There’s a great episode of The Crown that sums it up for me. Prince Phillip is overly excited to meet the astronauts from Apollo 11 during their royal visit and prepares a lot of deep and philosophical questions for them to discuss. However upon meeting them he is bitterly disappointed to find they are just normal humans that find fart jokes funny.
Never meet your heroes means exactly this: you will come to realise the person you look up to and hold in high esteem is just another person with typical person problems, if not have other character traits you despise. They’ve done something you find admirable, that’s great! But leave the relationship there.
Back in 2000 I lived in Loveland, OH which is just north of Cincinnati, OH. There used to be an old fashioned barber shop on Loveland-Madeira road.
I walked into the barber shop and was greeted by the barber and told to take a seat. There were two other men in the shop. One was in the chair and getting his hair cut and the other was reading a newspaper and I was unable to see his face at all. The barber finished with the guy in the chair and looked over at the man reading the newspaper and said:
“Neil you’re up.”
The man closed his newspaper and laid on the chair next to him…
And I found myself looking at the first man that walked on the moon.
I completely blew every circuit breaker in my brain. Somehow though I managed to keep my composure and didn’t turn into a complete idiot. As he got his hair cut we talked about mundane things, never once talking about space flight, although we did discuss aviation. At the time I was a skydiver and he actually had some questions about it. He told me that he had a ride under a parachute… I replied, yeah I’ve seen that video.
And that is how I met and had a conversation with Neil Armstrong.
Tell him any good fart jokes?
People are better in the abstract and getting the high definition version of someone exposes flaws you didn’t know about or ignored while you thought highly of them.
It means don’t put people on a pedestal. Everyone is human and everyone has flaws. Don’t try to put people above flaws because they have them and if you pretend they don’t exist, the realisation will just hit harder.
That a person you admired from afar might turn out not to be so admirable once you get to know them.
I think its better reworded as “don’t idolize people; everyone is flawed”.
To me it means the hero might have done something notable or impressive but once you meet them in person you realize they are just people with the same faults and annoyances as everyone else.
It used to mean that the idealized version of people you see from a distance isn’t necessarily going to jive with who they actually are. They may seem mythical and turn out to be mundane. They may seem genuine and turn out to be farce. It’s better to let them live as an image in your heart than to resolve them into all that a person is in reality.
Unfortunately, as so many things have gone, even that is too optimistic for the world I find myself in. Not a song, not a character, not a book or ideal has managed to remain unsullied by the realization that we’ve culturally agreed that sex crimes are just ok. Especially against children. Don’t meet your heroes, they’ll probably rape you.
it means people are people.
Ideals should remain just that: idea(l)s. Be fine with them not being… a reality.
Exactly. It’s fine to build up flawless versions of people in your mind and to try to emulate those imaginary heroes or draw inspiration from their strengths.
Just be aware of the fact that you’ve created a fiction. Don’t treat real humans like you would their hero image. They say to never meet your heroes, but you can’t anyway: your heroes don’t exist in reality. And that’s ok.That said, many really really awesome people do exist. They may not be perfect, but they’re arguably better than that: they’re good and they’re real. You would be lucky to know them. I think one issue is that far too often our heroes are famous, and that is not a group that generally selects on the basis of quality of character. Many famous people are good at something and we mistakenly take that as proxy for being a good person. It probably helps that we mostly see them doing the thing they’re good at.
Exactly. It’s fine to build up flawless versions of people in your mind and to try to emulate those imaginary heroes or draw inspiration from their strengths.
Indeed. And even without looking for heroes, or role models. Try to be the best version of yourself does not mean you have to be perfect, nor that other people should be.
We’re all filled with flaws. No matter how amazing we’ve been told we are, or how amazing we think we are, or even how amazing we can indeed be (lucky you).
Doesn’t mean you need to accept the unacceptable, just be realistic. Don’t you ever fart in bed? Don’t you ever pick your nose? Don’t you like to eat some crap from time to time? Don’t you like to watch/listen to/read and actually do some real stupid shit, from time to time? I do!
Me? I’m the sum of countless flaws plus a few scarce qualities. I know it and so does my spouse, which is also filled with her own flaws btw, the person who I love today at least as much as I have been loving her for the last 30 years or so we’ve been together… and counting.
That said, many really really awesome people do exist.
Yes! They’re all around us. They’re just not perfect and they’ve not been waiting for us to debark in their life.
So, when we’re dismissing them because of their perceived flaws/imperfections, or because of something/someone they like we don’t like… we’re missing out on their qualities and maybe on getting to meet an amazing friend/partner/someone to spend time with.
Powerful people just can’t help but be vile.
As you gain social power, the empathy centers in your brain are suppressed. “Power corrupts” has a neurological basis.
True, but do heros have power? My heros are generally powerless. It’s that they managed to do great things in spite of this that earns my hero’s respect.
Yeah it depends on who your heroes are for sure, but unless we’re talking about like “my granma”, anyone who has significant accomplishments probably has enough social status within their group to count as powerful.
Thinking more like Rachel Carlson, author of Silent Spring. Social cred now, sure, but she was an obscure marine biologist toiling away for a pittance at the time.
Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carlson, E.O. Wilson, and many many more. I wonder how many I would find assholes if I ever met then on a street, or had them over for dinner.
My dad was a linguist, so he’d met chomsky at conferences when he was just a big name in linguistics, not politically. Despite being very left wing, my dad wouldn’t listen to anything chomsky later had to say on politics because dad hated chomsky. Arrogant pig-headed asshole, he’d say. And when my dad called someone an asshole he specifically meant a kind of false or unempathetic rudeness.
Before the epstein files came out i told my partner I bet chomsky is in there.
That said i want to believe specialists toiling in a field they love are less likely to fall prey to this, but academia politics are known to be brutal.
Could be, you never know. But I doubt Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson went to epstein island. But great point. Epstein coveted intelligentia deliberately.
That’s very interesting, do you have any source so I can read more about it?
I didn’t know it was scientific like that.
(Here. Are. Some. Sources). These are pop articles. Below are some quotes from papers. I go on about this topic a lot!😂
“Recent evidence has demonstrated that empathic responses are modulated by social power.” “high-power people show low empathic accuracy compared to low-power people” “numerous studies have shown that people with high power are less accurate in recognizing others’ emotional expressions”
“higher socioeconomic status is associated with reduced neural responses to the pain of others” “experiments using fMRI indicates that power promotes greed … displayed decreased response in the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, indicating a weaker restrain of self-interest when processing receiving more than others” “Power decreases empathic concern” “powerholders may experience less distress and less compassion as well as exhibit greater autonomic emotion regulation when faced with the pain of others” “elevated power impedes accurate understanding of other people’s emotional expressions” “Elevated power is associated with heightened interest in rewards while low power is associated with increased attention to the interest of others”
“In face-to-face conversations, participants disclosed experiences that had caused them suffering. As predicted, participants with a higher sense of power experienced less distress and less compassion and exhibited greater autonomic emotion regulation when confronted with another participant’s suffering.”
Don’t admire people, admire deeds.
Heroes are an ideal you admire from afar. Humans all have flaws up close.
Considering everyone I’ve ever looked up to is either dead or has been exposed as some kind of creep, it means exactly what it typically means as well as a caution against necromancy.
Tangential to that phrases I’ve come to understand that everyone will let you down in some way or another.
Everyone looks better from a distance
