Hero Culture

   "Personally I've never had much time for heroes." --wise words from
   [1]Albus Dumbledore; { To this I would only like to add this much: fuck
   all heroes without any exception, you fucking cunts. ~drummyfish }

   Hero culture (or just hero cult) is a [2]harmful [3]culture of creating
   and worshiping heroes and "leaders" (and other kinds of [4]celebrities)
   which leads to e.g. creation of [5]cults of personality, strengthening
   [6]fight culture and establishing hierarchical, anti-[7]anarchist society
   of "winners" and "losers". The concept of a hero is one that arose in
   context of [8]wars and other many times violent conflicts; a hero is
   different from a mere authority or a well known individual in some area,
   it is someone who creates fear of disagreement and whose image is
   distorted to a much more positive, sometimes godlike state, by which he
   distorts truth and is given a certain power over others. Therefore [9]we
   highly warn about falling to the trap of hero culture, though this is very
   difficult in current highly hierarchical society. No, people don't need
   heroes -- heroes need people, but not the other way around. To us, the
   word hero has a pejorative meaning. Our advice is always this:

   Do NOT create heroes. Follow ideas, not people. Also similarly: hate
   ideas, not people, and follow ideas, not groups.

   Popularity is just successful [10]populism.

   Smart people know this and those being named heroes themselves many times
   protest it, e.g. Marie Curie has famously stated: "be less curious about
   people and more curious about ideas." Anarchists purposefully don't name
   theories after their inventors but rather by their principles, knowing the
   danger of hero culture leading to social hierarchy and also that people
   are imperfect -- people are like packages, a mixture of both good and bad
   inadvertently inseparable, they carry distorting associations, they make
   mistakes and their images are twisted by history and politics -- even the
   character of [11]Jesus, a "theoretically perfect human", has been many
   times twisted in ways that are hard to believe. Worshiping an individual
   always comes with the tendency to embrace and support everything he does,
   all his opinions and actions, including the extremely bad ones. Abusive
   regimes are the ones who use heroes and their names for propaganda --
   Stalinism, Leninism, corporations such as Ford, named after their founder
   etc. Heroes become brands whose stamp of approval is used to push bad
   ideas... especially popular are heroes who are already dead and can't
   protest their image being abused -- see for example how [12]Einstein's
   image has been raped by [13]capitalists for their own propaganda, e.g. by
   [14]Apple's [15]marketing, while in fact Einstein was a pacifist socialist
   highly critical of capitalism. This is not to say an idea's name cannot be
   abused, the word [16]communism has for example become something akin a
   swear word after being abused by regimes that had little to do with real
   communism. Nevertheless it is still much better to focus on ideas as ideas
   always carry their own principle embedded within them, visible to anyone
   willing to look, and can be separated from other ideas very easily.
   Focusing on ideas allows us to discuss them critically, it allows us to
   reject a bad concept without "attacking" the human who came up with it.

   Mainstream [17]US mentality of strong hero culture is now infecting the
   whole world and reaches unbelievably retarded levels, which is further not
   helped by shit like the stupid superhero movies. Besides calling murderers
   (soldiers) heroes, it is now for example standard to call handicapped
   people heroes, literally only because they are handicapped and it makes
   them feel better, even if they do nothing special and even if they
   actually live more comfortable lives than poor healthy peasants who have
   to live miserably and slave at work every day without getting anyone's
   attention. Or -- and this is yet another level of stupidity -- anyone who
   just happens to not behave like a dick in case of some emergency is
   guaranteed to be called a hero; for example if someone by chance walks by
   a baby that is drowning in a pool and saves the baby from dying will with
   100% probability be called a hero in the media. But WHY the fuck would
   that be? Is the guy a hero because he didn't just sit down a watch the
   baby drown? It is the absolutely normal behavior to save a drowning baby
   if one sees it, especially when there is very little risk of own life in
   doing so (such as just jumping into the pool); calling someone a hero for
   doing so is like calling a gun owner a hero for not going to the streets
   to randomly shoot at people. So in this fucked up society the title of
   hero is basically won like a lottery -- you just have to be lucky enough
   to be present at some emergency and then just do the normal thing.

   On a bit more lighthearted note: in Internet [18]meme slang "an hero"
   stands for committing [19]suicide.

See Also

     * [20]Facebook heroism

Links:
1. wizard.md
2. harmful.md
3. culture.md
4. celebrity.md
5. cult_of_personality.md
6. fight_culture.md
7. anarchism.md
8. war.md
9. lrs.md
10. populism.md
11. jesus.md
12. einstein.md
13. capitalism.md
14. apple.md
15. marketing.md
16. communism.md
17. usa.md
18. meme.md
19. suicide.md
20. facebook_heroism.md