We have a severe lack of revolutionaries.
Our stories keep handing us a hero. Luke Skywalker. Katniss Everdeen. Neo. Aragorn. One person who sees the world as it is and shatters the broken system.
It’s everywhere. Star Wars has a genocidal ethno-empire and says the farm-boy with a laser sword will bring it down. The Hunger Games shows us the inevitability of an imperial extraction state and a girl who can shoot a bow well brings it down. Lord of the Rings gives a prime evil that wants to subjugate the world to his authoritarian will, then the hero becomes a king.
We’ve taught the next generation that if you see injustice, you need to wait for a hero to fix it.
In Star Wars the ultimate power of the galaxy, the evil Empire, subjugates and destroys everything it touches. It immediately sets up the rebels as the ‘good guys,’ the ones to root for. Their struggle, off screen, has an actual weight to it. They fight for the way things once were, and come together to bring down the Empire.
But despite this, they are losing. Forget what the war in Iran says, asymmetric warfare in Star Wars is absolute defeat. Constantly underfoot, the rebels cannot win anything of value.
Then a farm-boy and a scoundrel save a princess.
I remember being a kid, and just hearing the name ‘Luke Skywalker’ and getting excited. The hero. The one we needed to win the fight.
I wanted to be Luke. Everyone did. But deep down, we all knew we weren’t Luke Skywalker. We were just like the billions of people in the galaxy, just trying to get by, hoping Luke might show up and save them.
We learned this feeling. It didn’t just appear. Not just by the stories we had, but by society, our community, and our parents. One person. One conscience. Change comes from a single, extraordinary person.
But let’s move past just the idea of Luke as a hero. Luke represents us all. Or at least, the idea of us that society has decided we should be.
When modern Western stories were first created, so was Western Liberalism.
Let’s stop here and make sure we’re speaking about the same thing. Liberalism: individualism, consent, equality, (free-markets…but don’t get me started.)
Think about that for a moment, though. Individualism. The entire medium of storytelling revolved around the protagonist. Still revolves.
Novels, which arguably shaped all media we consume, generally show us the mind of a single person. A protagonist, and how they navigate the plot.
An individual, there to change their world.
So, think about this:
You want to control the world, mold it from a communal space into an individual one. What better tool do you have than a story?
I am not saying a dark cabal planned this, but that the ideology required it. Modern liberalism, as a guiding principle, requires these stories. The world view we hold as a Western society is that we need a hero to come and save us.
As a leftist, and a Westerner in the imperial core, it’s hard to not fall into this trap. You read about Che, MLK, Malcom X, Lenin, Mao…but there is more to it than the face.
Each of these leaders had institutional backing, and the communities they built were powerful and lasting. But there are so many examples of movements that require no central figure.
The Zapatistas, Black Panthers, Blair Mountain/IWW, Paris Commune, and Solidarity Poland.
Not all are surviving the onslaught of liberalism, but it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t real, measurable change for those involved.
Don’t let media trick you; it takes more than a hero.