Heroes
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At some point it became low status to have heroes. Or maybe it’s just my heroes. Make fun of them, these people who believe in something. Aren’t they ridiculous, thinking they could ever do anything?
My friend Thibo put it well: Heroes were heroes because we didn’t know the whole story of their lives, only the narrative. Today we do know all their lives, and people have difficulty going past the necessary human/flawed side of heroes.
To me in part, it’s a larger collective nihilistic pessimism. There’s no objective good, and calling someone a hero implies that what they’ve done is clearly good. There’s no chance of progress, in a genuine or growthful sense. Believing in the idea of progress just outs you as one of the benighted masses.
It’s emotionally deadening.
More importantly, they’re wrong. The future is determined by small groups of insanely impactful people. They kill the incentive people have to become heroes, leading to a leaderless and soulless society.
Thoughts:
- I think this thing is mostly about elon musk. Nobody else.
- Stephen wolfram has an ego.
- Nick bostrom is fair game but not a heroic archetype.
- Ray dalio is too financially focused.
- Nate and Eliezer are part of a low-status cult. Unreasonable to live in their frame.
- Demis started the most dangerous company in the world (by some standards).
- Peter Thiel took a set of political positions which make him unworkable.
- Taleb’s twitter mask is made of insanity and is utterly unrespectable.
- So many turned against silicon valley, in part due to scapegoating, in part because the apps felt so timid and unimpactful. Or, the people they help are elites, and so (the way it feels) it would be better if they didn’t exist, and those people deserve no credit because they’re making the world a worse place.
- Often people are so unseen. Musk pattern matches to ‘cars for rich people’, not re-starting the sustainability movement with electric cars. They hate on the most moral-at-scale person of our generation.
- People hate on anyone whose workers work long hours. Can’t have Andrew Ng as a hero (not that I even do!) because he expects people who work for him to work hard and long.
- There’s something about work being fundamentally evil, and anybody who is a capitalist being the purveyor of that evil, underneath it all. There’s a simmering resentment of capitalism in general underneath it.
- Conclusion is that all of my heroes happen to be flawed, fatally flawed in ways that make me think I can’t voice my adoration for them without umpteen caveats.
- Everyone deciding that JP didn’t have any merit
- My fictional heroes are still okay. Hermione and Ender are acceptable. But the list basically ends there.
- Francisco and Dagny are from an illegal book. HPMOR Harry outs me as a rationalist or rationalist lover. L is a defender of the status quo, and doesn’t belong on the list. Tony Stark is extremely ambiguous.
- Is there anyone who showed the way? Dumbledore? He’s defending a status quo. Grindlewald and his love for him shows me that Dumbledore is like me - loving that side of things and of himself, but unwilling to ally with it. And in his denial of it, not becoming anything more than a preserver.
There’s a personal version of this, which opens with “I feel a full fledged attack on all of my heroes.”
Source: Original Google Doc