When the hero is the problem

The stories I read as a child were filled with heroes. But now I’m not so sure. They were tales, ancient and folkloric, of a singular strong man (yes, man) who bravely challenged his antagonisers; a man fearless beyond reason, who either alone or with paltry aid, became victorious; a man to whom the maidens were indebted, and delighted if they were lucky enough to be chosen. It’s a notion that chimes with our concept of the past; more great men with armies and powerful institutions at their beckon call, forever shaping the course of history.

But the stories I read now, of aid agencies atttempting to alleviate the genocide in Gaza; of activists in Sudan saving refugee children from the landslides destroying their camps; and of climate-emergency grassroots organisations protesting the legislations bound to damage our environments, these problems feel too many, and too deep, for one hero to ride in on his (yes, his) chariot, and fire a golden arrow from his bow.

The notion that success must be immediate is a simplistic one, also created by the hero narrative. So here I want to ask, why would we even want a muscly man, who is good at violence, to be our change agent?

The history books I read, taught me that power resides in the rich, famous institutions. But what about ordinary collective power? What about solidarity and collaboration? Yes, the courts and parliaments of the world still make decisions for us, but these decisions arise from years of collective work. 

And when you take a bigger look at history, amongst its messiness, you can see how that collective work became movements, which gained momentum and led to other movements - the equal marriage act, the feminist movement, civil rights, the acceptance of gay relationships, then marriage equality. One built upon the other. Perhaps few of those brave protesters felt an immediate sense of victory, but they achieved, somewhat later, a successful change. That success is still coming, and will come, is something more hopeful; that change works in more complex ways, that progress happens in slow incremental waves, is a reason to keep going.

Which makes the hero, once again, the problem. Why is it not heroic to contribute to a community? Look at the natural world. Our best example of socialist interdependence, which, in beautiful and surprising ways, thrives when we allow it to thrive. Fungi create networks to joining underground roots and allowing, through the interconnectedness of plants, their sharing of nutrients, waters, and warning signals to raise their chemical defenses. The fungi are not conscious messengers, and they also benefit from the resources. It’s a system of mutual community aid. 

When we believe in heroes we believe in simplicity and in a single line of thinking, reducing our laterality, our ability to problem solve. We start to believe that, in the absence of a hero, it would be impossible to end the goliaths of capitalism, the fossil fuel industry which causes eight million deaths a year and irreversible climate damage. Stories of heroes and villains teach us to think in dichotomies, so that equations of exclusivity pervade our thinking. We need energy, so we must sacrifice our climate, for example. The fossil fuel industry doesn’t want us to believe that clear electricity can power our lives. But why believe that we have to sacrifice the climate for the sake of our comfort? The two concepts - a thriving planet vs our comfort, cost, and convenience - are not, by nature, a mutually exclusive pair. For the cycle to break, we need government action. Policies that stop air subsidies and redirect funds to electric cars, solar panel and insulation incentives, and passive architecture so that, in a desperate attempt to cool ourselves in a warming world, we don’t exacerbate the problem with high-voltage air conditioning units. Policies like these come from demand, and the demand comes from us; from the communities who lobby, who sign petitions, who write to MPs, who boycott and peacefully protest. And the same is true of our purchasing power. If we are the ones giving global conglomerates their space in the world, aren’t we the ones who can collectively take it away?

Capitalist systems trap everyone in a cycle of poverty. Even me (and my fellow readers, no offence) who are privileged people, are participating in systems of producing and consuming that keep us too busy for critical thought, questioning, and protesting. Our behaviours, our habits, reveal a poverty of resistance and resolve. We opt for the path of least resistance, which inevitably includes a higher carbon footprint, thus letting capitalism take up more space. In a gradually heating bathtub, we’re being boiled to death without knowing it, or if we do realise, we ease our worries with next day deliveries (from China) before placing the packaging in the recycling bin. 

Yes, the hero is the problem. If we depend on a hero, we minimise our role, our power. And if we believe in these disempowering versions of ourselves, we pass the story on to future generations. A few years ago, researching for one of my novels, I went to Morocco. I stayed in a village an hour or so from Fez, where my host told me a tale. The Moroccan government was trying to sell off part of the village’s land to a French energy firm, who wanted to dig it up and build a pipeline. But this land was community land. It had been part of their grazing and farmland for generations. It contained their well, and a lagoon surrounded by almond trees, with precious shade beneath. So the community came together, and sat down on their land. They refused to be moved. Neighbouring villages joined them. And soon the land was so filled with this intergenerational gathering, that the French surveyors, unable to fulfil their duties, dropped the contract. Interesting, Moroccan literature does not feature as many hero narratives, but ones of community strength. 

The hero is a western phenomenon, or problem, because believing in a hero teaches us that only the biggest and best win. But maybe social Darwinism is a lie. Maybe we are not inherently selfish, and it’s capitalism that steals abundance and turns it into scarcity through poor distribution. Maybe an anti-capitalist world would be much more democratic. 

So maybe it’s not a problem with heroes and villains. Maybe it’s a storytelling problem. The story that the future is written by someone else somewhere else. But what if we believed in a different story? A story that the future can be constructed, collectively, here, in the present. That would be something much better to believe in. Maybe I’ll write a story about that.