Is it Dangerous to Hero Worship?

Are you a hero?

Do you dream of being a hero?  Do you fancy the idea of saving someone one day?  Do you want people to say “wow there he/she goes, I wish I could be like him/her.”

It’s strange isn’t it, but we’re all capable of being a hero if the opportunity presented itself.  Imagine your child falling in a river, would you jump in to save them?  Most people would without thinking about it, it’s simply a reaction to wanting something more than anything else at that moment.

The traits we admire in heroes are often the traits we have in ourselves.  So if we are all capable of heroic acts, why do we put some people on a pedestal?  And why is this a bad idea?

When we admire people we think there is something special about them and they are not like us.  As we idealise a person we begin to feel an emotional attachment to them.  We may even ignore a few minor transgressions or a major transgression.  This is mostly because we don’t want to be proven wrong that this person may not be the angel we have painted them to be, so our admiration continues.

Basically as we form an emotional attachment we stimulate all the corresponding feel-good chemicals in the brain.  This is fine until our hero’s transgressions get to the point where we can no longer ignore them and they fall off that pedestal with an almighty bang.  The disappointment we feel is quite profound and some of those brain chemicals have the opposite effect and now we demonise the fallen hero.  At this point it’s worse than if we hadn’t admired them at all in the first place.  Our fallen hero is now doomed to our wrath and we are enraged to the point of illogical blame.   

It’s not much fun being a fallen hero, but there is something for us to remember here.  Heroes are human beings, which means they will make mistakes just like everyone else.  Remember it’s not the hero we admire; it’s the traits they display.  Those same traits are in all of us. 

So before we get all lathered up about those whom we have deemed to have badly let us down, take a look in the mirror and see another hero who is secure in the knowledge that no one knows about our secret, so we are out of danger of falling.