When people try to define what a hero is, there are some personal and abstract qualities that spring to mind, for everyone. The most obvious personal quality of a hero is courage. All heroes have both moral and physical courage. What this means is that they must be prepared to fight, to suffer injury, to take risks, to endanger themselves.
But of course evil people can have these qualities too. Hitler had great courage in this sense, and so did Saddam Hussein. Hitler won the Iron Cross for bravery, Saddam is supposed to have impressed his executioners with his physical courage.
So the courage has to be moral as well as physical. It has to be courage on behalf of good. And this brings in the most important abstract quality for the hero, which is justice. A hero is a person of courage who fights for justice. The hero’s actions are ones which increase or defend justice, and by justice we mean both the good of the innocent and the punishment of the guilty. The hero embodies a moral order in which the innocent are protected, and the guilty are punished, often in conflict with forces of corruption and evil. Quite often these forces of evil are themselves in positions of power and respect, meaning that the hero restores natural justice by fighting unjust authority.
These features of the hero have been consistent through all art and literature in the West for thousands of years. They are in the Epic of Gilgamesh. They are in the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. The hero fights, and the hero restores justice. The hero risks himself for others.
The original heroes were always semi divine. Gilgamesh was the son of a god. Achilles was the grandson of a god. The legitimacy of ancient kingship was tied to the divine too. Pharaohs and Caesars declared divinity, but often fell short of heroism due to their vices. But the reason for the declaration was not just ego. It was to confer legitimacy. It was to pretend that the reign was ordained by the divine. It was to align secular power with natural justice, which comes from the divine. The superhero often restores this ancient claim. We have films about Thor, for instance, or books about Percy Jackson, son of a god.
We have also analysed what makes a hero in literature. What are the recurring features of ‘the hero’s journey’? In books like The Hero Has a Thousand Faces people recognised recurring elements in every hero story, every heroic myth. If the hero must fight, there must be something TO fight. So the hero always emerges in times of strife and always faces powerful foes. And the more powerful the foe, the more heroic the fight. Heroes face the odds that seem insurmountable and achieve the tasks that seem impossible. And for this to be the case, evil must already be ascendant. Ordinary people must wonder whether the world has gone mad, whether natural justice will ever be restored. And if the hero had status and power, it must have been stripped from him, unjustly, he must either come from nowhere, having nothing, or he must have had everything and been unjustly deprived. Hereward the Wake, a hero who actually existed, is a Saxon leader unjustly stripped of land and power. Robin Hood is Robin of Lockesley, in some versions, likewise a deprived noble. Aragorn is the real King of Gondor.
In other words, heroes must know defeat. If they don’t, there’s nothing heroic in their journey. They haven’t risked anything or lost anything. They must get beaten down in order to rise. In film this is shown physically. In every Rocky fight sequence he is losing before he wins. In Game of Thrones the Starks are the heroic side because everything is taken from them. In Karate Kid Ralph Macchio gets beaten up and bullied before he kicks anyone else’s arse. The Star Wars original trilogy begins with The Empire ascendant. In any decent superhero movie there are fights that are lost and the hero wonders if victory is impossible. It’s not heroic unless it restores natural justice. It’s not a restoration of natural justice unless it begins with evil ascendant.
There has to be suffering and struggle. Without that there is no drama and no heroism. This is why wokeness has no real heroes. They are already ascendant and they face no real struggle. Even in fiction they give us bland characters who only know triumph in boring stories with no cost and no development. That’s why superhero stories have become so dull. Because they just want to revel in their cultural ascendancy. Thus we get the ‘Mary Sue’ character who is automatically great at everything and loved by everyone. Thus Middle Earth becomes some tick box of diversity where the forces of good aren’t small, struggling, embattled and heroic but big, shiny and bland. The hobbit represents something specific (the English yeoman) but also something universal (the little guy fighting back). It’s hard to still consider that heroic when we know beforehand that he now represents a specific ideology (diversity) and a perhaps universal evil (entrenched corporate power) and that these things directly contradict the original message (being aimed AT the little guy, not intended FOR the little guy). You can’t pretend your little fictional guy embodies plucky rebellion when you are using him to enforce mental conformity on the little guys in real life.
The ultimate heroic story is also a story of resurrection. This is why the comeback is so powerful. All the other elements are most manifest if the hero seemed dead and buried. There’s no greater injustice to overcome than death. There’s no greater restoration than resurrection. There’s nothing more impossible or more heroic than that. This is why the greatest religious figures have resurrection stories, from Osiris to Adonis to Tammuz to Mithras to Jesus. People try to deny that dying and rising gods and even heroes have any relevance in the modern world, but we still crave these stories whether we believe them or not. We still repeat these stories in fiction. We still look for shadows of these stories in sport.
So these are the elements needed:
1. Personal and moral courage. The hero fights. The hero risks harm.
2. Justice restored. The hero fights for something beyond themselves, on behalf of others, for a greater ideal, for things which improve the lives of others. This reclaims a balance that has been lost.
3. Evil ascendant. Legitimate authority is overthrown. Current authority is corrupt and unjust. The hero fights against this.
4. Impossible odds. It doesn’t look like the hero can win.
5. Actual sacrifice. The hero has suffered, the hero has been harmed. But the hero continues to fight despite that.
6. Resurrection. The triumph of the hero comes after he has been pronounced dead. We see that his return is sonehow divine and the restoration of natural justice because it was so impossible as to be akin to a return from death itself.
Now here comes the controversial bit, and the bit that many will laugh at. But it’s still true. All of these things apply in politics. They have to, since our ordinary experience of good and evil, right and wrong and especially justice and injustice are the results of political power and political choices. The hero’s journey is more important in politics than it is in myth or fiction. The film or the book may shape my society and control my imagination, but when I step out of a cinema I step into the place where politics enacts the direct effects that can harm or help me, that can make me thrive or make me starve.
We have depicted so many heroes in fiction that we think that all heroes are fictional. We think these qualities and characteristics are only imaginary, and we are told to think that. Entrenched power doesn’t want real heroes challenging it. This is why entrenched power is very careful to undermine your historic heroes and to pretend that the distortion of heroic stature that tyrants confer on themselves is ALL of what the hero narrative is, especially in politics. But the hero narrative is never really in favour of the tyrant. Most of the elements needed are not there and cannot be there where tyranny and injustice are ascendant. The hero exists to topple those.
Now tell me which modern leader has ANY of the elements of a hero, other than Donald Trump? Tell me which of those elements he doesn’t match. Nobody else has those elements. He has ALL of them. They have been conferred on him by his enemies. The hate applied to him exceeds that applied to any modern figure who has done good. In the crucible of politics he has been beaten into heroic form. This is even more true if people laugh at it, because that dismissive laugh is the first response of entrenched power to any genuine threat. If you hear it today, remember that you heard it in 2016 too.
He may be the last real hero in the West. They want our heroes to only exist in fiction, so that their power may never be challenged. The laugh, the sneer, the mocking and the silencing, just like the impeachments, the raids, the lies and the rage, are all for one purpose. To kill the threat. But every act, every beat down in print or elsewhere, only confirms his heroic status. They aren’t threatened like this by anyone else. They aren’t as determined to remove anyone else. They know he’s a hero more than we do. It’s why they want you to be embarrassed by hero worship in anything but fiction. Because we NEED heroes to win, and only one has actually stepped forward.