Culture, huh? Be careful, you find those things in Petri dishes too

Last one, huh? Well, I guess I just want to say, first, you guys have all been wonderful. Seriously guys, stay amazing, you all are just awesome. Second, I want to just go into it, talking about something I know quite a lot about, to a degree. I talk about the whole superhero thing a lot, right? Well, I like to think it’s got a bit of a Jungian component to it. You know, student of the guy who said we all have inappropriate thoughts about our mothers (Happy Mother’s Day by the way guys! Try to get that out of your head!), believed in an idea of the “collective unconscious?” Yeah, I like the ideas of him and Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, especially what they say about us, people. I like to think, after all my years of studying heroes and vigilantes, that I do it because they’re basically the epic heroes of our day, the modern replacements for Gilgamesh, Achilles, King Arthur, etc. We look for examples, paragons, who stand for what we see as the best in ourselves, and the greatest potential for mankind. I like to think this, especially since it means that I can justify thousands of hours on Wiki pages as deep, intensive research into the concept of a great, modern, collective mythology.

Moreover, I have researched this with a bit more of a personal reason and zeal. Long ago I had a few, let’s say naive ideas and thoughts about myself, the world, and my place in it. I saw myself having a big part in it, maybe one of the biggest. I won’t lie and say this wasn’t partly ego, because it was, it made me feel important, but it wasn’t nearly the biggest part. It was also because I had been instilled from a young age that I would have a large role to play in not just my own life, but the lives of others. That it would be my job growing up to do big things: get educated, more educated than most of those who came before, take up a job better than any who had come before, provide for me, my future family, generations before me. Growing up it gave me a lot to feel good about, I had a lot of self confidence because I felt I had so many who were confident in me, but it also put a lot of weight on my shoulders. As I got older, more capable of sizing myself up, I started shedding a lot of that unquestioned self esteem, started feeling that I had a mountain of expectations straddling my shoulders with less and less of the confidence that I could really do it from those who once believed as the years passed. I started feeling like I was a hero in my own story, maybe in one great big story, set up to do as best as he could, maybe beyond what anyone should have to do, but ultimately to fail. I wouldn’t change that tune until about eighteen.

In my senior year of high school I came to know a few select individuals and one particular piece of literature that helped me completely change how I looked at myself, my life, and life on Earth as I knew it. It’s a long story, ironically surrounding a story that’s actually a small fraction of the amount of pages I’ve read in the larger novels I have picked up, but suffice it to say I made some important discoveries about the human condition that changed me forever. Firstly, that there’s nothing wrong with humanity, no matter how much we’ve destroyed. Our capacity to screw things up the way we have, how we have, is not a product of our species, but our culture, the culture of civilization. It’s constructed, not passed on in the genes, but in the ideas and cultural mainstays that we haven’t questioned for thousands of years. It is learned, and therefore can be unlearned. What are these things to be unlearned? Well, first of all, that human being are the most important species on this planet. There’s no objective evidence to support that this is so, yet all machinations of civilization seem bent toward this will. The second, that there is only one right way to live. Most conflicts, major and minor, in the realms of civilization have been fought over this concept for millennia, and again, there’s no real reason to objectively believe that it’s true.

Before I go on, I just want to make clear those discoveries enumerated above are the collected work of Daniel Quinn, whose work I highly recommend, at least for his philosophy. What follows is all me.

Towards the end of the work I was studying I came to a stunning epiphany. I mean this quite literally, I was stunned. More, I had burst into tears of sheer joy and unbelievable relief. With the knowledge that we aren’t the most important things on this planet, and that there is no one right way to live, came a thought that for a long time in my life may never have occurred to me. I realized that, in the large sense and the small, we didn’t need the hero in this world. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean we didn’t need heroes, as there will always be crises that will call upon the help of those compassionate and brave enough to step up; no, I realized we don’t need the hero. There paraphrase a character I used to enjoy, any old fool can be a hero. A hero is just someone who decides to put others first, to risk of themselves so that others can be okay. The hero, however, is the idea of the person who is at the very center of it all, knows exactly what is right and what is wrong, must shoulder the whole world, and most of all, is our only last and best hope. In essence, this idea encapsulates what I said our culture as a whole thinks of itself: the most important and armed with the only true knowledge of the absolute right way to live.

Realizing that this idea, this person, didn’t exist, that he didn’t have to exist, that the world didn’t need me to be this person…

I don’t remember ever having so much weight lifted off of my soul, before or since.

So, what does this have to do with costumed crime fighters? Well, it all clicked for me why they were such a huge part of my life. They represented a part of my life I never wanted to fully acknowledge, but that also helped me to grow strong in some ways. I was also lead to a marvelous revelation about fiction in the modern day, specifically about where it should head if it wants to break us of this cycle we’re in. As I said, superheroes are our mythology now. They speak the same words and intone the reverence that Zeus and Mars once did, and they are also born of an idea that has long since no longer made sense. If you really want to start a change, the heroes of our comic books, movies, cartoons, etc must no longer be made out to be the heroes, the only guys who can fix it, our only hope of salvation. We need to bring them back down to level of ordinary folks, like you and me. I don’t think this is just important in stopping us from repeating behaviors that I think are ultimately destructive, but in creating new ones that are more beneficial. The thing that hurts me most about the kind of culture civilization as we know it has created is this constant understanding that importance as a person is relative to others. That others can be more or less important than yourself. I think we should do away with this. A few of my contemporaries have brought up that with tossing out the idea of discerning importance among ourselves we basically level it all to the baseline that no one matters. No, not necessarily, only if you start out from the premise that no one matters, which, to be fair, civilization does. It has done a great job teaching us that the baseline for people, the average, everyday guy on the street, is that they don’t matter, and only with further affectation, with greater enshrouding in the material byproducts of civilization do we gain status, importance (translation: you’re worth crap in society until you have stuff that society deems says otherwise). Yet, what if we tossed it all away, and decided to work off the premise that everyone is important. Imagine the stories we could tell if we were working out the premise that we all matter, that there’s no chosen one that needs to come to the rescue, no messiah that need sacrifice all for everyone, but instead that we all have a part to play, and that we all have it in us to be a hero.

Idealistic, I know, but I never said that our dreams weren’t important either.

 

– Mike R.