Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

Heroes have been scientists, warriors, revolutionaries, religious leaders, writers, thinkers, musicians, mountain-climbers. They have been national heroes and local celebrities, fictional characters and myths. They showed humanity at its awe-inspiring best, demonstrating excellence. Their heroic acts varied wildly according to the cultures to which the stories belonged, but each hero made an impact. And we passed their stories from one generation to the next because they inspired us.

But today the hero has been supplanted by 'the survivor' as our inspirational model. The survivor does not act, he withstands. The survivor does not want to change the world, she wants to learn to love her 'true self'. The survivor is "brave" and "honest" because 'bravery' and 'honesty' have undergone Orwellian redefinitions and are now frequently used to refer to those who publicly confess weakness. The sick are always "brave", and those who have had painful experiences are 'respected' for surviving their emotional responses.

We applaud the survivor when they appear on a chat show. We write admiring letters when they give interviews in magazines. We register an approval rating when they cry during parliamentary speeches or "bravely" declare themselves dysfunctional. And the high-brow figures, writers, artists, those who would sneer at guests on Tricia and stars like Kurt Cobain, write 'confessional autobiographies', dismissing their work as attempts to fill an emotional void, listing mood disorders, addictions, deviant proclivities as the defining features of their identity.

'Low horizons' is not strong enough to describe this horribly degraded picture of humanity.

In contrast to the hero (a social being), the survivor aims only to improve their own lot: learning to love themselves and 'be themselves' and to pay no regard to the critical opinions of others. This positive rethinking of narcissism reflects our social fragmentation.

We have given up our quest for shared meaning and embraced emotionalism. We attempt to form social identities through our private emotions; endlessly 'self-monitoring' and treating 'emotional scarring'. We are encouraged to hold ourselves in esteem for being unlike other people: our common humanity no longer valued. The philosophical search for the self – once an attempt to understand the human condition – is now concerned with raising the self-esteem of the individual.

Enlightened thinkers rejected the church in the eighteenth century, citing its denial of human rationality. Two hundred years later and we're going backwards. Emotionalism is a secular religion, but a religion it is. Reason, rationality and human potential are rejected as illusions. Survivors/believers confess their weakness and enter into a permanent state of recovery. Criminals/sinners admit their powerlessness, declare self-control a delusion, and are forgiven. 'Emotional scarring' is considered a threat to each and every one of us; hence the individual who 'survives' provides hope – like Jesus rising from the dead.

The extreme individualism of a theology that posits private emotion as the driving force of society has meant the right wing can take on emotionalism without any problems. But the left has put up equally little resistance. When Marx talked about 'alienation', he referred to the economic separation of the worker under capitalism from the products of their labour. Modern Marxists using the word are more likely to be referring to the feelings of individuals left out of one of the government's many 'inclusion projects'.

Politics has been exhausted by events of the last century and replaced with a tedious, monumentally uninspiring managerialism. When it is popular opinion that the search for shared meaning was a pointless, imperialist mission, the unifying ability of a theology like emotionalism is precious. Left and right: we all speak the same language now.

Emotionalism isn't liberal or enlightened: it's a reaction to what we in the West perceive as a meaningless existence. We envy the poor and the sick their certainty, identify with them, argue for the superior integrity of their 'way of life', attempting to imbue their struggle for survival with meaning.

The death of the hero is but a symptom of this broad social problem. But the day we regain our belief in human potential and reject the low horizons and divisive, demeaning tenets of emotionalism, will be the day we once again admire those who make history, taking us closer to understanding the wonder of the human condition. There is no conspiracy here – the elite are as timid and paralysed as we are. But we are the ones who pay when we define ourselves through our weaknesses and demand respect for passively 'surviving'.

Only when we raise our expectations of humanity will the panda-eyed, depressive/junkie/traumatised fuck-up/victim be replaced by an image that reflects our abilities and inspires action.