It Takes A Hero To Be Selfish
A villain is simply someone who silences that still small voice, preventing their own gifts from improving the world.
When I close my eyes and picture a hero, I see Tim Burton’s Batman unfolding his cape.
I’m instantly transported back to that sticky-floored theatre, dad sitting beside me. My eyes are wide with excitement, and like little bullets of light, the sun is penetrating the cracked walls. I can’t help but hope the movie never ends.
“What are you,” a criminal pleads, Batman dangling him off the side of a building.
“I’m Batman.”
Chills!
I see a cartoon Wolverine, yellow and black uniform, then later, Hugh Jackman’s version. I see Tony Stark snapping his fingers, and a lifetime of action movies pass before my eyes.
But I don’t see myself.
I wonder if anyone does, and what life would be like if more of us acted like our heroes? Would the world transform into a utopia, or would it end up like ‘The Boys,’ a fractured corpocracy full of self-indulgent pricks?
It seems vain to imagine yourself a hero. As if that’s the exact opposite of what a hero would do. And that’s fair. But what if that’s what the enemy wants you to think?
Maybe that’s just doubt, insecurity, and cowardice repackaging itself as false modesty and realism. A way to, once again, avoid failure. What if the only way we’re ever going to be who we were created to be, is to start believing we’re the hero in this story?
Author Joseph Campbell studied heroes and the various cultures heroic myths are associated with for his entire life. He was once asked if he believed that a hero is lurking in all of us; we just don’t know it.
“Well, yes,” Campbell says. “Our life evokes our character, and you find out more about yourself as you go on. And it’s very nice to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature, rather than your lower.”
That’s a lot to swallow. We know ourselves, after all, and it feels more like we should be the villain. All those sinister notions, evil ideas, lack of compassion, and heaps of judgment we’ve carried our entire lives. Add that to all the things we should’ve done, the person we wish we were, and there’s no way we could be a hero.
Except that’s wrong.
All the best heroes are screw-ups.
We don’t love them because they’re free of problems; we love them because they win despite their issues. And who’s faults are we more intimately familiar with, and therefore more capable of overcoming, than our own?
Becoming the hero, Campbell continues, starts with listening.
“If a person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life, and insists on a certain program, they’re going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off-center; he has aligned himself with a problematic life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. And the world’s full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.”
A villain, then, doesn’t have to be Joker gassing Gotham or Luthor destroying Metropolis. A villain is simply someone who silences that still small voice, preventing their own gifts from improving the world.
Best selling author, Steven Pressfield, agrees.
“We’re not born with unlimited choices.
We can’t be anything we want to be.
We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it.
Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”
That should be a relief, but it’s not. It means you can’t coast. It means the only reason you’re not the hero in your story is you’re choosing not to be. Worst of all, it means that once you decide to take the hero’s journey, life gets harder.
“Rule of thumb,” Pressfield continues in ‘The War of Art.’ “The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
To Pressfield, Resistance is a force. Something like climate, it doesn’t really have a body, but it’s all around us, trying it’s best to shape the way we interact with the planet. We can either be shoved around like a lost ship at sea, or we can rage into the storm, the way a hero would. We can take our chances with the whale, dragon, or whatever source of malevolence fate has in store.
Because what else is there?
The cost is high, of course. It requires a certain type of focus. A laser-like form of attention that separates the signal from the noise, allowing us to discover the lessons we’re meant to learn, and therefore share with the rest of the planet.
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” Campbell says. “Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
You will be condemned to continually questioning if what you are doing is right.
“Fear doesn’t go away,” Pressfield says. “The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”
And if you’re like me, you’ll feel selfish. But that’s ok. Even necessary. It means you’re on the right track.
In a recent interview with Tim Ferriss, Matthew McConaughey says that selfishness is our duty. That the specific task we’re created for can never be fully realized if we’re not all in, all the time. He calls it the “egotistical utilitarian.”
“The egotistical utilitarian,” McConaughey says, “that’s what the real prophets are. That’s what Jesus was up to. Making decisions. That’s the honey hole of when we can succeed or have satisfaction or live life the truest.”
For McConaughey, that’s acting. To do anything other than that goes against his nature. It’s his obligation to the world, then, his heroic sacrifice, if you will, to act.
“Where the decisions we make for the I, for ourselves — the selfish decisions — are actually what’s best for the most amount of people — utilitarian.”
It’s hard at first to think of something like acting as heroic. But then you realize that it’s not the acting that’s noble; it’s a willingness to do only that which you were created for and nothing more. To wholly, selfishly, lean into the curve that has your name written all over it. To become the hero in your own fairy tale.
Nelson Mandela, Jordan Peterson, Stephen Hawking; all heroic forces of nature who have given the world much by leaning into the person they were created to be. Undivided and present, these world transformers do little more than the one thing they were made for. They don’t ignore it, try it out on the weekends, supplement it with plan B. They push, with everything they’ve got; committed, selfish, absolute.
Resistance will beat you silly, and you’ll want to quit. And while you may find the Virgil to your Dante or Sam to your Frodo, you will ultimately be alone.
“No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.” — Robert Greene
And that’s ok. Even preferred. It takes a hero to recognize the gift within themselves and to pursue it at all costs. It takes a hero to accept nothing less than all in. It takes a hero to be selfish.
