Heroes
What makes a hero?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing American hero, John McCain. Nick, John McCain, sadly recently died. He is, he was an American hero, right?
Speaker B: u know, ran for presidency in: Speaker C:out, also, he's admired on both sides of the houses by Republicans. He's a Republican, and a very sort of conservative Republican, but he's admired by lots of Democrats as well.
Speaker B: He wasn't very admired in: Speaker A:started criticizing Donald Trump. But he's very principled. He's famous for being principled, is the word, and also for taking often a bipartisan approach. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Okay, so that's a sort of a sketch of the life and times of John McCain. So, I guess, you know, I think one of the questions we want to ask is, or maybe it's not, is, well, what makes a certain person a hero? And I guess, in this case, is the fact that he went, he put himself in danger, and he was in the military. And then it's this principled thing about the fact that he could have been released early, but chose not to. And then, in life of politics, was known to be a principled person or had that reputation. So he sort of fills some of the
Speaker B: a book by Joseph Campbell in: Speaker C:it works very well. And I think... It maps on nicely to the three-act structure of... Indeed. The introduction and the character build, then you have the challenge, then you have the victory. Now, I was, so I was
Speaker B:thinking about this in the context, there's no reason that a hero couldn't be a hero in an afternoon in this context, you know, that you are plucked out. And there has to be, I think, it has to be an element in which you are chosen, not the chooser, that the hero is chosen to be there, and they're tested, and they respond in the right way. So they pass the test. And I think if you look at the, you know, things like the way that people have responded, you know, look at the sort of first responders in 9-1-1, or, you know, those kind of citizen heroes, the guy in, you know, when the Herald of Free Enterprise sank, the guy who made a bridge out of his own body, you know, these things where you think, well, you know, a lot of us wouldn't have done that. A lot of people just wouldn't have responded in that way. They might have panicked or run off. But the point is about why we think about these people as heroes is they're chosen, first of all, they haven't gone there necessarily, they've been, events have pulled them out of the ordinary world into this extraordinary world of crisis or terrorism or whatever. And they've faced that ordeal and passed. And I think that's where, and if you put that in the context of John McCain, you know, the going out to Vietnam is sort of, in some sense, the hero's journey. And then, you know, the ordeals that he faced and then successfully passing and coming home. It kind
Speaker A:of fits. So yeah, kind of fits. So but one thing that I know we want to move towards is perhaps the concept of being a flawed hero. But maybe if I sort of turn that around a little bit, do you think, not really in the examples you mentioned there of, you know, being a paramedic in the afternoon, and you become a hero, but do you think it's not necessarily a necessary condition, but do you think it makes for a more interesting hero, if they are flawed? Or are heroes always flawed? Because it's, you know, demonstrates a sort of human fallibility. I want to hear from
Speaker C:Peter. Yes, let's do him first. Well, I think real world heroes are always flawed. I think because they're people, they're not all going to be perfect. But I think, yes, I think in fictional heroes, I think more interesting ones have a darker element to them. So I'm thinking Batman and is more an interesting character than Superman, who's always just nice and perfect until he goes bad in Superman 2. Bizarro World. Oh, the film. Yeah. Yeah. So and indeed, the most interesting characters are often the anti-hero or the villain. They've just got a bit more about them. More interesting dimension to them. Yeah, and often the anti-hero's journey
Speaker B:will be almost, well, it'd be very similar to the hero's journey, but they might have taken a different path. They have not passed the test, or they've responded to the test in a different way. They've been Darth Vader, where they've failed the test and they've become an
Speaker A:agent of the enemy. Okay, well, let me pose that question in a different way. With the greatest of respect to John McCain, who I think there are things about him that are certainly admirable, and I can see why people would call him a hero. But one thing that I'm slightly uncomfortable with is, let's not forget, the thing that he's most famous for, his being imprisoned in Vietnam, well, was during a war that is arguably, you know, not a just war. And, you know, why were Americans there? Hundreds of thousands, millions of... I should say, definitely, arguably,
Speaker B:because I'm not acceding to that simple statement, but carry on. Okay. But I mean,
Speaker A:millions of Vietnamese civilians killed, and of those that were killed, a lot of them were killed by bombing in North Vietnam, for example. Can I just say, Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star,
Speaker B:with deaths possibly in the... certainly hundreds of thousands, possibly in the millions, of innocent people who were simply going about their day. Might have been children on there,
Speaker C:like families of stormtroopers. They almost certainly were. And blowing up a Death Star above an inhabited planet is likely to kill off most life on that planet as well.
Speaker A:And I'm happy to go along with these. Yeah. So, right. So, I mean, I'm not trying to trivialize
Speaker B:the Vietnam War, but I'm saying that, you know... No, just to finish off my point,
Speaker A:just to finish off my point, and, you know, there he was flying a bomber and got shot down by, I mean, putting it another way, is, you know, one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. If you're Vietnamese, is John McCain really a hero for you?
Speaker B:Was John McCain trying to kill innocent people? No, he wasn't. The US government wasn't trying to kill innocent people. Now we can argue about exactly to the extent to which they cared whether they killed innocent people. Terrorists are trying to kill innocent people. So there is a difference there. I'm not saying that he's a terrorist. I'm just
Speaker A:questioning, you know, if you look at... I'm just questioning this, you know, this concept of hero-worship. Well, not hero-ship, of being a hero.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, I don't... I think there's a totally separate thing here, which is about the the hero. What we think of as a hero is someone who faces certain challenges and responds in the
Speaker C:right way, what we consider the right way. Well, just picking up, to argue Fraser's point, Osama bin Laden is a hero to a lot of, as we would argue, misdirected young men, extremists, Muslims, to hold him up as a hero. And he was sort of responsible directly for the deaths of
Speaker B:lots and lots of innocent people. I don't really have a problem with the idea of a hero being, at the same time, an agent of what we might think of as evil. I don't think heroism is about achieving good results. That is not necessarily... Now, obviously, we prefer the heroes who achieve good results. They're better for everyone. But I don't think it's necessarily... it's more to do with the thing, the way that they respond to things. Do they pass the trials that are put in front of them in a good way? I mean, it's not why we're able to point at, you know, sort of heroic acts on both sides in the Second World War. You know, it's not... I'm not going to judge an individual as an individual German soldier who does something very heroic and, you know, manages to capture an entire sort of Belgian fortress single handed. You know, that's heroic, right? Because he's putting his life on the line, and he's achieving this result successfully. And, you know, he's doing it through, you know, but it's not... the fact that he's working for the Nazis isn't great. But it's certainly a cross on his CV. But it doesn't necessarily attract from
Speaker A:his inner heroism. Yeah, we're talking about being on different sides, different causes. What about an example of famously one of the... from the 7-7 attacks in London of one of the people who was... he got part of his leg blown off, but was called a hero because he helped people get out of the carriage and he saved some people. And so he was all over the press going, isn't this a wonderful person until someone piped up and said, oh, hold on, this bloke is a criminal and was convicted of raping me. And he served a number of years of prison. Doesn't feel like much of a hero to me. And so I guess I just want to get into this idea of, you know, of the fluidity of the term, or it's meaning... how meaningful is it to call... to be a hero? Well, I think... Actually, sorry, I want to hear from Peter. Well, I want to ask a different question. Okay. Sorry, Fraser. So let's... Do you want me to answer your question? No, we'll come... Even though you love Peter so much. No, I want to hear... I want to hear
Speaker C:why do we find... why are heroes so attractive? Why are they so provocative? Why do we care so much? Why do we have... Why are we writing loads of plays and films about just your everyday man? Why is there going to be a hero to it? And I think it boils down to that, you know, in a social species, you need hero types in your group, the risk takers, because they... having enough of those around make you more likely to climb over that next mountain or find a new source of food or to improve the... your life chances as a group. And on an individual basis, you aspire to be like that because they... the heroes are often the physically the most strongest and the most likely to be the top guy in charge of the clan. So individually, the men will aspire to the hero leader, because the women all want to mate with him.
Speaker A:Yeah, men want to be him, women want to be with him. Men want to be like him, women want to be with... Well, you know what I'm trying to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it's a question of story. People... There's something about humans, we love a story. And I remember recently sort of thinking, oh, God, my kids are just reading the same story again and again. They still love it. And then I thought, well, hold on. I love, as I've said before on other podcasts, is I love the Richard Sharp novel set in Napoleonic... well, in the Iberian Peninsula.
Speaker C:You also love ways, Fred, you haven't mentioned that.
Speaker A:Yeah. But it's essentially the same story again and again and again. The same thing happens every time. And he's very much a hero figure. And I thought, well, it's not just my kids who like this stuff, a story. It's me who likes the same story again and again. And so that would be my interpretation. And that's perhaps for the same reasons that you... But the point is, why do you like the story about the hero? Right, right. And I think it's for the reasons that you've said.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nick, you can either come in on that point or the... I think Peter's touched on it. I'm not sure. I certainly would not be too sure that it's as simple as we need heroes in the tribe, because among other things, certainly the heroes aren't necessarily the biggest and the baddest and the strongest. I mean, you know, like, take Frodo. He's never the most powerful person around him. He passes the test of being able to destroy, or at least, you know, getting 99% of the way to destroying the ring where a lot of others would have failed. But he's never the most powerful person there. I mean, that's Gandalf, right? So you always have these figures in stories who are the really powerful ones. And that's not usually the hero. And similarly, he's also not... the hero is not necessarily the biggest hit with the ladies. I mean, so, you know, you're the hero of Luke Skywalker. He's the one everyone fancies the Han Solo character.
Speaker C:I think if you're being literal, that's the case. But I think it's the guy who overcomes the challenges, the sexy thing.
Speaker B:I don't know. My feeling is that it's actually a vicarious enjoyment of doing things that we actually would enjoy doing. So I think we've evolved to enjoy doing the things that heroes do, rather than something more to do with society and the kinds of people we want in our tribe. It's more actually we like watching that journey because we ourselves are the everyman to begin with. Everyone is ordinary. And we like the idea of the Harry Potter, the owl arriving. You know, we like the idea of being plucked into a world where we can do fun stuff and face challenges and win. And that's, you know, why computer games are so successful, because they give us the chance to do that. You know, they give us the chance to be that just that everyday shepherd, you know, the shepherd's boy who finds a magic sword and then goes off and defeats a dragon. And I just I think it's as simple as that, that we like doing those things because, you know, we've evolved to want to defeat things and to win.
Speaker C:Yeah, I was relating to a point you made earlier that I read an interesting article years ago. I probably struggled to find it now, but it was it was lamenting the types of heroes that are in popular culture, modern movies. There's been a sort of shift in Hollywood movies where the heroes. So thinking of films like the X-Men, Star Wars, the heroes are more often than not plucked out, chosen in some fashion, either by their genes. If they're X-Men, they've got these special abilities or chosen by a person to be the guy or by God or by some sort of external power. They're less often these days, apparently according to this article, self-made or decide to be that guy, to be that hero. And, you know, think about, you know, think Rocky. He was a boxer, quite good, but decided to be the best and did the montage and then sort of.
Speaker A:Actually, a key part of that story is that they couldn't find a contender and they said, let's pick a no hoper. So there was an element of being chosen there.
Speaker C:But he wasn't sort of injected with drugs and made to work at that. So sort of the there's a this this article is interesting. There's something missing there. It certainly counts to the American dream. Everyone can make anything of themselves. And it was interesting that this is counter to that ideal that in order to be a hero, you need to have been elected or given some special just before.
Speaker A:I know Nick looks like he's bursting to come in, but I think you're right because I want to film and watch a book is To Kill a Mockingbird, where the hero in that is. Is it Atticus? I forget. Atticus Finch. Yeah, Atticus Finch. I think he's definitely chooses. Although you can say there's another situation where whether sorry, another context where the situation has landed in his lap. Yeah, that always has to be. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker B:Nick. Right. And this goes back. You asked this question about. So I'm linking this is what comedians call a callback. I'm linking something you mentioned earlier to something we've just been talking about. I trust this is going to be hilarious. Watch this. No, it's not. It's not a joke. It's this issue about whether heroes can be flawed. I say they necessarily are in a story because they have to grow. Right. So they have to start being incompetent that. So Luke Skywalker's rubbish at the beginning. Right. He's got no idea how to hold a lightsaber. He's a whiny little bitch. Yeah, he gets bopped by the little floaty thing. You know, he's in the journey is the growth. Right. So the heroes have to start out being incompetent. This links directly to what Peter was saying. And I absolutely agree. It is boring to watch a thing about a guy with superpowers. Superheroes are boring. They're boring because they are just given power from nowhere. And hey, presto, they use it. Now, that's kind of fun to watch. It could be spectacular, but it is not in any way as thrilling as watching a total, you know, every man rise to that challenge. And I think the very good example, I think it seems to speak a lot about the difference, about the failure of the new Star Wars films, is that someone like Ray starts out way too powerful. She starts out in episode seven. She can mysteriously use a lightsaber. She can mysteriously use, you know, the force to read people's minds. She can influence people. She can fly the bloody. She does everything. So a lot of people are saying, well, she's a Mary Sue. Right. In other words, she's a character who just is just perfect. She's like this perfect. You know, if you imagine being a screenwriter going, oh, well, what would I really like to be like as a person? And that's fucking boring. It's boring to watch because there's no growth. They start out great and you go, well, fine, we're there. They just win everything they go near and that's that. We need a hero's journey.
Speaker A:OK, look, we're going to wrap up. But before we do, I want you to tell me either from the real world now or from history or from literature or film, who is your biggest hero? And you are not allowed to say anything that's related to Star Wars. Oh, damn. That's that. I'm going to have to go to number 13 on my list. OK, I'm going to start off with my answer. So my hero actually is Harry Flashman, who is just a complete out and out, out and out shyster and con artist and braggart and coward. And yet runs around the world having a great time shagging loads of girls and killing lots of people and having a great time generally being having an adventure. He's my and also I like the way he's just the opposite of moralizing. You know, he's very much immoral. So he's he's my favorite. I probably say he was an anti-hero. He's an anti-hero. He's an anti-hero.
Speaker C:I since I'm not allowed to Star Wars, I'll have to go with Indian Jones. Yeah, I think it's such a strong character. He's vulnerable and human, makes those mistakes, trips up and that sort of thing. But is just an all round daring do kind of guy.
Speaker A:And he's an intellectual as well.
Speaker B:And he's intellectual as well. Yeah. People have pointed out to me, and it does sort of slightly take the sheen off that in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones doesn't actually do anything. Bear that in mind. Next time, next time you watch it, he is in no way instrumental at any point in the plot. He basically just follows the arc around right at the end when all the Nazis die. And that's it. He doesn't do anything. So, yeah, just interesting fact there. No, I had to think about this because I used to always say Garibaldi, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who, of course, unified Italy, driven by a dream, you know, decided that he would, you know, impossible, really, you know, Italy at the time occupied by these hugely powerful foreign powers. And, you know, it seemed hopeless, but he was able to convince the right people. And he himself, you know, had this very heroic, classic hero's journey, you know, was given this impossible challenge. I think the siege of Naples or something, they lost and had to flee and his wife died. And he had to. He couldn't even bury her because he was fleeing, you know, he had to get away. And then, of course, eventually, you know, his dream came true. And then right at the end, Vittorio Emanuele II, the king, I think, at the time of Naples and subsequently king of all of Italy, you know, they sort of met up halfway down and he knelt down and said, and you said, it's yours. Have Italy. You're now the king. And so he was incredibly cool guy, Garibaldi, very popular at the time, you know, but subsequently since then I've played a few board games about the Reformation. And I have to say Martin Luther is going up in my estimation because and I think, again, it's sort of this challenge of impossible odds. But I suppose you could say that his the challenge to him was, you know, the his conscience, you know, saying we you cannot allow this wrongness to go on. In his case, primarily the sale of indulgences, but actually a few other things and stood up to the mightiest foe you could imagine, which was the Catholic Church, you know, in the kind of just early modern era. And and of course, you know, despite facing huge opposition, threat of death, you know, certainly lots of contemporaries burned at the stake, ended up effectively winning, you know, the Catholic Church changed, Protestantism took off. Incredible story, really, and it really illustrates that, you know, one guy can make a huge difference. Well, he did a lot, but he didn't invent the biscuit while he was doing all of it. OK, I was going to say he did invent. He did invent that sponge you can clean your back with in the bath. What Martin Luther.
Speaker A:OK, right. All right, gentlemen, we'll stop there. Thank you. As always, listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Thank you until next time. Bye bye.
