Who are your Heroes?

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No heroes for me, and I prefer it that way. I admire certain things that certain people have done, but I can't even be bothered to remember their names half the time. To me there's no such thing as a "great person." Everybody has strengths and weaknesses, and I don't think it's healthy to put individuals up on a pedestal. The real person is very unlikely to live up to the whitewashed myth that's been created about them, and the sense of competition and inequality it creates goes against my egalitarian sensibilities.

It seems I'm flying in the face of something that great swathes of society love. I don't understand what they get out of it. I've heard that it allows them to try to emulate their heroes and achieve things they wouldn't otherwise be able to achieve. I don't see how that could work. You might admire Einstein and focus on the question "what would he have done?" when you're faced with a puzzle about physics, but the answer would be something like "something very clever that I don't know how to do," which wouldn't help to solve the puzzle. There might be some psychological advantage at times in pretending you're more able than you think you are, but if so, that can be done without focussing on an individual about whom you don't really know much.

^^ The propensity for hero worship is one of the things that let homo sapiens behave more like hive insects, surrendering judgement to one brain. This worked better when we only knew about a hundred people to choose from, and knew them well. Now, we can be recruited by a PR image.

You learn something new every day, if you are lucky.

I had no idea that the term "hero" was so...problematic. I understand some of the (well-articulated) reasons for it being so now.

I think a less charged term like "inspiration" or "role model" (or did Charles Barkley kill that one?) might do better.

Thanks, y'all.

Yep, that was Barkley. Iverson killed the term practice.

Yep, that was Barkley. Iverson killed the term practice.

While I understood where both guys were coming from, the truth is, if you are a prominent (and well-paid!) athlete or entertainer, you are in a very real sense a role model. Kids will pattern themselves after you, especially if you act out.

Not wanting the responsibility is one thing; acting like it doesn't exist is another.

Eugene Debs. he stuck his neck out at a dangerous time, and paid the price.

Hero: (n) A person who is admired or idealised for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.

I don't think I idealise anyone, and I'm certainly not into hero worship, but one person I admire for their courage, outstanding achievements, noble qualities, and character would be my late father. He's actually considered a hero, and there is national monument for his service in the benefit of others.

Rest in peace, Dad.

Rest in peace, Dad.

Clear thinkers in general are my heroes. To my previous list, I should add Peter Drucker, who first wrote about modern management, Gilbreth, who studied production efficiency, Bucky Fuller, for many inventions, Stewart Brand, for the Whole Earth publications, Oliver Sacks and Norman Doidge for their work on brain functions and plasticity, and Gary Trudeau, for pithy political presentations. From the TED talks, I'm fond of Sir Ken Robinson and Sugata Mitra for their tips on education.
After over a century of automotive progress, Frederick Lanchester seems to be vindicated in his view that a driver wants to be eye-level with a person standing. He may have been an Aspie, because he spent a year or so perfecting his own standard for bolt threads instead of getting his car to market, but his work was wonderful and original all over. Since then, Colin Chapman seems to have been the best at "simplicate and add more lightness."

Makes sense. The other thing I've noticed is that young children usually see their parents as heroes. Parents would normally be displaying abilities that must look very impressive when compared to what the infant themselves are capable of. And as humans tend to retain a lot of the characteristics of children, the tendency to see heroes might be expected to persist, and I suppose it manifests itself in the worship of deities and celebrities. But ultimately such black-and-white thinking must cease to be useful as a way of accurately conceptualising reality, and anybody who thinks (rather than just feels) that there truly are indiviiduals who are worthy of their complete and utter admiration, must be setting themselves up for a fall.

I guess the popularity of the anti-hero suggests that humans are capable of something more mature than blind worship though. Even as far back as ancient Greece we see deities making mistakes - something most people of Abrahamic persuasion might be very reluctant to assign to their figures of worship. I remember a Pentecostal preacher in the UK who "had to" resign just because his wife left him. My immediate reaction was that it was practically insane to have put him onto such a lofty pedestal in the first place.

A thoughtful post, but I don't see having "Heroes" as necessarily equaling "Hero-Worship".

I think that a warts-and-all appraisal of a great individual showing the personal flaws etc that they rose above is a basic component of my admiration of anyone.

Lincoln, manic-depression (I that's what it was), Churchill's drinking...everybody has feet in the gutter. Few reach the stars, and they should be admired, at least in my biased view.

As far as I can tell, no great scientist has been free of at least one crazy notion. One astronomer of quite shattering eminence thought that our noses pointed down to protect them from space dust, as if it did not float on the breeze. Anthropologists always almost imagine primitive people as if they were just like themselves, unable to get advice from a parent who had survived the same conditions. There was also a major study of ancient stone working, to see if bronze tools could produce duplicates of ancient buildings. They could, but they could have done it easier if they had been treated like bronze tools, not ferrous ones. Dozens of highly-educated people doing blacksmithing badly accidentally did better tool maintenance than if they had done the wrong process well.

I agree that it's possible (depending on your definition) to have heroes without particularly worshipping them and that it's possible to admire a person without being completely blind to their flaws. I just think there's some correlation between heroes and worship.

Personally I don't hold with the idea of great individuals, the notion that anybody or anything can objectively be said to be great. All I can really say about anybody or any thing is about my personal (and largely emotional) liking for them / it. And when I look more closely, there are nearly always aspects I dislike about them as well. I can try to rank people and things according to how many of their aspects I like and dislike, and I can try to weight each aspect according to its importance to me or to the human race or whatever, but a confounding factor is that people, things, their behaviour and achievements are often very interconnected with other people and things, and also dynamically changing over time, so it's hard to correctly pin praise and blame onto the appropriate targets. I'm on firmer ground when I look at particular deeds, and decouple them from the people who happened to be in the right place at the right time to do them.