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Post 0

Wednesday, August 21, 2002 - 8:02am

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The importance of dreaming (in the sense of creating an image of something to aspire to) is critical and I'm often appalled when I hear people belittle the dreams of others -- and I'm not talking about strangers here. I'm talking about family members or spouses belittling certain far off aspirations and worst is when they do it to children. This happens all too often when adults around them destroy the heroic figures children often emulate as they learn to find their way in more abstract thinking.

Certain dreams have sustained me all my life, and have drawn me forward though all I wanted to do at the time was retreat. The value of such dreams is often overlooked, relagated to whimsy, or the victim of various religion's 'work ethic' in which dreams have no place and the focus is on keeping busy doing real work. Bah Humbug on that.

If you ever meet anyone with no dreams or those who belittle all in the world that can inspire dreams ... RUN! They have a dangerous sense of life!

Thanks Matt for a very beautiful article!

Joy

Post 1

Wednesday, August 21, 2002 - 1:13pm

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I'll choose heroic beauty over nihilistic depravity any day of the week! Excellent article!

Post 2

Wednesday, August 21, 2002 - 2:52pm

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Thank my lady, Joy, for setting my mind to wandering in this direction after a chat about our writing and what we'd do if we couldn't have children.

You're right, Joy, in that it's critical for people to have a dream they can reach for. I find myself enraged when I hear people belittle somebody else's dreams and I would never forgive somebody who pissed on my own dreams.

People sometimes ask me, when I'm shopping or going out, if I play D&D; they say I have dreaming eyes. Strange, neh?

Post 3

Wednesday, August 21, 2002 - 2:54pm

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Thanks, Pianoman. You ever upload those MIDIs yet; I'd like to hear them. Just zip 'em up if it's less than 1MB, or find website for me to download 'em from.

Post 4

Wednesday, August 21, 2002 - 10:33pm

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Great article Matt. Case in point re what you said about artists weaving dreams of ugliness and emptiness - in NZ an alleged 'artist' just won a top award for his 'scuplture' which consisted of 5 oddly shaped beer crates filled with home brewed beer. The artist waffled on about how it demonstrated the impact of colonisation and the level of control over our lives. I couldn't get over it. I sent a letter off to the editor of the paper that covered the story, but I doubt they'll print it. I said that art is supposed to lift us up and show us how life could be, and the awarding of the top prize to this rubbish demonstrates how irrational society is becoming. The only thing this alleged 'sculpture' does for me is remind me of a late night garage booze-up. What a load of crap.

Post 5

Thursday, August 22, 2002 - 4:33am

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And it probably wasn't even good beer. It reminds me of a slogan used by a Goth band called Type O Negative to whom I'd listen as a teenager: Functionless art is merely tolerated vandalism. We are the vandals.

Thanks, Tony.

Post 6

Friday, July 16, 2004 - 10:45am

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Matthew: You certainly have a way with words. This could almost have been posted as a prose poem if that category had been available at the time you wrote it.

Such a hero is born of passion and reason; it is the artists that must serve as midwives for the birth of heroes, for a hero is made of words and images instead of flesh and bone. Because of his composition, a hero cannot act in the physical world; he walks through the dreams of men rather than alongside them.

Great stuff!

Thanks

Sam

Post 7

Friday, July 16, 2004 - 1:48pm

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Thanks, Sam Erica. I might have written this article almost two years ago, but I meant every word and I still mean every word.

Post 8

Wednesday, September 7 - 7:31pm

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Just came up as a random article. I need to post this by my computer for when I go to write.

Or uh, great article.

---Landon

Post 9

Wednesday, September 7 - 9:37pm

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What a beautiful and inspiring article. Thank you, Matthew.

Also, thanks to Landon for bringing it back up for attention.

Post 10

Wednesday, September 7 - 10:30pm

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Yes, thank you, Landon, for bringing this great article up.

The opening statement is a gem: "The world needs a hero. Not a hero to save the world from itself, but one who can inspire man to rise up, take responsibility for his fate, and create his own salvation." It sits nicely with Nathaniel Branden's point that "Everybody who has any familiarity with psychology knows about the danger of disowning the murderer withing. Far fewer people understand the tragedy of disowing the hero within."

Rand gave many us many examples and wrote hundreds of pages dedicated to her idea of heroism, but she never gave a simple definition of the word hero. Sciabarra emphasizes Rand's dialectical sensibilities, but they seem to be at odds with her celebrations of heroic conquest through reason. Rand the reconciliator of false dichotomies is at odds with Rand the repudiator of all things irrational. James Hillman may explain this contradiction when he writes: "�[F]or what sort of mind wrestling with what sort of issue is the ideology of oppositionalism so useful? The apparent answer is the heroic ego, who divides so he can conquer. Antithetical thinking�belongs to the will of power and the masculine protest."

My theory is that it's time to redefine the hero from something besides the classic dragonslayer to what Matthew has described in the above statement.

Post 11

Thursday, September 8 - 8:06am

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This is one of MGs finest. Beautiful article.

Post 12

Friday, September 9 - 10:08am

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Thank you all -- Landon, Tenya, Joe, and John -- for your praise. I have little time before I have to return to work, but I did not want to go without acknowledging you all.

Joe, I have to admit that I did not set out to offer a new definition of the word 'hero', and certainly not by means of the dialectical thinking Dr. Sciabarra employs. I also have to thank you for the Branden quote concerning disowning the hero within; I am not familiar with Branden's work at the moment, but I think I shall have to remedy that.

Post 13

Friday, September 9 - 2:02pm

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Matthew,

I just read this. I liked it. A tale of a hero is one highly effective way to get a philosophy across and into the mainstream. The USA culture certainly has enough heroes.

I have sketched out (in a very, very preliminary manner) an idea to create a hero palatable to Islamic culture, but reason oriented. That should help a great deal in planting ideas into that culture other than the Koran.

I think the idea will fly after it starts maturing.

Anyway, congratulations on a fine article.

Michael

Post 14

Friday, September 9 - 2:56pm

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Thanks, Michael. I think your idea -- creating a Muslim-friendly hero to inject rational ideals into Islamic culture -- is a good one. Perhaps you could start by romanticising Saladin, who fought the Crusaders without resorting to countering their brutality with further brutality?

Post 15

Friday, September 9 - 9:23pm

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Matthew,

Yes, Saladin is a great choice. Saladin's personal physician and closest advisor was Maimonides the Aristotelian - their story seems perfect for this.

Post 16

Monday, September 19 - 8:45am

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Matthew wrote: Rand wrote that it was the philosophers that controlled the world.
As a rule, this is true.
But rules are made to be broken.
C: Yes, rules can be broken, but you must also add, that when the man of reason breaks them, we all profit from it. When the hippies , the skinhead, the mafia, and the scoundrels break them, we all pay the consequences.

M: the philosophers are not almighty; there are people willing to defy the dominant philosophy even if they lack an explicit philosophy of their own.
C: I never met anyone like that. When someone breaks rules, he wants to impose his rules! Therefore, he has a clear philosophy of his own.

M: If their passion is strong enough, their reason and their sense of life can be enough to foment rebellion against the dominant thinkers.
C: A person's sense of life is created with his interaction with the world he lives in.
The hero is not the one who brakes the rules, but the one who continues what the previous heroes had started. A hero is not born unexpectedly.

I loved your first part of the article. I have little problems though, agreeing with you final part of the article.

Post 17

Tuesday, September 20 - 1:30am

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Thanks for writing that, Matt. It took gumption (and madness) to write it.

Heroism is dead as a doornail. I'm 35 and I've watched the slow death of heroic archetypes since I was a kid in the mid 70s. Would "Hawkeye" Pierce from M*A*S*H be a hero today? Of course, he had lots of lefty ideas but he was a sincere attempt at a hero, much like a Hugo character.

Generations X and Y make fun of heroes. They don't even respect the anti-heros that they pay good money to see. It's not about respect. It's not about inspiration. It's about amusement. It's about forgetting and distraction.

I haven't given up and I'm glad you haven't either.

Post 18

Tuesday, September 20 - 8:51am

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Ciro:

Yes, rules can be broken, but you must also add, that when the man of reason breaks them, we all profit from it. When the hippies , the skinhead, the mafia, and the scoundrels break them, we all pay the consequences.

You're right, but this is not relevant to the theme of the article in question. I wrote "As a rule, this is true. But rules are made to be broken," to acknowledge that even though Ayn Rand was right about philosophers controlling the world, exceptions were possible. I should have been more explicit at the time.

C: I never met anyone like that. When someone breaks rules, he wants to impose his rules! Therefore, he has a clear philosophy of his own.

You're talking to one right now: me. Before I discovered Objectivism for myself, I was something of a nihilist. I held the rules in contempt, but I did not seek to impose my rules in place of the ones I despised. All I had at first was a feeling that I was not born to be either a master or a slave.

C: A person's sense of life is created with his interaction with the world he lives in.

I agree, but I think that a person's basic temperament plays a role in the formation of his sense of life.

The hero is not the one who brakes the rules, but the one who continues what the previous heroes had started. A hero is not born unexpectedly.

I disagree. I think it is possible for a hero to continue the work of his predecessors while breaking the rules. Consider Howard Roark from The Fountainhead. While Roark continued Henry Cameron's battle by insisting on his work done his way, he was still breaking the rules his 'fellow' architects demanded that he follow.

It's true that a literary hero is not born unexpectedly. Rand did not sit down at her typewriter and 'accidentally' create Howard Roark. However, in real life one might find heroism where one did not expect it. Would you expect to find a hero in a kindergarten, for example?

I loved your first part of the article. I have little problems though, agreeing with you final part of the article.

Thank you. And thank you for mentioning your objections.

Post 19

Tuesday, September 20 - 9:21am

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Thanks for writing that, Matt. It took gumption (and madness) to write it.

You're welcome. As for gumption and madness -- I've got a fair amount of both. I'm a New Yorker, after all. :)

Heroism is dead as a doornail.

I disagree. Heroism isn't dead, it's just been driven underground to wait out a winter of depravity.

I'm 35 and I've watched the slow death of heroic archetypes since I was a kid in the mid 70s. Would "Hawkeye" Pierce from M*A*S*H be a hero today? Of course, he had lots of lefty ideas but he was a sincere attempt at a hero, much like a Hugo character.

I would have to watch M*A*S*H before rendering an opinion on Hawkeye Pierce; I had seen a couple of episodes while growing up in the 80s, but I wasn't mature enough to get it.

Generations X and Y make fun of heroes. They don't even respect the anti-heros that they pay good money to see. It's not about respect. It's not about inspiration. It's about amusement. It's about forgetting and distraction.

Yes, a lot of people do. However, being almost 27 (my birthday is this Saturday) and having been born in 1978, I'm one of the few people from 'Generation X' who does not mock the concept of heroism. I know it's not dead, I just have to look damned hard to find it.

I'll admit to a taste for anti-heroes of a certain kind, the sort that do heroic deeds for reasons that are not traditionally heroic, like Achilles from the Iliad and Satan from Paradise Lost.

I haven't given up and I'm glad you haven't either.

Oh, no, I am just a little too mean and stubborn to give up.