The American Cultural Hero-System

[coberst]

The American Cultural Hero-System

Who am I? Of what value is my life? The child, when asking these questions, is saying that s/he wants to be recognized as an object of value. S/he wants to know how well s/he measures up as a hero.

Freud saw that the underlying foundation for these feelings and ambitions was the “utter self-centeredness and self-preoccupation, each person’s feeling that he is the one in creation, that his life represents all life he tallied all this up and labeled it narcissism. Nietzsche saw this healthy expression as one of the “Will to Power and glory.

This represents the “inevitable drive to cosmic heroism by the animal who had become man.

Culture provides the vehicle for heroic action directed toward strengthening self-esteem. The task of the ego is to navigate through the culture in such a way as to diminish anxiety, and the ego does this by learning “to chose actions that are satisfying and bring praise rather than blame¦Therefore, if the function of self-esteem is to give the ego a steady buffer against anxiety, wherever and whenever it might be imagined, one crucial function of culture is to make continued self-esteem possible.

Culture’s task is “to provide the individual with the conviction that he is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action.

The cultural hero system whether religious, primitive, or scientific is “still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations.

How does the American culture perform its task?

I claim that the maximization of production and consumption is the principal means for the satisfaction of self-esteem for its citizens. It is through the active participation as a member of a community that strives constantly to maximize the production and consumption of goods that the American citizen best satisfies his or her drive for “cosmic action.

We are all captives of our cultural systems. Whether the cultural system dictates the stoning of one’s sister for destroying family honor or a system that finds cosmic heroism through a process that maximizes the rate at which we consume our planet.

Quotes from “The Birth and Death of Meaning Becker