Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
– Abraham Lincoln
Like everyone else, I cannot deny, I enjoy the occasional heartwarming tale of the oppressed masses rising up against the evil empire, led into the fray by one of their own, an ordinary man who has risen to heroism at the behest of the times, to vanquish the evil holding society hostage. Although this is a prototypical fantasy trope, this kind of plot structure can be found in almost all genres, so popular has it become in recent times.
The latest example of such a premise that I came across was in the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, which I started reading about a week ago. A fantastic series in every way, the story revolves around a French Revolution style dystopian society with rich, decadent and evil aristocrats, mistreated peasants and of course, a ragtag band of ‘heroes’ who rise from the obscure ranks of the abused masses to take down the despotic tyrant known as the ‘Lord Ruler’ and his gaggle of sycophantic and over-privileged followers.
Mistborn is not alone in using this much-beloved trope though. From the trailblazing Harry Potter series to almost every Sydney Sheldon potboiler, the underdog is put on a nigh-unbreakable pedestal, from which he sets out to vanquish the arrogant, privileged and otherwise rather generic villain of the particular story. From the eponymous Mr. Potter to Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen, from the supposedly plain Jane, down on their luck engineers of almost every other Chetan Bhagat novel to Daniel LaRusso of the Karate Kid, a great many of the most iconic protagonists of our age have one thing in common – they were all the innocent victims of a vicious villain who finally, by the end of the story, learned to stand up against their tormentors and snatched victory from the jaws of almost certain defeat.
Inspiring as these themes can be, though, one has to wonder, what exactly is so singularly extraordinary about trying to get yourself and your loved ones out of a terrible situation? Don’t we all do that on a regular basis, with varying degrees of success? I mean certainly, a poor peasant who beat the odds and rose up against an evil oppressor to defeat him and better the lot for himself and his fellow men is admirable insofar as he was successful in achieving a difficult goal, but there’s nothing particularly impressive about the goal itself.
Forced to live in miserable conditions under the thumb of a cruel master, anyone would want to revolt. Whether or not they would be successful in such a revolt is a different matter, but that is a celebration of success, not of goodness or rectitude. Success is success, whether it is achieved by Hitler or Mother Teresa, and would most likely be celebrated by both in their own way.
What makes Mother Teresa heroic, however, is that she sacrificed what could have been an otherwise perfectly comfortable life in order to serve people who were in no way related to her, fighting a system that in no way inconvenienced her personally. On the contrary it was a system that could have benefitted her, had she so desired, considering that she was a white woman living in a colonized India. Yet she remained committed to serving and protecting the destitute, the outcasts and the oppressed from a society that would have happily extended her any convenience or privilege for the asking.
I should mention here that I am aware of the many controversies surrounding the actions and purported motives of Mother Teresa. But the point I was trying to make in the above argument was not the goodness (or otherwise) of Teresa herself but rather of the idea that she represents – the idea of selfless service. Of doing the right thing, not because it would benefit you in any way but because it is the right thing to do. To me, that is heroic. And the villain is a villain not because he did something bad to you personally, but because the sum of his actions, relating to the world in general, is bad and corrosive to humanity at large.
I guess that for once I would like to see a hero who has no real reason to be a hero. A hero who is perfectly happy and content with his lot in life, has loving friends and family and is born into affluence, even privilege. A hero inhabiting a society, a system that benefits him and his in every possible way, ensuring both his material and emotional welfare. Basically a person who has no personal reasons for wanting things to be different from what they are.
And yet he fights for change anyway, risking everything in a battle where victory would mean him losing his exalted and privileged station in life. A hero who does what is right for no other reason than that it is right, with no expectation or desire for personal upliftment. Now that would be heroic!
In conclusion, I would just like to say that there is something wrong with a culture that requires its heroes to be miserable, poor and abused, for them to unlock their heroic potential and take action. After all, anyone would want to get out of a bad situation. But not everyone would voluntarily enter one for the benefit of strangers. And what is a hero, if not precisely that?
