No More Heroes
About that saving the world thing…
Wouldn’t it be amazing if heroes were real? Supervillains sure are real. But what about heroes? Because it would definitely be kind of nice if Superman could show up right now and take care of Lex Luthor. Or if Marty McFly could hurry up and go back in time to put Biff Tannen back in his place.
Everything about this moment we are living in feels to too big to solve. Climate change, global poverty, the collapse of American democracy; it all feels too big. And I hesitate to admit that because I have just about every advantage there is to work with: access to a computer, spare time, income security, and a spouse who takes care of, well, pretty much everything. And I’m also pretty far from the harm at the moment. And yet it all still feels so immeasurably unsolvable. So yeah, part of me would happily take a hero right now, a Captain America to punch Hitler while everyone watches.
Except we mustn’t. Because the hero many of us seek at times like this is actually the supervillain in disguise. The very idea of heroes, that is, at least as we understand them in western culture. Hero culture is what leads to Adolf Hitler. Hero culture is what leads to Elon Musk.
I’ve spent a lot of my life immersed in popular hero culture. I’ve collected comic books since I was in middle school. I own every James Bond movie. I am also a life-long fan of Star Trek. As a boy, I believed that everything I saw in Gene Roddenbury’s world was both achievable and desirable. I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up — not just an astronaut a commander, a captain — a hero just like James T. Kirk. In the proper position and with the proper training, I imagined I could help humanity reach this future, one in which all of our problems, from hunger to poverty to racism, have been solved.
The craving for heroes is so relatable and so ubiquitous that you might even make the mistake of thinking it is part of our human nature. But it is not; the hero archetype is a recent human creation, only a few thousand years old, which is a merely a blink in the long history of humanity.
Rather, the origin of our modern hero ideal is a story told in thee acts. The first act, call it the prequel, is our species’ deep evolutionary inclination toward cooperation and altruism. The second act is the much more recent, but false, Judeo-Christian notion that humans are fallen and fundamentally flawed beings. And the third act is the modernist notion that despite our inherent failings, humans are still capable of controlling everything, at least if we only can gather sufficient knowledge to do so.
So we yearn for heroes to achieve what we know can be accomplished but do not believe we can accomplish ourselves.
Like the Ancient Greek Panthenon, we have heroes modeled after just about every notion out there about the nature of justice and how we change the world. Batman for vengeance. Captain America and Superman for pairing strength with ideals. Spiderman for optimism, Wonder Woman for feminism. Black Panther for anti-fascism. Ironman and Reed Richards for technology and science.
To put it another way, heroes aren’t people so much as they are theories of change. And they are very narrow theories of change at that. Heroes are the belief that the character of the world we live in must be set, and will always be set, by a handful of uniquely endowed individuals.
We call these individuals “Great Men,” and tell stories about how through their epic deeds they ushered in new ages of security and technological progress. Jefferson, Patton, Ford. While these were no doubt amazing humans with amazing stories, we are learning the relationship between them and the world we live in backwards. We think our world is a feature of their actions, when their actions are in fact merely a feature in our collective histories.
Today there are passionate fandoms for the leaders that many think might be the next hero. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and yes, Elon Musk. Again, all white men. These “thought leaders” capture our attention, but their achievements are not their own; their works are the results of the teams that they mobilized and the cultural moments upon which they capitalized. Does anyone really believe that we would not have smartphones if not for Steve Jobs, or electric cars if not for Elon Musk? Elon Musk is successful not because he’s the world’s leading engineer or innovator, but because he is rich and ruthless and, for a time at least, was pretty good at acting the hero.
When I left my life in IT and moved into science, I did it to become a hero. I would tell anyone that would listen that I was there to save the world. That I would go on my journey, fight my trials, and emerge from the cave with the special knowledge everyone needs.
How utterly crass this was, in hindsight. The entire story was about me, about what I would learn, about what I could do to solve other people’s problems.
Fortunately along the way I met a couple of mentors who helped me see that you cannot really solve problems that way. They helped me recognize that wanting to save the world, and believing that you are the one person uniquely endowed to do so, is the very essence of white supremacy.
Needless to say, a lot of very bad things have been done by white folk in the name of “saving” people.
So I guess I was transformed, in a sense. I entered my cave aspiring to be called a hero, I exited determined to be considered an ally.
Post-heroic world saving
Giving up the hero complex and giving up responsibility are not the same thing. And the more I look back upon the heroes I admired in my youth, the more I see that they were not acting alone. Captain Kirk and Picard both had teams, diverse teams that didn’t always see eye to eye, but who, collectively, were stronger than they were as individuals.
And yet, the hero ideal is difficult to shed. Who are we, and how do we contribute, if not as heroes? Well, our western culture is not the only one with hero stories. Indigenous cultures have hero stories, too, they just work a bit differently. Let me tell you about one example.
In Athabascan culture there is a tale about a girl who stayed with the fish. Now, it’s not my story to tell, so I encourage you to seek it out. But as counseled by one of my mentors Ray Barnhardt, I can tell you what I learned from it when he encouraged me to seek it out. It is a reincarnation story about a girl who falls into the river and transforms into a salmon. She lives an entire lifetime with the fish, hearing other salmon talk of how they want humans to treat them. Eventually, she returns to her people and relates how the salmon wished to be treated. Her people take these observations and wishes seriously, and collectively adapt their practices in ways that, through respect and reciprocity, empower both the people and the fish to live for generations in that place on the river.
At first it reads like a prototypical western hero’s journey: the girl leaves, is transformed, and returns with knowledge essential for the survival of her people. But in this story, it is not the girl that saves her people, it is the knowledge, knowledge that is used by all to live in a more respectful and sustainable way. The ‘saving’ happens not because of an individual feat of skill or strength or virtue, but because everyone’s actions are aligned with a set of shared values and vision.
And this next part is important: the people and their knowledge are not transformed by the girl in the story, but by the person telling the story. Just like how it wasn’t actually Captain America that was punching Hitler, it was Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who drew the image and put it on the cover of their comic book a full year before the US entered the war.
Two Jewish artists from New York, both children of poor immigrant families, punched Hitler for everyone to see. And it created a wave of debate that arguably helped shift sentiment against the Nazi regime.
We don’t need heroes who solve our problems for us, in the way that they see fit. We need a legion of people empowered to work together to solve problems on their own terms. Sure, there are often people who are catalysts, who give us the nudge we need. Like how Simon and Kirby let people know it was OK to be publicly incensed by what the Nazis were doing in Europe.
I mentioned earlier that not all modern heroes are embodiments of this problematic archetype. Two in particular come to mind: Black Panther and Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman’s origins are deep in feminism; notice how she fights and leads as an equal to Superman despite being hypersexualized on the page by the male gaze. And in recent years, a new generation of writers have used Wonder Woman and her expanded mythology to tell stories that explore the power of sisterhood and queerness.
Black Panther, likewise, has deeply anti-fascist and Afrofuturist elements. The setting seems characteristically antidemocratic, just as the costumes and posing of Wonder Woman seem counter to feminism. Wakandans live under a monarchy and are isolated from the world in a society with no apparent racial diversity and with an economy that isheavily dependent on minerals mining. But this is the point, that even things we think of as the hallmarks of oppression and exploitation — monarchy, bloodlines, tribalism — can be radically reimagined as venues for equity and solidarity and freedom if you first peel away the structures of supremacy that spoil their potential.
Wakanda isn’t strong because of Black Panther. Black Panther is strong because of Wakanda.
Give up heroes is extremely liberating, because it means that there is no secret knowledge or power that we need to acquire before taking action. Sure, there are things as scientists that we don’t understand and want to, and cleaner technologies that we’d like to develop. But we don’t have to wait. We already know everything we need to know to start living more sustainably. We know how to adjust our own behavior, and more importantly, we know where the lions share of our problems come from.
They come from extractive industries, from corrupt governments, and from food systems that could do much more to regenerate rather than degrade our ecosystems and biodiversity. We all already have the power to disrupt these. By treating people different, by acting different ourselves, and by imagining and demanding better.
Instead of trying to be like Tony Stark we all just need to act a bit more like our truest, kindest selves. To bring whatever it is that we can to the table, our own super power. Because saving the world doesn’t happen in a show of strength or technological marvel, but through compassion and conviction to hold other people up so that they, too, can thrive and lead.
Author’s Note: This essay is an updated adaptation of my TEDx talk, “No More Heroes.” Circumstances have changed a bit since I gave that talk and I felt compelled to make some updates.
