Hero Worship and its Discontents

We live in a society that worships heroes - athletes, movie stars, politicians. Many of us also get spiritually ga-ga over social activists like Che Guevera and Cesar Chavez and religious all-stars like Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama. [Once during a psychology class in high school, the teacher asked everyone to write down on a piece of paper the name of a person they idolized and turn it in. The teacher wrote everyone's idol down on the chalkboard (mine was John Lennon). She asked if anybody noticed what all of these heroes had in common. Nobody could figure it out and she finally told us what it was - they were all men! I guess my feminist consciousness meter was dreadfully low at age 16.]

This practice of hero worship seems to be common in old patriarchal cultures like ours with roots in Greek and Roman civilizations. It's also commensurate with our culture's emphasis on individual over communal development. It's the American way - we reify a myth that great people achieve great things all by themselves. They use their wits, their fearlessness and strength to do what the rest of us dim, scared, weak people can't.

This obvious fallacy overlooks the fact that extraordinary people are nested in a web of connections to people and processes. These great men have wives and secretaries. These social activists have rank and file members doing the organizing grunt work. Religious leaders have their own mentors as well as congregants who support their spiritual practice. Michael Jordan would not be a basketball hero if nobody had watched his games. Rich people get rich because there are poor people to help them get rich (that's Marxism 101). Unfortunately, this hero worship can be frustrating and destructive as we struggle and wonder why we can't do it alone. It distracts us from how things really operate in the world.

But, we are drawn to people with special, charismatic energy and their stories. These stories can obviously be fulfilling and inspiring in some way. One of my favorite literary genres has always been autobiography/memoir. I love to read about exceptional things that people do, the challenges they face and the victories they achieve in spite of them. I crave the words that speak of the wisdom they attain along the way. But inevitably, writ deeply in these memoirs, is the insight that they didn't do it alone, that so many other people really made it happen. They always thank their mother and father.