Hero Worship

With the evolution of time, hero-worshipping has evolved into a different horizon of human perspectives and understanding.

History has, a long time ago, taught us that during the ancient civilizations, the entire nation would not only celebrate the ‘heroic’ deeds of their emperors in rescuing the kingdom from an invasion but would also strongly idolize them for their chivalrous bravery. A person who would salvage the peace by sacrificing their life would be dubbed ‘superstar’ for the endowment of a nonhuman supernatural power and noble qualities.     

 

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But today, the DNA of such idolatry has turned flaccid and to a certain degree, it has already suffered an epidemic of extinction from a chromosome of human knowledge and interpretation. Due to such erosion and corrosion of human definition, a sea of change has impacted the lives of our children, when it comes to ‘hero worshipping’.     

Like many of us, rarely does our children hero-worship our ancient freedom fighters or the nation builders although the heroes of history are infinite and incalculable.  

Sadly, for the people of this generation when it comes to hero-worshipping, our adrenalin wouldn’t hesitate to cry out the names of celebrities, sports and TV personalities, models, wrestlers or anyone who has acclaimed superstardom of any sort. In anyways, we admire these people for their success or seemed-to-be fascinating outshine.

But at times, that subtle filament of our human ego tends to get hurt and suffer mental bruises when our so-called idols fail to magic us to a purview of our expectations and designs. That’s when I hear my colleagues regretting watching an English Premier League or LaLiga because their soccer ‘hero’ suffered a miscarriage in doing a hat trick. That’s also when I debated with my colleague about an acclaimed superstar whose movie flopped to churn out a huge collection at the box office.     

 

While a myriad of studies on hero worship and idolatry have been already conducted in many advanced nations, its bearings on our survivals are either viewed as negligible or ignorant. In fact, psychology is much against that ritual of pervasive celebrity worship for varied reasons-both scientific and empirical. It has been regarded that celebrity worship even purely for an entertainment purpose probably reveal an extraverted personality (interest outside the self) which is though deemed healthy and harmless to one’s behaviour. 

However, the one involving intense personal attitudes and admiration is regarded to show the characteristics of neuroticism (a mild psychiatric disorder). And the worst of all, the most extreme worship denotes borderline pathological behaviour and exhibit psychoticism.

“Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry” – Swami Vivekananda