Given the chance, a percentage of people in the world will always hope that someday, a hero, a true leader, a messiah, will ride out of the hills, or fall out of the heavens, and come swooping in to rescue them from the wretched state of their lives. This desire, the desire that a more powerful person will help you in your struggles and hardships, is nearly universal, except among those relative few individuals who already have sufficient power and authority not to need help, and not to want someone else whom to be accountable.
In democratic, or near democratic countries, political candidates almost always fill this role, if even unintentionally. To me, the mark of a good potential leader is how much they go out of their way to lead on issues and not exploit the hero fantasy with a shallow persona. I think that in fact, much of the let down that almost always follows a less than perfectly capable leader, once they’re in office, is the realization that they’re not the hero we thought they were, and often, not even close. This is because, the greater the initial fantasy, the worse the fall. Sometimes it can’t be helped.
In nineteen thirty’s Germany, Hitler played the archetypal hero to the max, and a half-starved population bought into it in lieu of bread and cabbage. Desperate populations are vulnerable that way. If people don’t know what to do, they will inevitably follow anyone who claims to, as long as that person looks passionate and idealistic enough to seem heroic.
The worst historical examples of this are, of course, political, but political with a populist ideology to shore them up. Of those, communism is the all time champion. The idea that you can get everyone to work on behalf of everyone else, in a collective super-family, without serious squabbles, inequity, slacking off, and exploitation is absurd. And yet, desperate peoples still buy into it because it sounds good as long as there’s a hero figure (Lenin, and Chairman Mao) to make them believe that the forces of inequity (firmly imbedded in the cells of most all people) can be vanquished once and for all, and for everyone.
Deep down, what all this appeals to is our latent (or not so latent) human sense of dependency. The fact that people stood by communism, for over half a century, is not only a testament to the intractable nature of totalitarian governments (and human resistance to change), but also an illustration of the fact that many people would rather give away some power to a hero-leader, or a even a perceived “heroic” state, then have to assume that responsibility for themselves, in light of their own weakness, uncertainty, and inability. In other words, excessive cultural or societal dependency leads to a noticeable and non-heroic complacency until extreme circumstances prompt people again to act in their own self interest, but only then when a new “ism” and a new hero emerge to prompt them.
Of course, the All-Time super-hero of fostering this tendency, in large groups of people, is religion, especially western religions with their single, supreme, omnipotent, and omniscient God. In all three of the major western religions, God is the super-parent, the ultimate authority, and the last word in human affairs. How could it be otherwise when you fashion a god in your own image? Worse still, Christianity, especially the literalist, fundamentalist, sects, and as well some of its less mainstream offshoots, adhere strongly to the part at the end of the bible that says that Jesus is coming back soon to make all things right. Shiite Muslims, such as in Iran, and now the ruling majority in Iraq, also have a belief that the founder of their branch of Islam is coming to straighten out the affairs of men.
Trouble is that if you think that the day of reckoning is coming in your lifetime, then you might have a tendency not to be as concerned about the affairs and trends of the day, like escalating global conflicts over scarce resources and looming catastrophes like global warming. Instead, you might see those challenges as signs of the coming messianic transformation, and even take actions to hasten that through exaggerations of current antagonisms. In any case, such a world-view is almost always constituted with an “us and them” mentality, but in this instance, the “God-hero” will take care of “them”, so the “us” won’t have to deal with details like figuring out how to get along with your fellow humans.
And that, is my larger point, that excessive dependency on either a political or religious philosophy leads to such complacency and ideological reductionism, in the affairs of men and in our understanding of the complexities human beings, that we will willingly and unquestioningly give away our power to others instead of learning to collectively solve our own problems. In a working democracy, that is what happens by consensus and compromise, debate and discussion, trial and error, and astute observation, both of ourselves, others, and of outcomes. And this is what our founders intended for us, that we become in Jefferson’s word’s, “an educated and enlightened citizenry… indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic””. If America continues to desire an expansion of democracy around the world, it has to realize it that is not only the task of establishing “one man one vote”, but also the real work of lifting people up in a better comprehension of political, economic, and yes, theological systems. Given the exaggerated and obtuse political polarities we’ve been generating here, often for the sake of cheap ideological and personal self-interest, can we hope to counter, by our example, the reactionary ideologies that have has been fomenting in the developing world? It’s a question we need to examine more closely before we further try to fashion that larger world entirely in our own image.
