culture

We Can Be Heroes and Probably Shouldn’t

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We’re awash in heroes today. Funny, it doesn’t seem like we’re any better off.

I’ve had an interest in conspiracy theories and their impact since the late 80s, at first in extremist groups, then the further out beliefs. I came to realize over time that many figures in the Conspiracy Sphere were so-called heroes. The radio personalities, the pamphleteers, the shaky-handed writers of only-vaguely concealed bigotries declared themselves Heroes. They were always being attacked by The Conspiracy, they were anointed by God, or whatever. Every Big Name was also The Big Good Guy.

That’s not surprising. When you make it to the top, people want a story. When you manage to publish a book, you better have a story of why you have to read it. A lot of Conspiracy Stuff is grift, and grifters gotta market, and no one is going to trust Divorced Guy WIth A Medium Sized Library of Bullshit to explain the world.

As I contemplated this and was jotting down thoughts of heroism, I realized how the idea of the Heroic Conspiracist had evolved in the Internet Age. It had become democratized – everyone was a hero.

People regularly posted to message boards, supposedly giving insider information – which is indeed how we got the “Q” debacle. They could be heroes, even if they made it up – and maybe in time they believed it. You’re only a few posts from being declared a Crusader for Truth.

The social disaster of “Q” created many personalities decoding “Q drops” and lending their own theories to a burgeoning katamari of dangerous nonsense. If you worked at it, social media would let you build a following and yes-and your way to fame, if not fortune. Also sometimes there was fortune.

I detected an uptick in the UFO community of heroic stories, often around the Secret Space Programs where people were mindjacked into other lives by aliens. There were plenty of stories of space heroism, echoing tales of past lives from previous New Age communities. You no longer had to be yet another reincarnation of a famous occultist, you could be your own Spiritial Cosmic Fighter!

Anyone could invent themselves as a hero and ride the conspiracy theories to fame and recognition and feeling special. I’ve seen it called Main Character Syndrome, Protagonist Syndrome, etc. We certainly need a name for it.

Now this isn’t exactly new. Our media is awash in “heroes” you can pretend to be like. American Christianity tells people they’re in a great Crusade – and is also media fueled – but other religious trends have declared people part of some Great Heroic Effort as well. It’s just I think this got amped up in the Internet age to the point where we’re all supposedly heroes.

Social media would be glad to reinforce it for you if you had a good pitch and persistence. Believers didn’t just believe, they backed each other up, creating a web of confirming the heroism of each other. You could always find an audience to confirm your stories of heroism against aliens or the Illuminati or whatever. You can even make money at it.


It’s heroes all the way down. Sure some people jockey to be the Big Names, but you can get a little reinforcement here and there.

Of course it’s not heroism. It’s grifting. It’s loneliness. It’s people who need therapy not social media. But everyone gets to be a hero, even though none of them are heroic. Heroism has been hollowed out, lined with mirrors, and turned into a self-reflective room for personal aggrandizement.

Now I wonder how a world deals with so many false heroes – and how the would be heroes themselves cope. How do you step back from a lie and accept humanity? How do you deal with the problems of the world that need more of us just getting their hands dirty?

I don’t have an answer to that, except maybe some kind of psychological or spiritual or media trend at self-reflecting. A simpler, more involved, life. I don’t have any answers beyond vague speculation

I’m not hero I’m just a guy and I’m not sure yet what a world of fallen heroes will mean.

(Special thanks to the podcast Knowledge Fight, who’s further examination of Bill Cooper’s insanely plagiarized work helped me solidify this idea).

-Xenofact

Feed The Unstable God

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I’ve been thinking about religious evangelism lately due to, well, large chunks of human history and too many chunks of current history. Most of my thoughts are about evangelizing by believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism, those who worship a god they insist is infinite and all knowing yet has the same traits and biases as humans. It seems a lot of people want us to follow their Big Daddy – or else.

The funny thing is for so many people proclaiming their undying faith – and being willing to spread it by the sword and the bullet – evangelical Anthropomorphic Monotheists seem peculiarly insecure about their deity. Considering a core part of their believe has a conflict between “infinite in all ways” and “just as petty as I am” it’s not surprising. You can feel that instability.

How do you resolve belief in a being of infinite power and potential with the idea they’re worried about, say, what bathroom they use or what day they worship at? How do you reconcile all the conflicts with experience, holy texts, other believers, and so on? A believer in an all-to-human infinite “god” has to spend a lot of time making excuses or a lot of time ignoring the conflicts – the world will mock them by existing.

This conflict is familiar to me – believing in a god both petty and transcendent is a challenge that is faced by enthusiasts for media, like fanfic writers. Every new show, every season, every episode the staff may dump a new load of continuity or retcontinuity on you. You have to constantly revise your ideas due to new input and instability – but whereas fanfic writers admit they have “a take,” believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism have to act like everything is real.

And this I think is one reason for the rampant evangelism. The world is constantly leading you to question your beliefs as your beliefs are fundamentally unstable and unsustainable without effort. So what do you do? You convert the world, you make the world believe and act the way you think it should so you don’t face conflicts.

Anthropomorphic Monotheism is inherently unstable to a level that is painful in the mind of believers. To resolve that pain they have to change the world so they don’t have conflict, so everything lines up, so everything is it should be. At some levels this evangelism is a kind of Gray Goo, Von Neuman’s Catastro-deity. It just chews up the world to replicate itself.

And, yes, the reasons for religions evangelism are more than just resolving conflicts by eating the world, but I think the inherent instability and need to convert are worth examining. Maybe it explains people’s need for an Apocalypse – they need a fundamental point where unresolvable conflicts are resolved, and are fine to watch the world die to have it.

So next time you see believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism enragedly trying to convert people, ask how much of that is them trying to resolve the inherit instability of their religion. And ask yourself how much of the world they’d burn to fuel it.

-Xenofact

Art And Spirituality

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Last column I wrote about how my experiments with art parodying spiritual bullshit and grifty scams had been intriguing.  I understood how art was part of human spirituality,  how it our love of beauty and form and such was a way to powerfully communicate deep experiences.  This made me realize it was time to explore something I’ve been trying to put into words about art and spirituality – my parodic work helped me talk serious stuff, go figure.

Simply put, I think art is inseparable from spirituality as art is the bridge that connects us to the Universe, the Tao, The Big Picture, because it connects to our thoughts and emotions.

The universe is vast and complex, our world is complex, our lives complex – even one person is complex. We’re here trying to understand reality, move within it, live within it – but it’s so big. This is why I like the term “The Tao,” which is essentially “the source of all this and no we can’t really speak of it.”

I’m honest on my biases. But let me go on.

Now we humans, we may be small, but we are aware of how huge everything is. We model the universe, we understand it, we analyze it. To work with it, with each other, to survive, grow, explore, or even just goof off, we have to find ways to handle this great Giant Allness. Philosophy and religion and spirituality are ways to organize and naviate this world and live inside it. Obviously some philosophies and religions don’t work out that well, but you get the idea – a bad plan is still a plan.

How do you connect us to our philosophies and meditations and spells and the greater universe? Well, humans have art. Art is where thought and emotion and sensation all come together, where a single picture or image can lead us to the bigness out there. Art is connection

Art is the bridge between us and The Big Picture, the way we line everything up to really think and feel and experience the greater world. From lovely philosophical writings to complex spiritual charts, awe-inspiring gods and gorgeous meditation hangings, those symmetries and poetries help us connect.  Those synergies of emotion and word and sensation come together and we get something larger than us in a way we can handle.

Art both focuses us and helps us get bigger.

In fact, isn’t most of religion and spirituality really art in the end? Temples and diagrams, pithy advice books and statues of the gods? It’s trying to synthesize infinity and vastness in some way you can work with it, get it, think it, and feel it.

The vast powers of the world are easily understood and appreciated and interacted with in the form of a god. You want to understand the states of existence, but the diagram of the Six Realms makes it easier (and hey, six is a manageable number). We drape art over the universe to make it both comprehensible – and to take us soaring into realms greater than ourselves.

Art, that love of form and color and combination, is the perfect tool to connect us to the universe in all its vast living potential.

I think I managed to sum up my feelings. I’m sure I’ll have more to say, but at least I said it – dare I say, made some art of it.

-Xenofact