Maybe the hero story is meant for children to have someone to look up to. Heroes exemplify the virtue of the culture and teach children the values of the culture. Whether that means to be brave, physically fit, intelligent or trustworthy, children can learn how to be useful adults and understand hierarchies with stories. While these stories are useful for children they can also create a heuristic that models the world in a far too simplistic way. As we mature we should be more and more critical of our tendency to simplify and gloss over important details. We should try to see the world as it is instead of as it might be imagined.
I am sure that those that have interacted with immediate danger will learn a valuable lesson but if you can prepare someone or help them avoid something bad then they are more likely to survive and pass on their genes. Those that listened to stories and comprehended them, as well as applied their lessons, would have had an advantage in our past which has led to a species that is prone to hold storytelling as a major virtue. The vast majority of humans can understand the lessons that come from stories and we value those that write and act out compelling stories. We are primed to seek out stories as they may help us to survive. This is why the entertainment world has amassed so much wealth, especially in the US.
The problem is that stories would be boring and confusing if they were too realistic. Real-life is oftentimes slow and most of the time nothing interesting happens, especially in the relatively safe 1st world countries around the world today. So, stories must be simplified and made interesting and an easy way to do this is to create a hero versus villain scenario. This creates drama, conflict and an opportunity for a lesson to emerge. Some clever writers play with this theme and will have the hero and villain roles swap or become ambiguous during the story. This is difficult to pull off but if done well can become even more compelling as it illustrates some of the actual vagueries of life. If it is done poorly it leaves the audience with nothing concrete to learn and just creates confusion as to who they should root for.
The reason this concept came to me was that I was watching a video about Jordan Peterson "wrecking" people with his words. It seems ridiculous to take a few excerpts from interviews and think of it as some intellectual victory. Even a long debate between two expert communicators may only result in a minor positive effect on the cultural landscape. Taking a few minute-long clips out of context that makes one person look smarter than another is misleading and disingenuous unless your goal is to attempt to idolize them.
Jordan Peterson could be more humble but if he is as qualified as I believe he is then he has every right to state his case as an expert in the fields of study that he speaks on. Also, he is probably in the minority of those with high IQs and so when interacting with most people on earth he will be the more intelligent and since he usually only talks about what he knows about he seems even more intelligent. He is confident and listens intently. He thinks about his responses more than most but he is not a hero or some kind of perfect human. He gives advise that many people need and they are benefiting from it and he has a great deal to say about humans but even he isn't completely aware of all the variables related to how humans behave. No one person can know everything about psychology or philosophy or any other complicated abstract pursuit.
The real key to our success in the modern world is not the efforts of individuals on their own but of individuals working together. We rely on specialization and the integration of a variety of disciplines to gain real insight into reality and in the pursuit to maximize prosperity. This does not mean that the efforts of individuals such as Elon Musk or Thomas Eddison did not have a major impact on the world but they were not alone in their projects and they were and are not devoid of failures.
Real people are fraught with inconsistent beliefs, personal flaws, and other unbecoming attributes. We often neglect these aspects in ourselves and those we deem heroic. We do the opposite with those with villainize. We focus on their flaws and inconsistencies and deem them unworthy. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
The judgment of others is a crucial skill in that we live in a world of both free and compulsory association with others. We must attempt to accurately judge the character of others in everyday life as well as in the more disconnected realms of politics and foreign relations. This article is not an attempt to deny the importance of assessing others' virtues and vices but the understand the gray and unsteady nature of such endeavors. Really, it is in the pursuit of personal understanding that we can see the nebulousness of others. If we can see ourselves more accurately we can see others as having many good and bad qualities and respect the vagueness of judgments.
At some point, we do need to act on these judgments and sometimes it comes down to deeming someone slightly more good or slightly more bad but we should be careful of our confidence in our judgments. We should seek wisdom in our understanding of our own frailties in an effort to understand the frailties of others and we should be wary of our desire to deify and hold others up above the rest. The inclination to idolize others can blind us to reality and create obedience when the moral act would be defiance. The opposite is true of course.
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