Why I Don’t Need Heroes
Or Myths and Fables
Rock stars, national heroes, religious leaders, sports stars, biblical characters, movie stars, politicians, the list of available heroes is endless. Many if not most people seem to need a hero.
Why?
I’m not sure. I have noticed, however, that a hero is rarely someone we’re close to, live with, or even depend upon. That would be too hard. Familiarity tends to breed contempt with greater ease than admiration from afar. Thus, the famous saying. We see all the little imperfections, every pore on the nose, the foibles, and eccentricities of those we know well. It’s hard to make a hero out of someone who irritates you on a regular basis.
There’s a strange yet predictable reaction to those who do the most for us as well.
Rather than putting them on a pedestal, we often take them for granted instead. Appreciation seems to dwindle according to how much we depend on another person. You know the old storyline about the one sibling that stayed to take care of the aging parent while the other siblings went far away to either find their fortunes or sow their wild oats. Who did the aging parent seem to admire the most?
You guessed it, the one who did next to nothing for them.
Yeah, there’s even a Bible story to that effect. It’s the story of the prodigal son. As the story goes, he left home and partied for a spell while the faithful son stayed home and took care of family business, adhering conscientiously to the values his father had taught him. But when the prodigal son decided to return home, I suspect he was broke, good old dad threw a big celebration. He was elated. It hurt the faithful son’s feelings. He even asked his father why he’d never thrown a big party for him.
The answer was unsatisfactory in my opinion.
Suffice it to say, good old dad had grown accustomed to the faithful son and took him completely for granted. I suspect he even held a higher standard for that son’s behavior than he did for lots of other people including the wayward son. This seems to be a predictable psychological response produced by our strange and faulty brains.
Our actions don’t often make sense. We are one big contradictory mess making successful relationships very difficult.
Yet, we still need heroes, people who are influencers in our mundane lives. Some of these heroes go on to be the center of entire cultures. Myths are built around their memories until the memories become distorted, nothing more than lies. Truth is written out of history books and strangely missing from folklore. We don’t want a hero that looks like us or even worse acts like those we live with or hang out with on a regular basis.
What’s so great about reality?
We need heroes that are stronger, smarter, richer, and better looking, with a few special powers thrown in to top things off.
Mother Teresa, Gandhi, our glorious founding fathers, Jesus, Abraham, the Buddha, Bernie Sanders, Reagan, Donald Trump, and Jim Jones. Quite a contrast in that short list, but all these people have followers who worship the ground they walk on. They see them in the pale light of storytelling and swoon.
Heroes are expected to inspire even save us.
People put so much faith in their heroes that they give up a measure of personal responsibility, hoping their heroes will fight the fight for them. Down the road, a truth seeker of one sort or another unearths a few choice bits of dirt about a hero and exposes their tender underbellies to their followers. Ugh! The reaction isn’t very promising. Truth doesn’t set people free. It offends people. It makes them mad. It threatens their worldview.
Truth is the boogeyman.
Thirteen of our former presidents owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson had children by at least one slave, Sally Hemings. According to Madison Hemings, her son by Jefferson, Sally was the half-sister of Martha Jefferson. That’s right! Jefferson was merely acting out an impulse that was encouraged by his culture. White, male privilege was a multigenerational belief system. To this day, we idolize Jefferson despite his appalling behavior because he was a rich, white male. If he had been a black male or a woman, the story told might be quite different.
Heroes get by with stuff that the rest of us might not easily manage to do — with their good names intact.
History often paints people as either villains or heroes. There are numerous things that are removed from historical accounts, however. To remain a hero requires the storytellers to sanitize the story. If a person is to rise to the status of a hero or a god, everyone must commit to immortalizing them.
We remember what we’re allowed to remember.
It’s very easy for humans to rely on gods and heroes to define their purpose in life. It’s so much harder to define your own values and work to fulfill your own dreams.
When I was a little girl, I asked my mom why girls weren’t allowed to do things that boys could do.
She gave me a very unsatisfactory answer. Parents tend to do that. My mom, like most moms and dads will do, explained the difference between boys and girls in the way her culture had explained it to her. Maybe at one point she had asked her mom the same question, but she no longer questioned why girls weren’t allowed to do what boys do.
Many possible role models for young girls were left out of the story.
They weren’t given so much as a paragraph in history books. Girls had so few available heroes that our only choice was to admire male gods and glorify male heroes. Our cultures choose our heroes. The people who don’t align with our cultural expectations, no matter how impressive their accomplishments, are rarely mentioned.
Girls had no choice but to immortalize men.
The one true god in American culture is male. His only child was a son. There was no mention of a woman as a possible hero. Even that third spot in the trinity was not given to a woman. It was given to a ghost. How insulting that you have father, son, and holy ghost instead of father, son, and mother.
Why such a glaring oversight?
Our heroes help to solidify our cultures. They can be the glue that holds us together. For centuries women were assigned a second-place role in many cultures. For men to remain at the top of the pecking order, our stories had to make them into gods and heroes.
Women were doing great things.
They wrote books, had ideas, were creative, could solve problems, but often under a man’s name or in his shadow. The culture kept the myths alive. The myths were needed to keep a pecking order in place. Women were not allowed to be heroes.
It would skew the narrative of the culture, a narrative that determined who had the power.
Consequently, we needed laws to level the playing field. Laws that gave women autonomy. Laws that made slavery illegal. Laws that opened doors for new stories and offered opportunity to someone other than white males.
There are plenty of people alive today who would happily take my personal autonomy away. We finally have laws protecting women’s rights, for example, but they don’t come with a promise to be there forever. Americans saw proof of this recently with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.
Why?
There’s a tiny thread holding us back from doing nasty things. In some parts of the world that thread is missing. There are places where women are buried up to their necks in the ground while their fathers and brothers throw stones at their heads for bringing shame upon the family. Because they can.
If they can, they will. If their gods and heroes say they should, then they will.
We want to believe so badly that our heroes are above all this, but often they are worse than we would dare to be. Because they can. When people are adored, treated like gods, and admired by many, they CAN do just about anything they want and many do. They behave like gods. Most gods do whatever they want because they can.
Our myths are filled with the horrendous acts of the gods.
It hurts to find out the truth about our heroes. Even Jesus abandoned us. Oh, I know that Christians believe he’s with them always, but since he was crucified, all those years ago according to the Bible, he disappeared. We must get everything second-hand now, through male religious leaders who write and interpret the scriptures.
Jesus simply refuses to show his face.
Furthermore, we must ignore everything that our culture tells us is acceptable behavior and embrace stories about our gods that if acted out today would put someone in prison. The virgin birth story alone is a hard pill to swallow.
Who has sex with a married, young girl who’s a virgin while her husband steps outside and waits?
Our heroes are a major disappointment when carefully examined with an open mind. We’d do better to put the people who help us out on a regular basis on a pedestal and declare a national holiday to celebrate their loyalty.
I’ve lived without heroes all my life and managed just fine.
I try to honor the people in my life who have stood by me through the years, instead. I’ve also learned to pay attention to my own intuition. When all is said and done, I’m better at taking care of myself than anyone else in the world would be.
Why?
Because I know what I need better than anyone else. No one else knows me like me. Once I realized that I COULD take care of myself, everything changed for the better.
I’m my own hero.
Go ahead and have your heroes if you want. I won’t fault you for it. Every culture on the planet has its share of mythological heroes that they adore. It’s the rare individual who can avoid a little hero worship here and there. As for me, I’ve lowered my expectations for human behavior. I do the best I can and even while making mistakes, I often discover that I still managed to do it a little better than many if not most of the acclaimed heroes. Why?
Because I CAN.
Teresa is a retired educator, author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
