The Fallacy Of Hero Worship
Dear [Mentat],
Yes you can [achieve self-actualization without focusing exclusively on that effort], but usually, only if you’re generally gratified up through level four. If so, then you can afford the luxury of (as Maslowmight call it) unmotivated, non-coping, purely self-actualizing, expressive needs pursuing. At level five, motivations are in fact, markedly less driven by external forces with the purest ones being strictly internal. Also, these needs require less from the external world for their gratification. The most advanced ones require no external input to achieve, and no external measures of success to know whether we in fact gratified them. This seems to jive well with your sentiments.
One would also expect people to show less obsession (or monomania as you call it) in level five pursuits, since these Being needs are less urgent and hurt less when left unfulfilled. People don’t usually get sick from thwarted level five needs, though pathology does appear when lower-level needs are thwarted. The lower the level of thwarting, the greater the likelihood of and the more severe the resulting pathology. There is less risk when gratifying at level five because we don’t get sick should we fail. And, it’s easier to imagine a happy life devoid of piano playing for example, than one without a lover, safe living quarters, and abundant air and food supplies.
Finally, the size of the set of all pursuits that gratify level five needs dwarfs those at the lower levels, thus another reason why we’d expect people to be less devastated when they can’t fulfill a specific level five need (like playing the piano creatively). With so many more choices at level five, it’d be much easier to find another means to produce the same gratifying effect.
I agree that strictly internal measures of success are the ideal, and are ultimately what we seek – happiness independent of others’ whims and judgments. This is probably why so many attempt to start their own businesses — to break the tyrannical grip of the corporate power structure. They want to gain more control over the measures that establish their success, and in so doing make their success more determined by their own rules (internal).
But if we accept [Abraham Maslow's] needs hierarchy [triangle] as gospel, this state might only be reached once the basic needs we have that do depend on the whims of others, are gratified. The ruler, to be a good one, must first be ruled himself. Though once a ruler, he might despisehis earlier life and look down on others still living that life, the fact remains that he had to live as a peasant himself to pavethe way to regal status. Likewise, the person wanting his own business must first, typically, work for others. He might not like that, and would probably consider such work degrading. But that lower work, much as he hated it, must be done in order for him to successfully run his business.
It seems crazy that such a successful person would spurn the path he took through the lower level needs to get where he is. Yet Maslow says that it’s common for people once gratified at a particular level, to start underestimating the importance of the gratifier at that level. In my view, we must not make this mistake, lest we become hypocrites. How can we legitimately diminish someone for living as we ourselves once lived? More on this next.
Are level five doers truly more worthy of our esteem? Do they represent the gold standard of humanity, and are the lower doers lacking who don’t measure up? Shall we blame the love-seekers for exhibiting needs not visible in the self-actualizers? And as a result, should we say, “You should be more like them”? Are the lower-level needs more shameful than level five ones? Are self-actualizers inherently better people?
Do they in fact, make the best lovers? After all, self-actualizers seem more deeply happy and have a greater zest for life, physical and mental health, longevity, generosity, compassion, patience, and such. Can we rightly attribute these achievements to an entirely self-made prowess? In short, how much credit for their advanced standing do they actually deserve, and do people not so advanced deserve any less? Shall the man who completes the race jeer at those still running it, even though he ran it himself? Shall he whose belly is full look disdainfully upon the hungry in New Orleans as they scurry about and ravage like animals to survive?
We’ve known politicians who, once in office, cancel programs that years earlier made possible their political careers [to take off]. Then on the stump, they deride folks who would take advantage of such programs like college grants, public works, and after-school activities. It’s common for humans to achieve success and then negatively judge those who have not. The higher-ups fault the lower-downs for having needs and inadequacies which they claim they’ve vanquished in themselves, and these attitudes are the basis of most inequality. Sociologists say that inequality is the biggest root of evil among humans and is basic to just about every social problem plaguing us today. Well, what better example of inequality than the stratification resulting from these wrongful claims of higher righteousness by the well-to-do? The hero without humility is no hero. The person [...] thinking that he doesn’t need his origins, is deluded.
Once I had many heroes. I looked up to people more advanced than myself and admired them. But I also blamed myself and got depressed because I wasn’t more like them. Then I learned that they were fallible and generally no less susceptible to life’s temptations and hardships than was I. People seeming proper today were likely improper at one time. We must be careful not to conclude that heroes somehow circumvented the customary paths to excellence. They didn’t figure out any other ways of eliminating their basic needs than through sheer gratification. Their way of living is not better per se than needier folks, but more precisely, is a logical progression along the same continuum. At best, we might say of their creativespirit and purely expressive abilities that are so universally revered, that they were lucky or privileged, and fortunate to have been able gratify their lower level needs so that they could play at level five. They might not show symptoms of lower level needs today. But I’m certain that practically all of them would, if deprived of gratifiers at those lower levels.
Attributing too much awe to these fully self-actualizing people without a clear understanding of how they came to be that way, has undesirable consequences. Let me explain. As I consider today how my Mom’s parents treated me and others when I knew them, I think that they were among the most self-actualized people I’ve known. They were kind, unconditionally loving, overwhelmingly compassionate, and selfless. Gram only ever complained about her arthritis, when she complained at all. And Pap? He wanted to hold and protect me just like the women in the family. Gram and Pap rarely yelled, and lead very simple, stress-free lives. I believe you met them in the early 70s during a visit here after we brought you home from the bus one Friday night. They lived in this house before Mom and Dad took it over in 1986, and things look much different around here today than in my grandparents’ time. They had far fewer material goods. In fact, the cellar in the 70s was empty except for a washer, dryer, furnace, water heater, pantry cabinet, and a couple empty tables. But now, you can barely walk down there because there’s so much stuff, much of which hasn’t been used in several years. Mom probably has ten loads of laundry thrown about the floors, Christmas decorations from fifteen years ago that haven’t been displayed since, and lots of papers and other memorabilia. Me, I have an empty upright freezer down there, a brand new air compressor which I’ve not hooked up though I bought it in 2002, and boxes and boxes of every sort of tool. As a boy, I could roller-skate in the basement without fear of running into anything. But not today. Back then, the floors had no clutter; no dirty laundry, no tools lying around, and very few infrequently used items at all sat propped against the white-washed walls. Upstairs, every room, dresser, closet, and cabinet was the same — sparse. The grandparents had very little, and apparently, wanted for very little. How could they be happy?
I never thought about this much until after they both died. It so happened that Pap died in 1977 and Gram followed in 1980 while [First Love] and I lived together in Highland Park. In fact the morning of July 21st, as Gram exhaled for the last time, [First Love] and I had just finished our biggest fight. [First Love] spent the entire previous day at [a local amusement park] with a male friend [...], without inviting me — her boyfriend — along. And when she got back, she was notably evasive about all they’d done together. Even today, [his] name still strikes tension in my stomach, for those two had a colorful dating history in high school, and as such, she had this unshakable affection for him. He was rich, drove nice cars, ran his own business — you know, the all-American male success object. Calls to his number [...] appeared on our long distance phone bills throughout the summer. So there was clearly something going on between them, and I hated that, and resented her for going with him despite my pleas that she not. But you know [First Love]. Never one to acquiesce. He spelled the beginning of the end for us.
The [amusement park] incident reversed the momentum of our relationship. Up to then, we’d been growing closer, but after that collision of wills we started to drift apart. She stepped up her talk of moving into the [...] dorms in the fall, and during August, spent no time in [our apartment] with me, all though officially we lived together through August 31st. She’d begun pulling away and I couldn’t stop it, though I tried often. I fought her at every turn, arguing constantly about how she was allowing [this interloper] to ruin things for us. I accused her of deserting me and blamed her for our demiseas a couple since she after all, she was the one who chose to move out. And then, as if to drive the knife further, she began a new association with [another formidible nemesis].
After she’d gone, I was crushed. What a waste the past seven years of chasing her had become. How could she abandon me after just a few months when I had patiently waited so long for her to love me? It wasn’t fair, and I hated her for it.
[First Love], so much more well-read than I then, could consistently confute me any time we discussed the situation, leaving me stammering and ashamed of my feelings. I never won an argument with her, and she never admitted to wrongdoing. I just couldn’t understand why, if she loved me as she said, she could so casually move away and why she had so much need of [her park buddy] and [the nemesis]. Yet she felt completely right with them and in moving to [the dorms]. All the blame for “ruining our relationship” as she put it was mine. She painted me as a selfish, needy child who would probably never acquire empathic abilities, and so, would never be able to truly love any woman. She said that her life circumstances demanded much more compassion and understanding than I apparently could provide. Then, she said something that brought Gram and Pap to mind once more, and set me on a thinking path that would prove confusing and mentally debilitating for the next two decades. The day she broke up with me she said, “Tom, I have so many problems right now, that you’ll likely never comprehend. Maybe when you’re sixty you will understand. But it’s obvious that as a nineteen year old, you simply cannot.”
Over the next couple months, I called her often, trying to get her to change her mind, and when I wasn’t campaigning to win her again, I spent much of the rest of the time in my bedroom, staring out the window, crying. It was hard to eat or get excited about going to [the trad school I was attending] which up till then, I loved so much. I’d even called [a therapy place] for help, but when they asked a few uncomfortable questions on the phone, I hung up and didn’t try again. I was an emotional wreck though, and I might well have ended it all if it weren’t for Mom, [Cher], and [Dem] supporting me.
Then, in October, whether by some design or random chance, an image came to mind of my grandparents standing before me. This was a peaceful, familiar vision at first, for they’d always been so consoling during childhood. Why not then, now? So I’d imagine them patting me on the shoulders and saying, “There, there now. You’re going to be all right.” And for a few weeks, that helped calm my chronically upset stomach.
Then, one day in early November as I viewed them in a daydream, I remembered [First Love's] words, “…Maybe when you’re sixty, you’ll understand… …Maybe when you’re sixty, you’ll understand… …Maybe when you’re sixty, you’ll understand…” The thought rang and reverberated relentlessly like a favorite song you just can’t stop hearing in your head, mixed with Pap’s voice saying, “There, there now. You’ll be all right.” I felt I was on the verge of some profound insight though at the time, this was just a feeling and I hadn’t the words to express what that insight might be. For some days, the two quotations played again and again on top of each other in my head. They meant something important and I was bound and determined to figure it out.
I came to believe that [First Love's] seemingly optimistic prediction that I might understand her when I was much older, was actually a lament that I didn’t understand her already. Clearly, she felt that I should have been more sympathetic and often chided me because I wasn’t. So this was just her way, through now-obvious sarcasm, of chiding some more, of expressing her beliefs of my ignorance as being so deficient, and my mental growth potential so small, that it would indeed take me till I was sixty to correct what she termed as my blind, selfish, unloving, and spoiled ways.
Ironically, the qualities she found so lacking in me, I found so abundant in my grandparents. They never were selfish, always understood (or at least, they acted like they did), loved without reservation, rarely forced me to do anything I wished not to do, and they were older than sixty. Could it be that if I acquired their strengths, that [First Love] would come back? After all, they had everything she seemed to want. The problem was that I did not, and eliminating this deficit became a life goal of mine for several years.
My grandparents then changed from my consulars to my heroes. I started appreciating the usefulness of being like them, thinking that if I had been more like them while with [First Love], that we never would have broken up. So, all through the eighties until I moved to Ohio, I tried to understand how they behaved, what made people admire them, and then, to emulate them. I believe I considered them more in the first decade after their deaths than during the last two decades that they lived. For some years after our split, all that really mattered to me was getting [First Love] back. So I poured and poured over every memory of Mom’s parents and how well they’d treated me, looking for ways to discover [and]incorporate their good qualities into my being. I scrutinized photographs, asked Mom and her sister and family friends to tell me everything about them they knew, and spent hours listening to the few surviving cassette recordings of them. What emerged at first was further affirmation that [First Love] had assessed me well. I really was wanting in several areas crucial to the health of any relationship, not just with [First Love].
I came to believe that I had indeed been selfish, relentless, immature, and spoiled. And with that, my grandparents assumed a judgmental role in my visions, scolding me for how cruelly I had treated [First Love], and voicing shame and disappointment because I had not learned better how to truly love someone from them. They were the best examples of good lovers around, had spent so much time raising and teaching me, and yet, I had absorbed so little. I felt ashamed and disappointed too, and resolved once more, to reshape myself in their image.
Now, here’s where I made the mistake mentioned just before starting this story, of attributing too much awe to self-actualizing people. I tried emulating my grandparents’ kindness, but most of the time felt pretentious and insecure doing it. They did it so well, but I just couldn’t manage it with the same grace and sincerity. Compassion came so naturally to them as I remember, because they never had to think about it. They were just automatically kindly folk. This was their talent. It was their nature. But for me, to exude compassion for [First Love] was quite a willful and dissonant undertaking. Nothing natural or right-feeling about it. Try as I did, I just couldn’t see her behaviors as veiled cries for compassion. Not when she was doing the following:
· Insisting on frequent time with [her two closest male friends] without me
· Spending only eighteen days at our home throughout the entire three months we lived together with most of those being in June,
· Moving away from our home,
· Distancing herself from me once at [school]
I felt that she was milking me, that she was willfully excluding me from the intimate details of her life that she had so willingly shared before, and that she’d decided well before this that we weren’t really suited for each other. All the compassion and kindness in the world would probably not have affected the outcome. Not really. Delayed it perhaps but not prevented it. She would have left sooner or later, no matter how like my grandparents I was. Of this I was fairly sure.
But on the flip side, maybe it was the depths of my own ignorance, rather than the overwhelming evidence against her, that made me feel so sure that [First Love] was doing me wrong by pointing out my perhaps true, but inconsequential flaws. That is, the things she said were wrong with me may indeed have been wrong, but did not actually cause her to leave. Yet since I still loved her, I for some time ignored the evidence, and aspired to become more of the person she claimed to want. Becoming more like my grandparents [therefore] became an imperative.
Now I had no idea what I was getting into, and soon found that there was much more to being like [Gram and Pap] than simply emulating their behaviors. When we highly esteem a person, it’s all too easy to dismiss the significance of the journey they took to reach the worthiness of our admiration. I did this. I had no idea what they were like before I was born, but learned that they weren’t always the kindly and gentle people I remembered. In the forties, Pap yelled a lot according to Mom, ranting and raving and cursing and drinking daily. He used to play cards and shoot pool just to make ends meet. He had mob connections, though Mom wasn’t very clear on the details. She may not have known any, or she may have been trying to protect his memory. But she did say that in the early fifties, Gram threatened to leave if he didn’t change. That must have scared him, because mend his ways he did. By the time of my earliest memories of him in 1964, he was completely different and he and Gram were still happily married. He had not been for all of his life, the man I knew him to be.
Gram herself, while perhaps more benevolent than Pap, went through her own growth periods as well, though again, Mom didn’t have much detail of her as an adolescent in the roaring twenties. We do have pictures from when she was fifteen in 1925, and she was quite a beautiful teenage girl. Her beauty and the secure way she carried herself hinted that she’d been around the block a few times, though again, I don’t have specifics. But like Pap, she’d become quite the well-liked lady in her fifties and through to her death at 69 years of age. She believed in God without question and went to church when her arthritis allowed it. Often speaking of the Bible, she strove to be a devout Christian, and in fact, was so for her last twenty years. So all I ever saw was Gram and Pap in their silver years. They had already worked out the kinks in their lives before I ever knew them. They had done all the trial and error, made all the humiliating mistakes, committed all the embarrassing acts, all before us kids were even conceived. Thus we have no first-hand knowledge of any impropriety on their part.
Now as a young adult, I still had heroes like Captain Marvel, Isis, Wonder Woman, the Incredible Hulk, and too, my grandparents. Because I had no knowledge of their wilder times, I thought that Gram and Pap had been their good way all their lives, and so I fallaciously expected that they, when they were my age, had the same wisdom, and that they [had] therefore, never been more selfish, less understanding, and less loving than I knew them to be as grandparents.
But I was wrong. I did not account for the inevitable growth that occurs throughout the life of any healthy person. According to my thinking [as a nineteen year old boy], they must have been at my age as they were in their sixties. It never occurred to me that they’d evolved into their current characters and that perhaps in their late teens, they too were likely as wild as me in mine. So in my early twenties, I tried emulating them, but couldn’t, and so, surmised that I was inferior because I just couldn’t find their qualities in myself.
Obviously now, this was clearly ignorant if not irrational thinking on my part. Unlike Captain Marvel, Isis, and Wonder Woman, Pap and Gram were real human beings with real pasts. They’d come a long way to get where I saw them standing in the 70s, a journey most of which I was not privy. So even though they’d seemed perfect, they’d not always been so, and so should not have been revered for always having being so.
The problem with my sort of hero worship is that it puts the hero person on a pedestal by inviting us to believe that they never had or never contended with the shortcomings that we have ourselves, that they somehow avoided the more distasteful aspects of growing up. Of course we know intellectually that no human ever walks on water. But on an emotional level, we often act like our heroes are perfect and can do no wrong, and in fact, never did any wrong. Then our esteems of them become artificially elevated as we affirm such illusions, again and again.
Part of the illusion is that these people were always stronger, wiser, and more self-sacrificing than are we, and that they could never have been as imperfect as ourselves. This makes emulating them most difficult, unless of course you’re a good actor. It’s next to impossible to emulate perfection unless you are yourself, perfect. If we’re going to truly duplicate the depths of any good quality you’d care to mention, then we must walk paths similar to the heroes’. We needn’t walk precisely the same path. But we must walk some path that imparts to and shapes the same values within us as profoundly as the path the hero walked imparted and shaped his values to him. No shortcuts. And that path would necessarily be longer and more challenging than simply imitating the heroic actions.
In light of this, among some other obvious complications that I’ll not get into here, it’s no wonder I had such trouble mimicking my grandparents in my treatment of [First Love]. Gram and Pap’s actions spawned from fifty years of life experience, which I of course, did not have. I could not therefore, rightly expect myself to be like my grandparents the least pretentiously until I had acquired the same level of life experience, which by the way, I still have not, and all this was over twenty years ago.
Back then, [this] deficiency [of wisdom] was even more pronounced. My illusion of their always-advanced nature pushed me into countless futile exercises to be like them without knowing what it really took to emulate them, and much self-deprecation when I failed. I might have avoided this if I had only seen their esteemed standing in their sixties as the product of years of less esteem, and not an innate quality that only the better, more worthy humans had. But I suppose this is a big part of what growing up is all about.
I must confess that I’m struggling here with how to express this idea precisely. So let me approach it from another angle. You remember that Star Trek episode, “Tapestry,” where Picard has that near-death experience with Q? Picard laments his behaviors as a youth (which he described later as ‘loosethreads in the tapestry of [his] life’) that lead to his reliance on a now-defective artificial heart. Looking back, Picard didn’t like his younger self, and so jumped at the chance to relive it when Q gave him the opportunity. For Picard, setting things “right” meant avoiding getting stabbed by the naussican. But as you probably remember, that regretted stabbing while seen by Captain Picardas the result of his immature, barbaric behavior, was also instrumental in his current-day success as captain of the Enterprise. With that part of his life history changed, the captain was no longer a captain, but a lowly lieutenant instead in a dead-end, low-skilled, no-excitement, mundane job. His less well-tempered history though bad, was just as necessary for his becoming captain as the more pleasant doings.
The point: Few heroes have a pristine history. Some of it is good, and some bad, but all of it so necessary for the hero to be a hero. Virtually always, if we’re talking about true-to-life human heroes, they do have a bad side if not in their present, then definitely in their past. Though the apparent absence of a bad side intensifies our awe of such people, we must remember that it is most certainly there, so we don’t come to see the heroes as holier than thou, and as higher than human.
Now, getting back to the question of higher opinions for level five doers as opposed to level three doers: It could be that the chronic mate-seekers lack no more esteem-able health than the love-satisfied self-actualizers. Picard was actually a better man for having indulged his aggressiveimpulses as a cadet, though he devalued his earlier self because of them. My grandparents were upstanding people but only after they had gone through a period of non-upstanding ness. Perhaps like these, love-seekers are simply at an earlier stage in their social development.
Given all this, as well as reading the first hundred pages of [Abraham Maslow's book] Motivation and Personality, I think now that we’ve wrongly pitted level five needs gratification against the lower levels in these dialogues. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. The general tone here has been me justifying my level three needs and disregarding the higher level ones. You on the other hand, appear to favor level five pursuits, as you’ve cited the numerous pitfalls of the more animalistic level three needs and the trouble to which ungoverned level three passions can lead, and indeed, have lead you yourself. You work on level five gratifications, while I work more at level three. Given the debating nature of these talks, we’vecome dangerously close to errantly dichotomizing these needs as though one is more right than the other. Fortunately, your email on Sunday clarified this. Again, I think we both understand that it’s really not an either-or situation after all. Ideally, level three comes first. But when we can’t easily gratify level three, then the next best thing is to focus on levels four and five. While this will never completely mitigate our level three needs, you’re right, it’s better than doing nothing.
If you think about it, this makes no more sense than say esteeming adulthood over childhood, for these are just different stages of humanity, neither one inherently more respectable than the other. Healthy adults don’t fault a child for being a child, though his youngling status means that he can’t do everything the adult does. No, the healthy adult empathizes with the child because after all, he was a child himself once, and recognizes his own childhood as a necessary step along the path that lead him to his adulthood. So he doesn’t fault the child for being where he was once. It’s like righteously proclaiming our peaceful nature by slighting the warriors, forgetting that we too warred in earlier generations, to gain peace within our borders. The warriors today, though they might seem repugnant, are simply doing now what we had to do then to erect the tranquility upon which we now stand while looking down on them. Can we avoid double standards by faulting them for following our same path? Likewise, those happily functioning at level five should not disparage thoseworking on lower needs, lest they become hypocrites. It’s too easy and unjust to blame a bum for his plight, while we live in warm shelters with fully-stocked refrigerators.
This is a typical response however. Maslow describes a tendency in humans, once they meet a lower-level need, to take its gratifier for granted, to begin thinking that we no longer have that need, to start believing that need to represent an underdeveloped, untamed, uncivilized side of humanity which we have evolved beyond, and then in the extreme, come to despise its gratifier. Many discard the gratifiers only to find that the need they thought had gone forever comes back with no less intensity than when they gratified it the last time. But again, especially in light of your Sunday email, I see that you’re not doing this.
