The Free Radical

The hero’s paradigm is fraught with paradox. As a society, collectively, we are ever in search of the latest-greatest hero who might soothe our societal ills, and yet the very structure of our societal institutions serve the function of ensuring that extraordinary heroes cannot arise. Our fostering systems, whether educational or political– or any other– operate on a conformity of thought, action and behaviour. At every turn, individuals are rewarded for ‘playing along,’ for following the rules, and only if you are exceptionally good at obeying the contrived system, might you eventually excel within it. Conversely, those who choose to operate outside of the system’s checks and balances, those who might wish to bring much-needed overhaul to those very systems– through conceiving a better way– are dutifully marginalized and ultimately outcast, their radical ideas tossed to the scrap heap. It is a situation of malaise, stagnation and impasse.

We are stuck searching for heroes within a matrix which promises to crucify him as soon as he raises his voice… leaving us utterly dependent upon the one thing we can never have.

Hero-worship has been sold to us relentlessly. In politics, religion, entertainment, even in the love quests of our personal lives, only the appropriate hero can fill our pathological need. Hero-worship is borne out of polarity. Heroes are needed to balance the inevitable rise of villains. The hero-villain dichotomy is the basis for our societal morality. Good must oppose bad; there is simply no other way– or so we are told again and again. As such, a foundational belief underpins our entire societal structure: that all action in a civilized world is rooted in conflict and attempted conflict resolution.

We consequently imagine that the very best in each of us is drawn out only through competition and hardship. After all, the hero can only become a hero through impossible struggle, right? We see fighting as a necessary aspect of character-building. Our tacit acceptance of such a doctrine causes us to view the world through tinted glasses, where wild animals are seen as ferocious beasts in endless pitched battles with one another. And yet, that’s not what our (updated) sciences tell us at all; it is in fact co-operation and nurturance that are the primary driving forces of natural evolution. Our experience too consistently contradicts this notion of nature waging perpetual war. When we go for a walk in the woods, or go camping, or fishing– we do so generally because we appreciate the deep balance and peace nature provides. Certainly, conflict arises in the cycle of predation, but its incidence is minuscule compared to the deep harmony of nature’s community. The forest’s critters do not live in a general state of fear; they do not have chronically elevated cortisol levels!

Nature has no heroes. Can you imagine if nature’s sublime balance relied upon the actions of heroic individuals? Evolution would not have occurred. Evolution is a product of community, but real community has always stood apart from the Hero’s Quest.

As individuals continually seeking out the heroic, we ever fail to recognize any need to fully take responsibility for our lives and their circumstances. In a world searching out heroes, victimization is an inevitability. The very search for heroes requires victims.

And the other side of the coin, when the hero is found, if he be truly worthy of the designation ‘hero,’ he then spends considerable energy battling the appellation. He insists that “Indeed, I am no hero. It’s not about me at all. It is my message and my behaviour which seem so praiseworthy; the man before you is irrelevant.” But as a society we are deaf to this brand of sanity; we place heroes upon pedestals… from which they must eventually fall, for they were indeed correct in pointing away from themselves, in telling us that we mustn’t invest our hopes in fictitious characters. We are fools.

And there is none more foolish than the one in love; experience bears this out. Could it be that our insistence on the quest for Hero has distorted our very conception of love, that we know not what it truly is nor where to find its everlastingness? Here, I know, I stand on dangerous ground. The ideas of soul-mates, twin-flames, and the exclusionary nature of romantic love have been sold to us at every turn. Marriage vows typically contain the phrase “to the exclusion of all others.” Is this truly love? Truly? Is it a rare and precious thing which can only seldom occur between two extraordinarily lucky individuals, and must be defended by any means necessary from the infiltration of the unloving? Really? Do you see? Our very conception of the supposed highest love is itself undeniably unloving! We wrap our arms around our sacred beloved and declare “This is mine and mine alone; everyone else fuck off! And I mean it!” This is our typical view of our most passionate, romantic love. Does anyone else see a flaw in this?

And how do we view it when our sacred beloved leaves us for the love of another? They have made the ‘difficult’ decision to pursue their own happiness with someone else… and we are left crushed, devastated, betrayed and utterly stripped bare of any love we might have thought we once had. Let me reiterate: this is the inevitable result of our former lover pursuing their continued happiness, further exploring love– a very positive thing by any objective reckoning– and yet it destroys us! Something is very wrong here.

The social engineers of domination and control are quite content to let us battle it out with each other for an eternity, scrapping over this misconception of love’s true nature. We imagine that if we were to learn to extend our highest love– that which we feel for our special beloved– to include all others, then we are betraying and diminishing the ‘specialness’ we share. Of course, such an action can be no diminishment at all, primarily because the exclusivity of our ‘love’ is not love at all; it lies squarely within the realms of relative truth… Whereas love the transcendent, the Absolute, can only be actualized through just such an indiscriminatory application of universal acceptance and being. When we fall in love with that special someone, that is a taste and an invitation to learn how to properly apply that feeling, that state of being, to everyone we encounter, to allow it to become the full flowering of love. It is our deep-seated need for hero-worship which distorts our greatest opportunity for learning into a self-destructive fortress of preferential treatment and regard. And it’s pathological.

We cannot be complete in ourselves. None of us is ever good enough. We endlessly seek out the other to fulfill all that we refuse to acknowledge and develop in ourselves. We must rely upon the special knowledge of experts in every aspect of our lives. We refuse to take responsibility for our own health and eventually we must seek out the heroic doctor who can save us from our own foolishness. We get into trouble with the law and only a heroic lawyer can save us from the ruination of our lives. The invocation of the necessity for heroes finds endless examples in our current society. Is it any wonder that we’ve become so unskilled at building community? Virtually everything we think and do stands in opposition to the very idea of loving community.

And finally, to answer the inevitable question: Yes, indeed, I have fallen in love before. It was undeniably the most profound experience of my life. It was a very long time ago however. And in the meantime, I have created the space in consciousness to revisit that tumultuous episode. What is undeniable now is that when I was in love I was completely insane. I was literally incapable of making rational decisions consistently. I had lost any semblance of a balanced view of reality… And at the time, I was sure that it was the most wonderful experience a human being can have! And now I see it as the basis for the mess we’re in.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding lying at the heart of civilization in its current incarnation. Perhaps it’s time we got past our petty jealousies and the need for someone to repair the inevitable wounds which result, hm? We are community; we already have everything we need; no heroes required. Who’s with me?