Hero Says: I AM SOMEBODY

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Hero Says: I AM SOMEBODY

“Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away. Tom Brokaw

“True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat. Napoleon Bonaparte

“What the world needs now, more than ever before, are every day heroes who are ready, willing and able to make a difference. Greg Hickman

Anthony Quinn, in “Requiem for a Heavyweight, earned his inner sense of self-value by constantly reminding him self and others that he was “fifth-ranking contender for the heavyweight crown. This made him really somebody, gave him continual nourishment, allowed him to hold his head high in the shabbiest circumstances.

“Academic intellectuals have their own fine gradations of worth: a six-hour teaching load, with no under-graduate teaching, in an ivy-league school; a three hour teaching load, with only one undergraduate course, in an almost ivy-league school. How these balance in the scale of self-worth can cause agonizing life decisions.

Hero is a technical word used in psychology to label an action that helps a person to increase their self-esteem. Modern man likes to spend his time shopping. Politicians inform us that a hero goes shopping when things get tough in Iraq.

“The supreme law is this: the sense of worth of the self must not be allowed to be diminished.--Alfred Adler

Self-esteem is the goal and heroism is the means; those who do not find a means for establishing self-esteem are in trouble.

My act is heroic if I think it is and it is also heroic if others think that it is. If my act is heroic then my self-esteem grows. We are not talking about absolutes here. In some cultures if I stone to death my sister for dishonoring my family then my act is heroic.

Our self-esteem is derived from symbols. In the ape such matters were biologically cared for but we humans depend upon a symbolic constitution of worth. We are largely artificialized creatures dependant upon our society to provide each of us with a means for establishing our own self-esteem, without which we go crazy.

Self-preservation and a sense of power and satisfaction in activity are combined in symbolic wo/man to produce the heroic urge. Nietzsche and Emerson both considered heroism was “necessary and good, and that nothing less than the urge to heroism would do to typify the place of man in the animal kingdom¦If you are a student of society, and want to understand why youth opts out of the system, find out why it fails to offer them the possibility of real heroism.

Newsweek article “The Martyr Factory: Why One Libyan City Became a Pipeline for Suicide Bombers in Iraq by Kevin Peraino. This is the story of a dead-end Libyan city of Darnah and the 52 young recruits who choose martyrdom in Iraq as one of the few means available for them to acquire self-esteem.

In Darnah there were few means provided for establishing self-esteem—martyrdom was one of them. Perhaps that might be why some Americans made the same choice when they enlisted.

Our whole life is a continual animation seeking an artificial symbol of self-worth. Often net-worth is our avenue for satisfying this craving for self-worth.

Is net-worth a valuable means for establishing self-worth?

What means, other than going to war, does the American society provide to young people to satisfy there need to be heroic?