Heroes

Monomyths, Systemic Suffering and the Working Class

Morning Comrades.

There are two sides to this story and I am not entirely sure if I can tell both, accurately, or rather they way it should be, but let’s back track a few steps for context. Some of this is going to be personal, some professional and I don’t see how it can be simply be either.

We live in dark times. The fraudulent promise of neoliberalism, capitalism if you may, is here to collect its due and we aren’t ready for what is on the horizon. The mass suffering upon which the foundation of the Western Empire over the last 500 years has been build is coming home, it has too and always had to, it is the very nature of the construct built by more nefarious people as you and me. There are a lot of social media types throwing around slides explaining this reality but if I may add my two cents, stick to books, this here will serve as a solid enough introduction.

Whenever we, for the sake of argument, the working class, have faced these times of crisis, and they go back as far as time immemorial, two events take place. One, the commonly accepted narrative of the “Hero’s Quest” is both spun and believed. Secondly, the exact opposite takes place, when, in times of victory over darkness, a communal, structural response took place. Now, both do exist at the same time and in union can offer solutions.

We desperately want a hero. There are days, like today, when I do. The systemic vastness of injustice is overwhelming and since we have been socialised over millennia to believe in the a monomyth, a story that involves a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed, whilst at the same time eradicating the root cause of all injustice.

This is precisely the problem. I am certain that there are studies that can link the construct of the monomyth to a tool employed by the powers that be to placate us, to provide a false sense of hope that is based on passing the buck and that results in apathy and total alienation. I don’t have that study, but if I can connect those dots during my morning shower, then someone smarter than me has done a study on it. It’s how it works.

The reality is then, that we are the heroes. Not in the sense of the classical or modern monomyths but in the flawed and exhausted persona’s that we are. Collectively, we don’t have to be heroes at all times, individually, we cannot overcome the global systemic injustices upon which our current construct is built, but collectively, all it takes us doing what we can, when can, together.

Bowie and Eno, when writing “Heroes”, oddly enough resulting from a drugged up phase in West Berlin, jabbing at the Wall and saying:

Will keep us together
We can beat them
Forever and ever

Oh, we can be heroes
Just for one day

nailed a modern version of Marx’s “"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" better than most modern philosophers have, but, personally, I ultimately prefer Peter Gabriel’s version. Like almost all Gabriel’s work, it catches me where no other artists does.

So much for the personal side. Going forward is a philosophical approach to the reality that there are no heroes coming to save us, and we, together, are all there is and that’s more than enough. In other words:

There is No Superman: Capitalist Myths, Systemic Suffering, and the Hope of Class Consciousness

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