Why we need a Hero

As we saw in the last posting, Ben's family had recently gone through a number of traumatic deaths, including 3 of his siblings, just before he was born. The question is how this effected him and at least partly led to his greatness. Within Family Systems theory, different people get into different roles in the family, and these roles become more pronounced and more rigid, the more dysfunctional the family and its situation. For instance, there are the scape-goat, the lost child, the victim, the perpertrator, the dependent, the co-dependent, and the hero, who's "job" is to excell, fix, and heal the system. When Ben was born they needed a hero and to an extent even a savior to take away the hurts of the other kids dying, and this was a role that was nurtured when his father sent him to school to eventually become a minister. He lasted only one year, not because he wasn't able, he excelled to first in his class, but his father pulled him out for "financial" reasons, which was debatable, and decided to keep him in the trademan realm. This created a particular kind of hero, one that would have to emmerge from the common man's world, rather than excelling academically.



Throughout our American history, there has been a mythos around the common man hero that starts from very humble roots to achieve great things. The rags to riches story. In Jungian Psychology, this would be a kind of archetype. A universal story that fits a need for the society. In the same way that Ben's family needed a hero, Americans need a certain kind of hero. Franklin was a common trademan who became respected in business, politics-both domestically and internationally, science, as a writer, and social commentator. The archetype that appears over and over as an American hero is the hard-working, self-made individual, out of the box thinker and doer, someone who overcomes all sorts of obsticles, including societal and economic ones. Ther is a societal need for "self-improvement". Ben was the first such hero and is in many ways the "father of the self-improvement" movement, but it also shows up in such figures as Abe Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and Daniel Boone. Because we are a nation of immigrants, that didn't usually arrive with socio-ecomomic advantages, this is a very appealing story. As we go on however, we will see that Ben became larger than his own life, through this incredible need of society.