Partly, we do this because we desire to be heroes ourselves. We desire the hero’s journey. We desire to confront chaos and emerge as a more powerful and complete version of ourselves in a world that has been ordered as we desired. We require a hero’s journey because we bear a terrible burden that, as far as we can tell, nothing else in the universe bears. Knowledge of our past and understanding of our possible futures.

Now, if you’re someone who has managed to live their life without knowing the pain of losing a future you had set your heart on, then you’ve lived a better life than me. Worse still, I can see how I failed and caused the loss of some of the futures because I was inadequately prepared or not wise or strong or determined enough to save them. I have to live with the loss of those futures for the rest of my life. And I have to face the coming future with (hopefully) the knowledge and strength I gained as a result of that experience.

There is a terrible burden of guilt and inadequacy we bear, the knowledge that we failed ourselves, failed our future, and have to carry that part of our past forever. We look back and we feel a pang of pain and shame and anger. Anger at whoever we blame. Maybe ourselves, maybe whoever it’s easier to blame other than ourselves. We know that we were adequate to handle that moment, and we lost something because of it. And maybe we hurt other people too, along with ourselves.

No other creature has to carry such a terrible burden. It’s an incredibly useful thing to be able to carry. If we are able to learn from it we can navigate the future in a way that no other living thing can. We can grow and adapt and advance with a speed that cannot be matched. But such opportunities come at a high price of knowledge and responsibility. We aren’t unconscious.

Unconsciousness has the advantage of smothering experience in a warm, dark blanket of neutrality. Because there were no better or worse outcomes we could clearly envision, nor better or worse ways of adapting and reacting and navigating and learning and being, there is neither opportunity nor knowledge, nor responsibility. There is no guilt. There may be sensation, feeling in the moment. But there is no existential guilt for pasts ruined or futures lost or potential unreached or possibilities betrayed, either for yourself or for anyone or anything else.

Moralitiy emerges as the burden of those who know, who see that there is or was a choice. The knowledge of good and evil. It does give us godlike power, but it also places on us a terrible weight we often feel inadequate to bear.

Modern life, despite its many arguments deconstructing our moral consciousness and even conscious experience, has failed to relieve us of the burden of guilt or of the quest for righteousness. The fact that the immense feelings of guilt and the need to confront and absolve it, along with the need to prove our own righteousness and enact a hero’s journey have survived the death of religion in our culture and found an entirely new, secular expression should come as no surprise to anyone who has studied history and culture much. In all times, in all places, those instincts persist and take some form that is meant to help us address an deal with them.

It not only is so, it must be so, so long as people are people. Those burdens are a function of the basic qualities that make us all human. We are all those that know. Therefore we all bear the burden and must address them. We must build an understanding of them to help us live with our past and navigate our future. We must use that knowledge to conceptualize what future we want to pursue. We must identify the weaknesses ourselves that prevented us reaching that place in the past and seek them out and change them in the present. We must justify our own lives and absolve our position in the chain of being by pointing to how we have freed ourselves from the sin of the past and promote the righteousness of the future.

In some ways, the secular and religious distinction is only a matter of development. All life is religious because all life is moral, and all morality depends upon a certain understanding of the past and a certain vision of the future, and those understandings and visions are nested inside a certain understanding of and vision of the world and ourselves and our place in it. All humans have these things because they must. And when they come together in some coherent, organized, thought out, explicated, comprehensible, and communicable form we often call it a religion. It might be a philosophy or ideology in its infancy, but as it takes form and body and instantiated itself into art and into our lives and social structure it becomes more recognizable as “religious.”

But because we live our lives as individuals, because the way that we interact with all these forces of past and present and possibility largely come down to the lives of individuals, we conceive of others and ourselves in our roles within that context. There are those who conquer chaos and navigate the present to make the hoped for future come to pass. And there are those who fail and who destroy the future, who choose to sacrifice it, either their future or someone else’s. There are the friends of the future and the enemies of the future, those who will help and those who will not.

We see ourselves and others as either heroes or villains. Or possibly victims. A victim is merely a failed hero. All of the moral virtue, none of the present rewards (and also none of the attendant guilt of having become a villain). In our present time, that fears both hero and villain roles, the safety of the position of victim offers itself as an especially tempting refuge. It sidesteps the dangerous test and shifts the responsibility. It relieves the psychic burden most effectively.

Still, it is hard to say whether embracing the role of victim is really the best strategy in other, more practical ways. It solves the existential burden best, but perhaps not the practical burden best. Conceiving of yourself as a victim saves you from responsibility by sacrificing agency, by drawing the warm blanket of neutrality back over your works and their outcomes. You were not aware, you were not able to affect things or change them or navigate them. You do not carry responsibility. There are others out there who possess the power of agency and the ability to become heroes or villains, and they are the real actors upon the stage. Victimhood, by escaping the burden of personal responsibility for the outcomes of your own life, also sacrifices humanity and adulthood for infantilism and inefficacy and brings you down to the level of poor little rabbits. Pitiable, but not more than that. And how can a rabbit learn to sieze the reins of the future if they cannot bear the weight of their own present? This is a practical question we have to face, regardless of how much or how little we actually are or have been in control of our past and how much we could have expected to be able to act appropriately and confront our problems and create the future we wanted.

Looking back on my own failures, it’s a crushing weight. I’m filled with a sense of terrible loss. I have enormous regrets. I have shame and embarrasment. I have anger. Toward others, toward myself. The world was hostile, there’s no doubt. Maybe the world would better if some part of what produced all that didn’t exist. So I need to attack it somewhere. I need to find the evil. I need to find the mistake, the problem. My moral understanding of the universe demands a villain. And I don’t want it to be me.

I already have to bear the burden of my knowledge that the past happened. There are some moments I can’t even think back on without uttering an involuntary sound. As if the noise itself might cover it up or release my pent up feelings. I already have to live within the present that past created. I already have to soft through the limited futures that that past has defined for me by bringing my life to this specific place. I need a way to face all that, I need a way to discharge all that. And I can’t do that and live with all that and also bear the existentiao burden of accepting myself as a possible agency and villain in my own story. I need that guilt to be relieved in order to live with myself and escape my own judgement. I need to know that I was righteous. That I am worthy of being. That I’m not trapped, of if I am, that it’s not my fault. I need someone to take that sin on their shoulders.

One of the problems with humans is that we make both inadequate heroes and inadequate villains. In stories we often heighten or simplify realities to make the narrative clearer. But humans bear the weight of both roles, of godlike hero or Satanic villain, very inadequately. We’re often too complex, we mix one with another. Often we are far too simple. We are unconscious and undeliberate in our actions, unaware of our own motivations or the consequences of our acts. We are too small to stand up and take either all the blame or all the credit. We lack the grand plans and strategies and foresight that would define us as wither great heroes or great villains. Our conspiracies are often so much smaller and more thoughtless than we had imagined. What grand designs we envision, either in our own family or in some vast corporate enterprise, when we cast our villains, often the truth comes down to a more complex mix of half-realized ambitions and self interest and poorly understood goals and reactions and half-envisioned desires. We often lack the long term vision and understanding to merit the label of great hero or villain. We’re just people, fumbling our way inadequately toward one or the other, and sometimes both.

Modern stories make progress when they reveal this complexity, when they show us that most everyone seeks to be a hero, in fact. And most everyone manages to be a villain. And many don’t think adequately about either but just fumble their way through life. And we are all just people. But modern storytelling also errs enormously when it goes on from such to suggest that there are no such things as good and evil or heroes and villains. When it reduces us to less than the sum of our parts.

We have the ability in us to take on those roles, if we can rise to them by knowledge and action. And being “just people” means we have the potential to bear the greatest burdens and achieve the greatest feats that are unparalleled by any known being in the universe.

We are small, we are little animals, little rabbits. But we also contain a powerful and dangerous spark of the divine. We can know and create. We have purpose and understand it. And we can mould and change the past into the future we desire and ourselves into the person we desire. We can choose, we can adapt, we can change, in a way that nothing else can. We can sieze, in our own, small, rabbitlike way, the power of the gods. And that is amazing, and terrifying. But if we are to sieze it, we will not do so by imagining ourselves more rabbits than gods.

This power, this spark, is the foundation of modern law, that recognizes the inherent value and potential of all individuals. We do not, I think, enjoy equal outcomes. Whether by fortune, failure, or deprivation, many of us will struggle to be all that we could. But we all have the potential, we all have the spark and so are potentially valuable as well as potentially dangerous, and deserve to be treated as such. Whatever we are, we need not be merely animals. We could be gods or devils in our individual worlds. And so we deserve the opportunity and the respect such power commands.

And as real as the potential for good is, so is the potential for danger. We aren’t nothing. Even the smallest life could wreck terrible suffering on those in close proximity, if a person allows themselves to take that path. A father can oppress his children, and a mother can devour them. A friend can alienate a friend. A worker can exploit another coworker. A man can betray his future. A woman can forget her past. A follower can ignore a warning. A leader can abuse their privilege. And likely we all will at some point. Likely we all have.

How we deal with the problem of our need as humans to seek or to become heroes and villains defines much of our outlook in life. Our guilt and responsibility must be dealt with. The burden of our past accumulates and the debt must be paid. And we cannot right everything. We cannot live perfect lives. We must shoulder the blame and punish ourselves or assign the blame and punish others, or we must try to forget and so distract ourselves, or we must forgive and seek forgiveness.

Who we choose to identify as our villains is a measure of our vision and our understanding of the world. A shallowly conceived villain is likely a harbinger of a poorly understood world and misguided vision. A shallowly conceived hero reveals much the same weaknesses. A vision that might not be possible, or whose pursuit may not lead to its realization, or even to our own ruin. Our need to be heroes and our need for others to be our villains can lead to our own destruction (or others). We must always be on guard against how we have filled those needs. Our lives are often only as good as the heroes and villains we choose. A society is only as good as the heroes and villains it identifies. A culture that makes false heroes pursues false visions and lives false lives.

None of us are “simply” heroes or “simply” villains. The truth is always complex, sometimes more than we imagined, sometimes less. With people, it is never “simply”. There is good, and there is evil, because we are human. Because we have the divine spark; because we know. Because we can. Our lives are a divine struggle over time and reality and ourselves and the lives of others. It is a monumental thing that we do in our smallest acts, in our humblest lives. It is wonderful and terrible. It is worthy of respect. It is worthy of notice and value. Not perhaps, of all men, but of those around us perhaps, and at least of ourselves. We must respect our own power enough to recognize its potential and our responsibility. We will all walk the journey of the hero or the journey of the villain, the friend or the enemy of the future. We will all meet heroes and face villains. We will identify them around us, and maybe within ourselves, if we have the courage. If we have the clarity, perhaps we will find both within us and within others. And perhaps we will learn to recognize that it is something broader than mere individuals that these characters inhabit. That perhaps the real exemplars and the real enemies lie within all of us. That perhaps they transcend us, and we each in our turn and in our time inhabit them and embody them. The good, the evil, the powers and principalities that we do not merely possess but are possessed by and captured by.

And so the great question we all must answer is, what possesses us? What ideology, what love, what hate, what future, what past, what vision? What possesses our culture? What possesses our hearts? And where does it lead us?