The dangerous rhetoric of heroics

The trope is well-known across many cultures: an improbable savior comes from among the masses, picked by a sign from the heavens or just by their own decision, to take up on a quest that is, based on previous attempts and all reasonable assessments, foolishly hard and utterly unlikely to be accomplished and yet, shielded with an almost religious determination and an obstinacy to ignore the common sense, they somehow manage to defeat the odds, pursue their goals long enough and stick to the task until they finally succeed, with great rejoice of everyone that had previously been repeatedly disapproving their pointless undertaking. The hero comes on top in spite of all the material impediments and even the neglect of the society because the sacred nature of their mission entitles them to go beyond any limit in order to attain it. But this archetype has three major problems that bound to engender an endless amount of unsupported martyrs.

The first problematic aspect of the hero is the supernatural design. Heroes are not envoys of their peers, selected for their training and expertise, especial individuals which can count with the love and the help of everyone because they are seemingly the best prepared for the job. Heroes are self-made, people that in the front of the adversity prove to be bigger than life and continue on their quest when everybody else has given up. And the alleged supernatural source of their selection, be it a calling or a divine revelation, means that anyone with such predisposition can suddenly consider themselves a hero and no arguments from their friends or family can deviate them from the right path. This is what we could call the problem of the subject.

Photo: Laszlo Ilyes

The next issue comes with the task itself, which has to be indisputably grand. Paraphrasing the motto that "all ends well, and if it is not well, it is not yet the end", the hero will continue on their quest until they have achieved something worth of the title, which necessarily leads to a systematic undervaluing of all the intermediate steps that might be equally important for the overall goal, but are instead discounted and waived away as mundane actions. We see this kind of problem in the basic science where analyzing and publishing all the ways that do not solve a certain problem is an essential step to avoid duplication of efforts and to slowly close in on the solution that actually works. Still, many journal editors will save their pages "for something that works" instead of an incessant (and indispensable) stream of "this does not work either". We could call this aspect the problem of the object.

Finally, the way the saga is told is also problematic, because it drops a lot of the nuances that make our subject a person and focus instead on a concatenation of key moments, like stepping stones to cross a river, as if heroes would move from one life-or-death decision to the next with nothing in between. The legend might tell about the hardships of the hero, but it will only do so in an overarching and summarily way, mentioning their existence but not going into any detail as to how often they happened and how hard they were to overcome in each occasion. This narrative license is terribly detrimental for the eventual followers of the hero: when faced with difficulties they will initially persist by remembering that their endeavor is sacred, but if the setbacks multiply themselves the potential hero would start to doubt and question if they actually are "hero material" or just an impostor, all the while just experiencing the same kind of insecurity as their predecessor. This is the problem of the message.

This brief analysis of the heroic trope comes on occasion of watching an episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" where the crew decides to try a new type of engine, which can save years in their travel back home, and instead of the cautious approach they choose to fall into the heroic path. Even if they were unsure of how long they could keep the spacecraft flying in the new mode, they go all in and try to keep it going for as long as they can on their first attempt. That the technology was not mature and the attempt ends in a disaster is not surprising. What I find worrying is that the series depicts a behavior that would be considered reckless by anyone with a basic instruction in engineering: when things can go wrong fast, the reasonable approach is to start with very short windows of operation, where the activity is tested, carefully assessed and, if the situation allows it, taken for a longer ride the next time. This is precisely the path that several research groups are taking in their fusion reactors. Since going wrong in this case could mean destroying a reactor that took decades to build (let alone the lives that it could cost), they typically start with ultra-short runs, just a few milliseconds long, to see how things go in a period of time that should be safe by all accounts. And only after they have had a chance to examine the data from these few milliseconds, the team can decide if it safe to extend the runs to a few tens of milliseconds.

It is clear that the "heroic way" would be to just fuel up the reactor and see if it can run for a day of two, just in the same way that Captain Janeway did, this would be terrible risk, both for the low probability of success and the high cost of the failure. And even if by an odd whim of fortune the experiment succeeds, the missing preparatory work would make it impossible to replicate because the next attempt might happen under slightly different conditions that, if not tracked, could be the difference between success and disaster.

Heroes are necessary sources of inspiration, particularly when facing difficult times, but it is very important not to try to follow on a path that is too far from the reality. The real heroes do not wake up one morning with a new idea in their minds, but instead they start on their quest after years of preparation and only when they see an angle that nobody seems to have tried before (but this has nothing to do with divine designation). Real heroes also fail a lot of times, even if the legend does not tell about it, and sometimes even their achievement was not the original goal they set their sights on, it was just adapted after several previous attempts did not turn out right. And finally, real heroes are aware of the importance of every step of their quest, valuing the errors as well as the successes, because all of them contribute to the overall task. I try to do my best every day, both at work and with the family, and I do not know if that will be enough to be remembered as a hero, but it is the least I can do. Have a nice weekend.