Many of you are familiar with the Old Testament
There are many examples of our idol worship – sports figures, politicians, musicians, and actors, etc. Many in these fields achieve a saint-like status, perhaps receiving more adoration than more established religious deities. However, in actuality, these people remain mortal human beings. While many of these celebrities have accomplished great things,why do we consider their accomplishments as super-human? What is it about our psyche that causes us to worship and and then sometimes hate celebrities?
Carl Jung wrote that the deepest and least accessible level of the psyche is the Collective Unconscious. It is the repository for the experiences of the human and pre-human species and passed from one generation to the other, or as Jung puts it. “…the residues of ancestral life” (Jung, 1953
There is an important danger that comes with the worship of our heroes. They may become inflated, too elevated with success, the heroic transformation going awry. This can lead to enantiodromia where the hero is rendered into his or her opposite, from god into demon. This is all too common for the heroes of our time, from the suicide of Kurt Cobain to the destructive lifestyle of Lindsay Lohan, the psychological pressure of the hero worship of adoring fans can force our idols over to the dark side (BTW, the Star Wars saga is a good example of what we are talking about here). The most recent example of this phenomena is the discovery of Tiger Woods’ sexual hedonism and his subsequent demonization. When those we worship fall from grace, they fall hard. Suffering from the sin of hubris, our heroes fall like Icarus from Greek mythology when they fly too close to the sun. The inevitable result is destruction in the cold and lonely sea.
Being trapped in the hero myth is not only dangerous to celebrities, but to each of us. As psychologist James Hillman says in the book Inter Views
“Fundamentalism serves the hero myth. It gives you fundamental principles – words, truths, directions. It builds a strong ego. It is American psychology. No Hermes, no Dionysus, no Aphrodite in it at all. Utterly monotheistic because there is only one meaning, one reading of the text…whatever else…you have lost the fact that you are a bundle of many levels, people, noises, impulses, trends, personalities, possibilities…” p. 82
We can become trapped in our own hubris, regardless of what we project on to our celebrity heroes. Our own heroism can cause us to become mono-dimensional, losing the creativity associated with the natural dimensionality of our personalities. Rather than projecting our disappointment and rage outward to celebrities, we sometimes need to kill our own heroic tendencies. This is perhaps the meaning in the image of Moses smashing the tablets over the Golden Calf – we must destroy our own heroism before we can properly worship. This is also the message of Sheldon Kopps book, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
References:
Apollodorus, (Hard R., Translator). (2008). The Library of Greek Mythology (Oxford World’s Classics)
Campbell, J. (2008). The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series)
DeMille, C.B. (Director). (1956). The Ten Commandments (50th Anniversary Collection)
Hillman, J. (1991). Inter Views: Conversations With Laura Pozzo on Psychotherapy, Biography, Love, Soul, Dreams, Work, Imagination, and the State of the Culture
Jewish Publication Society of America. (2000). Hebrew-English Tanakh Student Edition
Jung, C.G., (1953). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.7)
Kopp, S.B. (1976). If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients
BIZARRE BEHAVIOR & CULTURE BOUND SYNDROMES 