Commentary What is Driving Our Society? We Need to Exchange Celebrities for Heroes By Luciano Umerez (March 18, 2004)

When I was young, I had heroes, figures that signaled a course of action which didn’t have to be based on greed, individuality or selfishness; they were based on values. What is that word “hero” that we hear and believe when we are young? What drives the hero figure to exist and why does it exist? I remembered how Optimus Prime sacrificed himself to save mankind. I remembered Jesus going to the cross for mankind. I remembered Che Guevara living and dying for mankind. I remember. We all have these figures, but why do they exist? 

These figures are our first role models; these figures give us the path to find ourselves, to define ourselves. It doesn’t mater if we agree or disagree with the Crusades, but those people, those knights, were fighting for God; they could define who they were and what they wanted. And now I ask myself, is there any similarity between Optimus Prime and the Crusaders? Of course there is. Not a physical one, though a knight uses a metal armor he is not made out of metal as Optimus from the Transformers! But symbolically they are.

The conceptual jump of mankind is the tool. Kant said that this meant that, in the beginning, man saw a piece of rock, then stopped seeing a rock and then started seeing a tool. This is the biggest jump of the human psyche. This meant that we stopped seeing things as literal things which “are” and began seeing things as “it represents” or “it symbolizes.”
 
And as human society started to develop we didn’t stop when we took away the literal meaning to objects; we started to take away literal meanings to actions, and so rituals were born. A ritual is not crazy people jumping around or dancing; it’s anthropological history, people who are in a spiritual level where things stop “to be,” they “mean.” And so we evolved, creating meanings not only to actions but to people; I know my girlfriend is not perfect (nothing is absolute), but to me, she represents perfection. In anthropological history society did the same thing, we created heroes, which aren’t perfect (after all, they are human) but they fight for something greater than themselves. . I cannot touch the moon, but I can point at it. I can’t be perfect but I can point to it; and so, though I am not “love,” I can feel it when I point to my figure, my girlfriend, my mom, my friends. And I realize now the hero is nothing more (nor less) than a society value made of flesh. He is a person who devotes to something greater than himself.  He’s a person that gives himself blindly to something greater than himself.

I ask myself then, do heroes exist in real life? Or, if heroes are a society’s anthropological construction and we belong to that construction; isn’t the hero concept in every one of us? Because, after all, we all know that the construction of ourselves is not a construction of just us that we choose, it is something that society shapes. I believe it is true, they exist, and it lives in every one of us; because things that are worth dying and living for.

But here it relies the post-modernity challenge, to be original (meaning starting from the origin). We tend to forget the anthropological history that we have, and we tend to forget the figures that are made flesh by it. We tend to forget that there is something worth us dying and living for. We have to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves, and when we give in and we face the emptiness we shall have our trial, and we are judged by our conscience, what we devote to our spiritual “me”.

So what does this mean? It’s easy, just as the symbol of the hero marked my life and showed me a path; the loss of the symbol marks my life and shows me a path. What would I be if I would never have had a Che Guevara or an Optimus Prime? I wonder that all the time. I wonder, what does it mean that society is destroying the concept of the “important and respected = hero” to the hands of “important and respected = celebrity”? I also wonder how we can all be heroes, but we cannot all be celebrities; and how  being respected and important is only something of a few. I wonder what is driving our society? In what anthropological construction are we making it? I am not saying that we should go back to old values and figures just as a fundamentalist would (fundamentalist = person that holds tightly to an idea) because we live in a post-modern world where nothing holds nor stays, everything changes too fast). I am saying that our construction should be built on values, not empty glamour. I know what the Oscars are, but what do they mean? Why did I pay more attention in that night to the Oscars than to the heroes that were giving up their lives for democracy in Iraq, those brave Iraqi men, those brave American men that just think differently?

This drives me to another question; we lived and died for God in Monotheism, for the people in the Republic, for the race in Nazism, for the proletariat in Communism; but what do we live and die for, now? The market? Cheaper oil? We have to stop and think about what symbols and meanings we are creating. Life shouldn’t be something that can be traded for another thing that is not a greater idea. Someone else’s life shouldn’t be wasted on imperial wars such as Iraq’s. Life has to start to mean more, we need to reconstruct the hero figure and destroy the celebrity figure; our honorable soldiers should serve the greatness of the US by living for the US, not dying for cheaper oil. Does life mean nothing anymore? I don’t think so; because I believe, I devote myself, I remember, I wonder; I have my Che Guevara, Christ and Optimus Prime. And because I know that it is not just me, but is all of us, and that’s why there is a WORLD MARCH on March 20th against the war, to fight for life and values.

So, what is driving our society? Our anthropological history, our rituals, our heroes, our values, us. And so, if we start to lose our heroes, values, rituals and our history; we will lose our future as society. Because we will not just kill an “other” far away in the Middle East, we will kill ourselves. If we live by the sword, we shall die by the sword.

Personally, I remember the hero Martin Luther King saying: “A country that spends more money in weapons than it does on health care is spiritually dead”