Being Human

They say “never meet your heroes.” This reel not only reinforces that notion, it reminds us that even the giants of history were just humans, with human flaws and fallibility.

If you don’t want to click the link:

• Steve Jobs delayed treatment for his pancreatic cancer by months, choosing instead to try “woo,” and thus likely shortened his life by years.

• Mozart lived beyond his means, miserably and constantly begging friends for money.

• Martin Luther King was a serial adulterer.

• Isaac Newton devoted thirty years to the “woo” that is alchemy.

Christopher Hitchens pointed out that we don’t need to consider anything about the nature of Socrates’ life (or even whether he actually existed), to appreciate the ideas and philosophies attributed to him. We don’t need to know anything about Pythagoras to understand and apply his Theorem. Ditto for Newton’s Three Laws. We can and should respect their contributions to science and human advancement, and think highly of them in those regards, but when we canonize them or put them on pedestals, we go too far.

Because every one of them was just a person, who lived a day-to-day life just like every other human ever has. Good days, bad days, good qualities, bad behaviors, human failings, and more. Some humans rise up and leave lasting marks on the world, but even the greatest didn’t transcend their humanity to achieve some mythical infallibility.

We all know this in our cores, but we are still prone to, thanks to evolution, looking for heroes and father figures to fix things for us.

When those saviors succeed at fixing a problem, we are tempted to think they can fix more problems.

Sometimes they can, and do. If an auto mechanic solves that mysterious ticking sound, you are more apt to trust him next time your car has an issue. Justifiably so. But, are you also apt to look to him to resolve that mysterious pain in your elbow? Unless he’s also in the medical field, probably not. You won’t elevate your mechanic, no matter how brilliant he is, to hero status.

Sometimes, however, they prove unable to do so. Or, they don’t fix problems to our satisfaction. The “why” doesn’t matter, it’s the failure itself that leaves our expectations unrequited. Because we over-elevated those heroes, our expectations also get over-elevated, and we start to think that, this time, previously intractable problems can be fixed, because this time we’ve chosen the right fixer to put our trust in.

Specialization and division of labor are fundamental to advancing societies, so I am not arguing against trusting experts in their fields of expertise. The point today is that we look to them for what they do, not who they are. Character matters only as a forecaster of future actions and behaviors, not as an essential component. As the earlier examples, and countless others, show us, flawed people can produce great works.

Underlying all this is the admonition not to wait around for someone to cure what ails you, or what you think ails society. Not only will you be perpetually disappointed, you will grow resentful of the world around you.

Columnist Liel Leibovitz offers us some further food for thought. He posits that the true political - and cultural - divide is between “those who blame everything on everyone else” and the “resilient folks who have very little time and patience for the language and logic of victimhood.”

When you are in perpetual search of heroes to lead you out of your perceived state of misery, you affirm a lack of personal agency and treat victimhood as a salve or coat of armor. When those heroes fail, as they are bound to because the remedies you seek are unachievable, you are prone to diving deeper into victimhood.

As Thomas Sowell pointed out, in politics there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Here I respect the wisdom of his words, and while I think he has bestowed many such wisdoms upon us, I judge the words themselves rather than deem them valid merely because they came from him. To quote him without attribution is plagiarism, but to quote him without a critical eye is appeal-to-authority fallacy.

So it goes with all the other quotes I offer here and elsewhere. Even the great Milton Friedman put forth thoughts with which I disagree, and with which he himself later disagreed. As is true of the great minds of antiquity, Friedman’s “heroism” lay in what he taught us rather than who he was, and if the ideas came from someone else, those ideas would be what we value.

The baseline lesson here is to rely on yourself, to seek to manage your own life rather than wait for others to fix things, and to relinquish as little power over your life as possible. What you give up is very difficult to get back, and what you give up is rarely, if ever, used to give you what you ask for in return.