On the Death of Gods and the Murder of Heroes

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Nietzsche shouted that God was dead, and the whole world heard him.

The Zoroaster of Sils Maria is often mischaracterized as having attempted to kill god with his proclamations, but his statements were diagnostic. What he recognized in the world around him was a collapse of consensus about the religious narrative and, as a result, the disintegration of collective social values.

Nietzsche saw this mass disorientation as a great opportunity for a post-Christian revaluing of values — and it is. “Disappointment opens up a vista of chaos.”  1   In chaos there is both space and kindling for creation. He imagined that in this vacuum of divinity and direction, a new man, unbound by ancient orthodoxies — a man beyond man — could then create his own life-affirming values.

However, the collapse of religious consensus was never resolved or replaced by another consistent consensus. The outcome of disillusionment has not been a deep soul-searching, but a dynamic moral marketplace in which “trending” moralities are driven almost entirely by the madness of crowds and a culture of complaint.

Pious Christianity fell out of fashion among elites and influencers, but ressentiment remained in the masses, who replaced the divine promise of comeuppance and communion with a utopian vision that promised an equality of outcomes and esteem in the here-and-now — or at least in that unlikely moment when perfect equality is achieved.

Nietzsche’s diagnosis of deicide mutated into a malignant iconoclasm, not in the name of strength and life-affirming values as he had hoped, but in a “Harrison Bergeron”-style handicapping of all aspirational ideals.  2   The presumed absence of an afterlife or some divine authoritarian didn’t result in the widespread determination of individuals to work to realize their highest potential and make the most of finite existence — it resulted in the jealous damning of talent, of natural gifts, and of inherited privilege. It produced among the proletariat an indictment of all advantage and the exaltation of the mundane and the mediocre.

This horizontal culture of leveling has been replacing the vertical culture that preceded it — a culture that looked upward for inspiration to gods in the heavens and heroes on marble pedestals. Ancient and recent heroes of men have been posthumously diabolized by the thumbs of bored and bitchy social media mobs — accused of brand spanking new sins they never knew they were committing. This has not been the destruction that precedes all creation, the upending of one order to be replaced by a new order, but the destruction of order itself — because order itself is hierarchical. Weathered bronzes have not been toppled to be replaced by fresh idols of heroic stature. The pedestals have been left empty — or have been populated with pedestrians or sympathetic figures that can never haunt passersby with greatness.

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It is not only a god or the gods who have been murdered, but also by extension ideals and heroes — the destruction of all hierarchies. The prevailing rationale for this leveling is that by raising up an ideal form — a perfect ideal of strength, beauty, goodness, intelligence, or competence — those who are least able or willing to strive to embody that form will feel inadequate or unhappy. A reasonable desire for fair and equal treatment under the law has been perverted into an egalitarianism of all values.

As the thinking goes, men should not try to be better, because too few will be truly great, and a lot of them will stumble and fall along the way. The safer route is to stay put and learn to love oneself exactly as one is, because the struggle to be better may result in disappointment, pain, or injury. It is better not to try to reach, because one might fall. One might fail at trying to be something, so it is better not to try to be anything. One should learn to accept one’s ugliness, because beauty is difficult to attain, and ultimately transient — as are all things.

The refusal to elevate an ideal of perfection because perfection is unattainable and near perfection is exceptional, is the product of a nihilistic ethos characterized by cowardice and self-loathing. And, it misses the point of idealism completely. It makes the perfect the enemy of the good. This is like saying that a man shouldn’t work to become stronger because he will probably never become the strongest. That you shouldn’t try to be better because you’ll never be the best.

An ideal is not a destination, it is a direction. Without direction, there is only chaos and dissolution.

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Psychologist Carl Jung is often credited, at least by many of his adherents, with a gift of prophecy. In his Red Book , an exploratory project that remained private until decades after his death, he recorded a vision of himself ambushing and murdering Siegfried, the archetypal Germanic hero, “through trickery and cunning.”  3   After committing this cowardly crime he felt tormented by it and searched his soul for his underlying motivation. Jung concluded that, “The hero must fall for the sake of our redemption, since he is the model and demands imitation.”  4  

In this allegorical riff on a Nietzschean theme, Jung seemed to suggest that men must murder their heroes, or refuse to have heroes in the first place, because heroes are the enemies of the true individual. That until we stop copying others, we will be nothing more than pale imitations.

This is another common reason that has been given for doing away with heroes and high ideals — that we are somehow inauthentic or derivative when we aim to reproduce greatness. But, as perfection is impossible, so is perfect reproduction. All of the variables will always be different. A man is only capable of being himself. No matter how hard he tries to be like another man, he will never be the same. He will always be a unique variation on a theme.

No matter how independent you think you are, you learn through imitation. We all do. It’s how we learn everything from language to martial arts. Monkey see, monkey do. And then, when you have some idea what you are doing, you can innovate. That’s where the art is.

To choose qualities in another man that you wish to imitate or emulate means that you are choosing qualities that you value and wish to reproduce in yourself. I haven’t met a man of substantial accomplishment who never had a mentor or a model or an ideal or someone he looked up to at some point. Caesar wept in front of a statue of Alexander the Great.

They say that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” but the word flattery itself implies excessive or insincere praise. A better word is “honor.” By imitating another man, you are acknowledging that he is better than you at something — whether it is a skill or a virtuous quality — and that you want to become better at it, or as good as he is, or possibly even better. By imitating him, you are honoring him based on his reputation or his demonstrated expertise or simply by the way he conducts himself.

Imitation is also a consequence of inspiration. Gods, heroes, and ideals inspire us. The forms and the stories point the way — they give us direction and show us what is possible or admirable. Exemplars and paradigms push us to overcome ourselves and maximize our potential.

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I once attended a defensive handgun class taught by my friend Greg Hamilton, who is a former Green Beret. He told his students that one of the things they could do to cultivate the right mindset to handle an emergency that may require lethal force was to read stories about other people who have survived and overcome extreme situations. His point was that in times of stress, we remember powerful stories of courage and those stories inspire us to face our own challenges with courage. When you know that men have done extraordinary things, it expands your perception of what is possible and suggests the possibility of doing the extraordinary yourself.

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Men don’t need to hear stories about men who learned to love themselves “just the way they were.” Those stories don’t make men better. Hollow affectations of self-affirmation can only make men superficially content, because they will always know deep down they could have been better than “good enough.”

Men need to hear stories about men who are the best, because it drives them to be better.

Why elevate and affirm what is merely acceptable when you can tell stories about the exemplary and imagine what is perfect?

Men need gods and heroes and ideals — not to beg and wallow before, but to inspire them to reach higher and lift themselves up in imitation of paragons, and in imitation of righteousness itself.

Men need gods and heroes and ideals because our conception of what is best — of what is the highest good — orients our entire value system and helps us to order our external and internal worlds.

If we cannot determine what is sacred to us, then everything is profane by default. I believe that many men today feel lost and are looking for some sense of what is sacred to give their lives meaning, order, and direction.

from Fire in the Dark by by Jack Donovan