Having Heroes You Idolize May Be Holding You Back in Life

The other day, I read David Foster Wallace’s Consider The Lobster for the first time. After just three essays I was raving about the guy. When I took my lunch break for the day, I told my mother all about Authority and American Usage and how it changed the way I understood language itself and in the space of an hour evolved my understanding of the debate around political correctness to a complexity beyond what anyone in mainstream media appreciates. Later that day I discussed with my father Big Red Son. Wallace went from utterly unknown to me to approaching hero status within twenty-four hours.

The idea of a hero is fraught with danger. On the one hand, heroes are inspiring. They demonstrate to us that it is possible to be the men and women we hope we can be. Heroes are above reproach. On the other hand, real-life heroes have an annoying habit of being above reproach in one area of their life and yet tremendously deficient in the rest.

Nominating someone your hero makes it likely you are going to look right past these deficiencies. Further, you’ll miss how their strengths contribute to their failings. Part of growing up is learning how to look at someone and admire someone for their strengths while simultaneously acknowledging their deficiencies and making no excuses for them. When we make people our heroes, we forget to do this.

Quick searches on David Foster Wallace were a sharp reminder of this. His writing is penetrating. His ideology is both firm and considerate of those who don’t share the same. His feminism is admirable. On paper, he’s someone to whom you should listen. But in reality, some highlights of his life include stalking ex-girlfriend Mary Karr, pushing her out of a moving car, throwing a table at her, scaling the side of her house, and following her son to school. Unfortunately, Wallace is not hero material in any way.

This brings us to the question of ‘the artist and the art.’ Is it ethical to enjoy art by an artist whose actions you do not endorse? Until now, this question remained too challenging for me to answer. But Wallace’s writing gave me immediate clarity: Depriving myself of Wallace’s writing wouldn’t make up for anything bad he’s done. All depriving myself would do is deprive me of something that could improve my life (and deprive Wallace of the chance to posthumously do some good as well).

A lot of people only reason this far out. Once they decide to continue enjoying what a flawed human produces, they don’t allow their understanding of the creator as a flawed human to affect their understanding of the creation itself. The person who created it is reduced to a birthing machine for the created.

This is a misstep. Invariably, the strengths that create something worth having are also part of the dynamics of the deficiencies in the person making it. To model your life after something created by a deeply flawed person without considering how these concepts you’re modeling contribute to negative attitudes is to allow it to create those negative attitudes in you. If you care about your character, you have to consider what values are in the stuff you like and whether those values align with yours.

What you consume will change you — the only question is how.

Picking apart the values in what you consume is easy enough. You merely need to be able to answer two questions to know all you need to know: “What is it trying to say?” And “Do you agree or disagree and why?” If you don’t know what it’s trying to say, you don’t know what kind of attitudes it is teaching you. You’ll learn the attitudes in what you consume without realizing it’s happening. If you don’t know exactly why you think what you think, your subconscious will treat repeated exposure to it as a tacit agreement which becomes stronger over time. Only considered decisions, the kind where you know what’s at stake and what you think about it, contribute to the content of your character.

One of the joys of living is having meaningful relationships and experiences that give you the chance to come to considered beliefs this way. When we make people heroes above reproach, we strip ourselves of the opportunity to form a thoughtful opinion about what they say. Over time, our internal landscape becomes littered with the broken beliefs of others. We only think what we think because we were told to think it.

My reading of Wallace’s essays before researching him was adulatory in precisely this way. Whatever he wrote, I believed. After my research, my reading of his work was focused. Each assertion of his came under scrutiny so I could understand how the parts create the whole. I ended up learning more from Wallace because I stopped worshipping him.

The fix for unconsidered beliefs is simple. Stop worshipping your heroes. Any time you find yourself overawed by someone you know of through books or television or the internet, go to their Wikipedia page and check out the Controversy section. See what their detractors have to say. If their detractors look like credible humans (and not trolls or Twitter bots), weigh the truth of what they claim. Even if you ultimately conclude that negative claims about your heroes are false, understanding who makes these claims and why will lead you to a more human understanding of both your hero and yourself.

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