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You may have found yourself attracted to the vision of the New Hero that I’ve begun describing in my Saturday “Kirism Today” posts. Kirism is a demanding philosophy because it asks you to think for yourself, stand out from the crowd, and live your ideals. That is a lot: but I’m guessing that setting the bar that high is exactly where you’d like to set it. Setting it lower is likely to disappoint you, make you anxious, and open the door to despair.
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Our New Hero surprises himself by expecting a lot of himself. He understands and appreciates the kirist ideals of self-obligation, individuality, and absurd rebellion. He knows that it would please him to continuously do the next the right thing. He recognizes the ways in which his family, his neighbors, his bosses, his leaders, and just about everyone around him want him to be silent. He sees all this, senses all this, and would love to not disappoint himself by doing too little.
However, if he has been seriously psychologically wounded in his past, that may make it very hard for him to step into our New Hero’s shoes. Wounds matter. I hear every day from men and women who have been harmed for life because their mother or father treated them cruelly. That terrible epidemic cruelty, affecting so many children worldwide, produces exactly the sort of consequences that you would expect it to produce: self-hatred, weakness, lifelong confusion, addiction, permanent anxiety, despair, and more. Psychological harm produces all-too-real consequences.
How can such a wounded person also be a New Hero? Isn’t that heroism simply beyond him? No. It may be especially hard for a beaten-down individual to speak up: especially hard, but not impossible. It may be especially hard for a pervasively anxious person to defend an ideal: especially hard, but not impossible. It may be especially hard for your current weakened version of yourself to refuse to submit: especially hard, but not impossible. Despite your wounds, you have enough freedom left to do some small thing in the direction of heroism.
That small thing is your heroic act, the exact-sized heroic act that you are capable of performing at this moment. Whether it will lead to larger heroic acts or to more heroic acts is anyone’s guess. What’s vital—and possible—is that you identify a small, heroic intention right now, align your thinking with that intention, and then carry out that heroic intention. Maybe it’s meeting your bullying neighbor’s gaze. Maybe it’s not being silenced at the dinner table by those louder, more aggressive voices. Maybe it’s finally saying, even if only in a whisper, “Stop that now.”
You do not need to be a perfect hero. You can be a wounded hero. The heroism of wounded heroes matters. The heroism of wounded heroes counts. It is only in the movies that we expect our hero to be able to drive in the wrong direction between two lanes of oncoming traffic without consequences. It is only in the movies that we expect our hero to be able to race across open country, miraculously dodging machine-gun fire as if it weren’t there. In real life, you would expect head-on collisions and fields littered with dead soldiers.
Let us put all that fairytale movie heroism aside, as it mesmerizes us and weakens us. Let us instead honor the small heroic acts of wounded heroes who were bullied and mistreated as children, who suffered real personality consequences as a result, and who nevertheless can say, “I know what’s right” and “I will do what’s right.” There will be bullies until the end of time. Let them be met by an army of ordinary heroes, an army of wounded heroes who bleed, suffer migraines, are awakened by nightmares, but who still stand tall. Where would we be without them?
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