From
the days when traditional societies dominated our planet, people have always
had a certain anxiety or concern with regard to the creation of a surrogate
immortality in preparation for death.
Put another way, the organic imprints that an average person may make
and preserve himself may not be enough to create the kind of surrogate
immortality that the person feels will carry on his own unique presence after
he passes away. His deeds and achievements as well as the daily memories that
he has left behind may not stand out enough in his mind in terms of impacting
in a significant way the people around him.
One
way a person can at least partly resolve the concern is by identifying with a
person who makes and preserves organic imprints much deeper and more intense
than those of himself or of other more average people. In traditional societies, a superhero can be
an exceptional real person who carried out extraordinary exploits, an imaginary
person who frequently had to fight imaginary creatures, or a blurred composite
of the two. These superheroes are found
in legends, myths and scriptural stories.
They are found in oral tradition stories of preliterate tribes as well
as in the foundational religious stories found in traditional
civilizations. Many times, these stories
represent composites of many oral tradition story fragments that have been put
together. But in all these cases, they
are integrated into the cultural history of the people who embrace them. Average people in a particular traditional culture
have embraced these superheroes, because even if the super heroes haven’t
actually lived in historical time, they have been validated over cultural time,
so that on some level, people ascribed to them a sustained cultural existence
that rises above the imagination involved in pure fantasy.
Furthermore,
in truth, beyond simply identifying with a superhero, the average traditional
person mentally merged with the superhero.
The whole culture from which both the traditional person and the
superhero stem acted as a template, a foundation which allowed the
psychological merger to occur. In
particular, the person merged with the superhero much as a child continues to
identify with his mother as a result of mirroring and modeling. And to the extent that all the people, particularly
all the men, merged psychologically with the superhero, to that extent they
joined forces to create one gigantic collective surrogate immortality which
strengthened them all psychologically in the face of death.
So if
the ordinary traditional person had problems creating a unique presentation
with a unique self-definition in order to prepare for death, nevertheless, he could
fall back on his culture and the members of his society to fortify him for when
his individual consciousness ceased to exist.
Now,
in modern technological society, we have superheroes too, but they have a
somewhat different function. They are
developed for entertainment purposes by writers who have motives of making
money. While J.K.Rowling uses classical
and folkloric references in building her characters and creatures, most of
these references are going to go over the heads of the young people who read
her books and see her movies. As would
be the case of any author who used classical and folkloric references today. Most people in modern technological society
simply are not very acquainted with the cultural traditions of the past.
As to
the way people encounter superheroes today, they, the ordinary people, are too
connected to modern science and to reason to, on any level, believe in
superheroes, except maybe when they are very young. These are not superheroes that become parts
of larger cultural and even religious traditions in such a way that people can embrace
them as a part of a surrogate immortality.
The very fact that new authors are constantly creating new superheroes
with their own distinct living environments means that no one or two
superheroes can ever command the attention of the majority of the population
for a sustained period of time, the way it would occur in more self-contained
folk cultures in the past. Instead we
almost get to the point of superhero of the month.
And
again when supernatural things occur in these stories, people get shocked out
of the numbness they experience in modern technological society, but the
amazing supernatural exploits don’t lead to a strong sustained
identification. In traditional society,
people engaged in far more intense primary experience and so they could
identify if nothing else with the intense physical effort put forth by their
superheroes.
So
whereas traditional superheroes and their exploits act to elaborate on and to
extend the preserved organic imprints made by ordinary traditional society
people, modern superheroes and their exploits merely act to temporarily pull
average modern technological society people out of the experiential void in
which they constantly live. Superheroes
are sources of sustained admiration and identification for traditional society
people; they are mere sources of temporary kicks for modern technological
society people. Ordinary traditional
society people merge in their minds with the superheroes that they admire and
this allows them to strengthen their surrogate immortality by adding a
collective surrogate immortality component to it. In their minds, these traditional people
merge with an anchoring tradition that should last forever.
Today,
there are so very many superheroes.
Different comic book companies produce multiple superheroes that they
start putting in alliance with one another to defeat the seemingly overwhelming
forces of evil. But these superheroes
are as two dimensional as the images of them that appear on the pages of the
comic books. The focus of these superheroes
is to shock people out of their numbness rather than to truly inspire people
through an identification with greater life narratives and exploits than they
themselves would be capable of.
Unfortunately,
it seems that more and more people all over the world are electing leaders who
shock their citizens with harsh unpredictable rhetoric and harsh unpredictable
actions. Trump, of course is the
foremost example. With all the real problems
that exist in the world today, problems like climate change, where are the real
inspiring superheroes when we really need them?
(c) 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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