Heroes (and an Existential Crisis)

Reading news of genocides, climate-related natural disasters, the rise of the extreme right and political polarisation, I've felt what can only be described as 'moral injury' (a self-diagnosis!) or as Rebecca Solnit calls, in her latest book No Straight Road Takes You There, 'a deep sense of wrongfulness when we realise we are complicit in something awful.'

Moral Injury is a mental condition apparently characterised by despondency, avoidant strategies, and occasional bouts of despair. It's an existential crisis. I began to ask myself naive questions like, has the world ever been this evil? And answering them with sentences like, probably it has, but the difference is that hasn't been so close to the brink of extinction in said state.

So it came to me as a relief when Solnit described climate doomers as pernicious, and I realised that my pernicious manifestation of Moral Injury was a sense of disempowerment. Reading her book gave me some thoughts on heroes and storytelling; the parallel between the individualistic hero narrative and how capitalism has caused the climate crisis. How a system run for profit becomes successful (and is) when we feel small, isolated, and unempowered. It became a remarkably hopeful line of argument to take, and I followed it through into a thought experiment which became an essay. Plus, I've always hated Homer and Achilles, and the ancient men on my university reading list. So this became somewhat of cathartic experience.

The Literary Magazine Across The Margin were nice enough to publish the piece on their website. They did edit out my rant about Homer, but as I 'accepted all' to the track changes, I realised that this was for the best.

You can read my final and published essay here.