Descriptions:
Video Description
Every human being craves heroism — but most of us chase it through hollow scripts. This lecture from Academy of Ideas names those scripts: the way of the sheep, which trades individuality for obedience, and the way of the peacock, which trades self-worth for status and stuff. When both fail, the craving curdles into the anti-hero — the figure who gives up on heroism and sinks into depression, self-hate, and the victim’s story. From Dostoevsky’s Underground Man to the Joker, it shows how failure to live heroically turns inward. The liberating reminder: the hero lives in us just as much as the anti-hero does, and we choose which one to feed.
Full Video Transcript
When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution,
then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need.
One of the oldest stories on record is the Mesopotamian tale of the King Gilgamesh,
who upon witnessing the unexpected death of his closest friend, becomes tormented by the realization that he too must die.
Gilgamesh’s fear is so acute that his life turns into a quest for immortality,
in the hope of countering death’s approach.
Gilgamesh begins his quest in search of a mythical elixir that will grant him bodily immortality,
but he fails to attain what he seeks and so he turns to what he considers to be the next best thing.
the symbolic immortality conferred by heroism.
His body may perish, but so long as his name and legend remain,
Gilgamesh will live on in a symbolic form.
To attain this type of immortality, he commits himself to great deeds that
all the world shall know of in order to
stamp my name on men’s minds forever.
The tale of Gilgamesh, like so many ancient myths,
contains a psychological truth which the 20th century cultural anthropologist
Ernest Becker spent his career trying to decipher.
This truth, according to Becker, is that of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death, and
that as a result of this fear, there is within each of us an innate urge to heroism.
Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death, he wrote. While most people would agree that like Gilgamesh,
they too fear death, few recognize that also, like Gilgamesh, they strive for heroism as a counter to this fear.
The heroism that most of us participate in is not of the epic scale that defines Gilgamesh, and so is harder to detect.
But according to Becker, the reason we don’t recognize our heroism is because the form of it we seek is embedded into the value structure of our society.
Society, in other words, is the vehicle on which most people pursue their heroism, which explains why so many people are so protective of their social system.
Or, as Becker explains,
William James echoed this sentiment of Becker’s, writing,
provided by a society, not all are equal.
In fact, it can be argued that contemporary societies offer some of the worst heroic scripts the world has ever seen.
For modern man, no longer steeped in the symbolism of religion and myth, and having lost his connection to the rich roots of his cultural past,
tends to strive for societal heroism in one of two ways. By going the way of the sheep, or by
participating in the race up the ladder of social success and status. The first approach, the way of the sheep,
entails conformity and unquestioning obedience in short it is acting like a
good citizen by towing the political agenda and party line this may not seem
like an effective path to heroism as unquestioned obedience results in
dehumanization and opens the way to a dystopic future but this path to
heroism does allow the sheep to identify with something felt to be more powerful
and enduring than their small self namely the state and so in the words of
Becker, man earns his feeling of worth by following in the lines of authority and power internalized
in his particular social group and nation. Each human slave nods to the next. Each earns his
feeling of worth by doing the unquestioned good. I only followed orders, is the phrase that rankles
in the breast of modern man. The second approach to heroism is taken by those who feel they can
lift themselves slightly above the other sheep by attaining status and wealth. In answering Becker’s
question what is my contribution to the world or where do I rank as a hero the
status and wealth obsessed individual goes the way of the peacock they seek to
accumulate consumer goods more expensive cars and bigger homes not primarily for
practicality or enjoyment but in the naive hope that social status likes and
attention can alleviate their existential fears it is wrong to say
that man is a peacock if we mean thereby to belittle his urge to self
glorification, and make it seem a mere matter of vanity and self-display. The constant harangue
that we address to one another, notice me, love me, esteem me, value me, would seem debasing and
ignoble. But when we tally the sum of these efforts, the excruciating earnestness of them,
the eternal grinding out of the inner newsreel, we can see that something really big is going on,
really vital. Men, however, cannot go the way of the sheep or the way of the peacock for too long
without suffering consequences, as these heroic scripts rank low on the scale of effectiveness.
Our fear of death and the urge to heroism are too strong to be alleviated with conformity,
consumerist values and displays of vanity. And so, whether one centers one’s life around
conformity or status obsession and consumerism, or all of the above, Becker saw such attempts
at earthly heroism as doomed to struggle and fail. We disguise our struggle by piling up
figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth, or by having a
little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children.
But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller
scope.
Given that the way of the sheep and the way of the peacock are ineffective as vehicles
for earthly heroism, both precipitate psychological suffering.
When the average person cannot hide his failure to be his own hero, then he bogs down in the
failure of depression, and terrible guilt.
In order to shine a light on the suffering that results from the failed heroics of the
sheep and the peacock, we are going to draw from the wisdom of William James.
We learn most about a thing, he wrote, when we view it under a microscope, as it were,
or in its most exaggerated form.
If we learn most about a thing when we view it in its most exaggerated form, to understand
the phenomenon of modern heroics and how it relates to psychological suffering, we can
analyze a category of individuals who suffer most from the deficiencies of modern heroics,
that is, in a manner that is unmistakable and extreme.
And for this, there is no better category of individual than that of the anti-hero.
The anti-hero is the individual who has utterly failed in his attempts at social heroism,
finding both the path of the sheep and the way of the peacock too difficult or too absurd
to follow.
The anti-hero’s problems are exacerbated in that he or she has also failed to discover
an individualized solution to fill the void.
And so, the anti-hero experiences depression, anxiety, self-hate, and an inner division
which forces him, like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s underground man, to default on his life through
moral corruption in a corner.
In his book Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky has his underground man confess,
I am a sick man.
I am a wicked man, an unattractive man.
I believe my liver is diseased.
Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything, neither wicked nor good,
neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect, and now I am living
out my life in my corner, taunting myself with a spiteful and utterly futile consolation
that it is after all impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only
fools become something.
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is the quintessential antihero, but he is just one of many who began
sprouting up in literature and media with ever more frequency beginning in the late 19th century,
the time at which society started to become ever more tied to consumerism and the conformity
engendered by bureaucratic paternalism. After unsuccessfully struggling all his life to become
rich and well-liked, the main character from Arthur Miller’s 1949 Death of a Salesman confides,
I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been, echoing some of the passages from the
the 2019 rendition of The Joker, the latest anti-hero to come on the cultural scene.
Literary anti-heroes are not pernicious, merely pathetic, wrote Andrew Bernstein.
In not only rejecting the socially accepted heroic scripts,
but in renouncing the need for heroism altogether,
the anti-hero has no choice but to play the role of the victim,
which the psychologist James Hillman called the flip side of hero.
In the dark underground and morally corrupted corners of his mind,
the anti-hero consoles himself by blaming someone or something, anything, for his inability to taste the heroism that could validate his
degraded self. He convinces himself he has been kicked to the curb by family or peers,
alienated by society, oppressed by the economic system, or burdened with psychological defects.
But whatever the variant, the victim narrative the anti-hero uses to self-soothe leads to the same outcome.
The antihero’s life becomes meaningless and the paths that could redeem him are negated, as he believes the forces oppressing him are too strong to counter.
In his book The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner encapsulated the victim mentality of the antihero.
No battle is ever won. They are not even fought. The field of life only reveals to man his own folly and despair.
And victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Many will look down from a psychological distance upon the figure of the antihero and feel compassion or perhaps disgust.
But sometimes psychological health and success in life demands we be brutally honest in our self-assessment.
And towards this end, we may do well to recognize that there is, at the very least, a little of the antihero in each of us.
The Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky suggested that Dostoevsky left his underground man nameless and had him speak in the singular first person
Because he is all of us. I’ve never been a coward at heart
Although I’ve always been a coward in action the underground man reflects
But just as the antihero exists within us
So too does the hero or as Becker wrote the urge to heroism is natural and to admit it honest
We are a battleground of these two opposing life tendencies the antihero and the hero
And so our fate depends on which tendency we starve in which we feed
For those who would prefer to starve the anti-hero and strengthen the hero, in the next video we are going to focus on the psychology of the hero.
Specifically, we will outline an effective path to heroism that can replace the way of the peacock and the sheep.
And we will examine why the admiration and emulation of the great heroes, of past and present, can promote our own quest to live an authentically heroic life.
The search after the great man is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood, observed Ralph Waldo Emerson.
For even the underground man, in some of his more sober moments, felt the ache of the irrepressible urge to heroism, inciting him to seek a better life.
I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find.
Damn underground!
Source: Academy of Ideas