what happens to you when you construct a hero

1. you begin to believe that they are capable of making the changes you want and that you don’t have to do anything. you believe in the “change you can believe in” slogan instead of the hard and less seductive reality…you have to BE the change. you. in your own life.

2. you slowly, without even realizing it, become helpless, until the only role you can have is to ratify decisions and to consume…until pretty soon you are ratifying and consuming a person.

3. world events begin to disinterest you in favor of the cult of the individual; you’ll do just about anything to attend a rally for the individual rather than face the difficulty of the world–you’ll want the hero’s aura to wash you like water. baptismal.

4. the comfort of the illusion anesthetizes critical thinking. and more. it actually treats critical thinking as dangerous.

5. you begin to feel ok about capitalism. capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. capitalism puts democracy in perile. high capitalism buries it. creating a hero to put at the head of a government built on capitalism supports a fiction of democracy that buries it.

6. you turn the public slogan of the hero into your personal dreamspeak. “change we can believe in” and “yes we can” are slogans no one can disagree with. no one knows what they mean, nor does anyone care. the hero’s slogans divert attention away from the more important question: what would radical change mean for you personally in your actual life?

7. you become passive and obedient, not to a scary monster, but to a beautiful hero. in this process what’s going on around you begins to not matter…things like the crumbling of the economy, the war, the desperate cries of your fellow man. “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. that gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” (noam.)

8. you mistake revolution for a bright, shiny, apple that is within your reach.

9. you forget that the risk you must take in life is inside your own skin.

10. your gaze is locked on the center of entertainment–the television, the choreographed event, the hum and whir of publicity surrounding the hero; locking your gaze on the center of entertainment is a form of sleep or blindess.