All Our Heroes Are Monsters

But can we buy our soul back?

This famous proverb in its entirety is better than the first sentence alone; a sentence people misquote not knowing how powerful the whole statement is.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…” — Lord Actons

Martin Shkreli is that big pharma bro that jacked up prices on live-saving drugs after creating a near-monopoly. He came forward from jail saying he could cure Covid-19 if he gets let free early. This is the set up is forming my thought experiment here-in. We’ll confront some terrible hypothetical ideas that make us think twice about acceptable evil for societal gain. AKA Utilitarianism.

Famous people live in a world we will never experience. A world of “yes” men and other facilitators there to support your worst behaviour so they can ride your coattails. Then we need to think about groupies. Tell me if you got famous for something and individuals you are sexually attracted to are tossing themselves at you, what would you do?

Villains are the feature, not the bug

I don’t think I have ever met a true “genius” that was not off in some way, maybe somewhere on “the spectrum” which is a dismissive way of trying to bucket things as abnormal. Plus we tip people over the edge when they reach status. I think we are all out there somewhere, it just manifests differently. There are loads of my friends that swear they saw first hand that Stephen Hawking was a regular at a strip club.

Disney princesses Aurora (aka Sleeping Beauty) and Snow White were woken up by date rape. At the time it was romantic, through the lens of today, it is pretty evil. But maybe it is a metaphor for an awakening executed in a dated way. Disney hasn’t aged well.

Gandhi slept naked on piles young girls while only advocating for his race/class. Even beloved unfaithful presidents like JFK (financed by bootleggers and the mob) were racist, drugged-out human beings. Coco Chanel was a Nazi spy, but look at those clothes!

I know an ER Dr that used to have sex with nurses in stairwells after saving lives of hopeless cases. It was consensual, but shit, tell me about the fog or war or sleeping with groupies is predatory.

Lance Armstrong raised millions for cancer, until he got caught cheating. What do you do if you are the one in charge? Acknowledge that everyone is doping, or make an example of him while letting everyone else go?

PLAY THIS CLIP

Serial Killer Cures Cancer, Charges Dropped, Kills 6 More, Millions Saved

So imagine this, if you knew all the terrible things about a saviour, a hero, a doctor, a scientist, do you not accept the results? Enter the trolly problem.

I am not scared for society, there will be great art, leaders, healers, but I probably want to keep one eye opened.

We all drove Kanye crazy

Surrounded by people, as a celebrity you will find that nobody will ever advise you against something that jeopardizes their good time. “Buy a giraffe and ride it down Sunset? Sounds like a great time, do it!” or “don’t worry man, we got your back, we’ll tell everyone you were here with us all night, cops can’t prove it!”. Eventually some of the truth becomes a story that is whispered, then talked about and eventually shouted out loud. It’s how one of my favorite comedians, Hannibal Buress, helped open up the floodgates on Cosby with some jokes based on things everybody talked about but never spoke publicly. We know this shit goes on.

Bad Taste isn’t inherently Evil

One of those scumbag social media guys decided that posing in a suicide forest in Japan was good TV, others think that they can sing extremely racist things in front of an audience they are trying to call racist, complete with people they hired to sign this racist song nobody has ever heard…

Many “artistic” people have advocated for state altering drugs and other controlled substances because without it we would miss out on some of the most uplifting art the world has ever seen. Maybe a popular TV show. We write it off. We’ll let them do mountains of cocaine for another season of a hit show. Busted? We’ll let you back in when you pretend to repent.

Purity is Inversely Proportionate to Opportunity

Having been around very wealthy people, I can tell you it is on them to be the life of the party, and the bar keeps getting raised where “out of control” and “party legend” are sin-onyms. Nobody ever pulled them aside because they think they have been having a perfect game to this point and should take it easy.

It’s never acceptable to write it off as “boys will be boys”

Sex is generally the motivator that brings people down, racism and often physical abuse sadly don’t seem to count as much and worse yet, any kind of mental abuse is pretty much ignored.

Coping with celebrity means nulling yourself, sometimes with drugs and sex or you just have to leave the scene all together. Some people get violent, commit crime or just act poorly. Dopamine and adrenaline are insane in your system blinding out reason.