something on the bars of the pyramid common to all animals. However, we cannot claim Cartman is an animal, because Parker and Stone created a character whose intelligence is hard to compete with and that is exactly what is important to balance out the core of the show. Cartman served as a foundation for many moral lessons which can be extracted by carefully thinking through the irony which makes us laugh even in the hardest of times.
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