Favoring narratives of individual heroes over narratives of systemic changes is a cultural problem. Whether it's Atlas Shrugged, the Odyssey or Harry Potter. It instills a learned helplessness and an artificial desire for a "strong man fix things" that can be very difficult to overcome. But it also atomizes and fractures society and benefits those with the most individual wealth and power.
The ranger is a hero. What she is doing is good. But she shouldn't have to do it. And nobody should have to do so much. The article intentionally buries its lede: if this is what it takes to save one person, how can we save thousands? The implied answer is again helplessness: of course this isn't scalable so we can't. What she is doing is too much for one person, so we can't expect it of others. But the real answer is that literally none of this would be necessary if the system were actually built to help these people.
Her work does not require a herculean effort because it is difficult. It requires so much effort because it is being made difficult. The right question isn't how can we scale this, the right question is how can we make it easy enough that we don't need her to be a hero. The question of scalability answers itself once you've removed the obstacles.
those who cried out to quote Tax The Rich unquote, were likewise upset by the tariffs being imposed which are taxes on the rich... a really uniform and effective one! taxing corporations by tariffs is much father reaching than taxing individuals. individual heroes.
those who cannot interpret epic fantasy sagas as allegory or larger than Life metaphors are already helpless and they just need entertainment and some opiates.
Hero narratives are enabling the system.
Those are two different things. She likely doesn't consinder herself heroic. The story about her however is written in such a way to portray her as heroic. It doesn't leave room for any other option than helplessness and hoping for more heroes to emerge.
Framing it as heroes being toxic and enabling the system suggests accelerationism: if things only get bad enough (i.e. if we stop "enabling" the system by trying to work around it), the people will see how bad things are and demand change. But accelerationism doesn't work. When things are bad enough, the people will want a simple answer and a promise of a fast change. Stable systemic changes don't work fast and they are rarely simple.
To put it another way, heroes aren't toxic, heroes are harm reduction. Harm reduction is good because it helps people in the here and now. But harm reduction is not a solution to problems. Solving problems requires putting in the ground work of building bottom-up social structures. There's no reason to believe she would be just as good and enduring in doing that as she is in what she does now. And most importantly, she wouldn't be helping those she helps now because she might not even see it resulting in change within her lifetime.
So given that heroism doesn't work and letting things get worse doesn't work, what now? It sounds like we need a hero to take on the herculean task of dismantling the individualist atomizing culture norms - oh.
The noted person she was ‘saving’ attacked someone when she was on vacation, and she is lamenting how if she had been there she could have stopped him from being kicked out again. And she’s angry (and reading between the lines, probably burning out) and lashing out at people. And not assigning any agency to the person she was ‘helping’. That is toxic. Regardless of her hero status. I’m sure she didn’t start this way, but this is a result of being put in this position over and over again and trying to do the right thing.
Like a combat vet with PTSD who attacks a random clerk at a grocery store due to a sudden trigger, or goes around yelling at everyone all the time because they’re always pissed off. That isn’t usually because of a one time event.
That she is also doing what she is doing, is also enabling the brokenness of the system by not allowing it to fail in a terrible way so the public or those in charge actually do something different.
Expecting heros to solve systemic issues by going so above and beyond that they ruin themselves is also toxic. That’s that I’m calling out.
Someone who jumps on a grenade in a foxhole is a hero - and those around them owe them their lives. That should be celebrated.
That someone got close enough to throw a grenade into that foxhole was likely due to many screwups, and if we ignore that, and even reinforce the environment that resulted in it, we’re just murdering heros, aren’t we?
Not that anyone wants to think long and hard about that of course.
It doesn’t mean all of these problems are solvable - some parts of life are, and likely always will be, meat grinders for a number of reasons. Maybe this is one of them.
Thoughts? I think we’re actually in agreement frankly.
I know the common human fallback is going to the ‘strongman’ (the ultimate hero fantasy).
IMO, that will almost certainly ultimately fail, and is toxic for anyone to try to even ask, because really we need to take a legitimately honest accounting of what we need/want, what price we’re willing to pay for it, and then actually follow through.
As a society. So there don’t need to have heros constantly ruining themselves to try to save us.
Notably, however, some people will still try to martyr themselves, even in those situations, to be the hero no one was asking for. But that is a different kind of problem.