Hollow Hero

The mythology of the hero rests on an abstraction: that one can act with decisive force, impose order or belief, and remain untouched. In lived experience this is impossible. Violence and coercion, whether physical, institutional, or symbolic, leave residues that manifest as trauma — what in clinical terms is described as post-traumatic stress. The nervous system remembers even when the conscious mind suppresses. To believe otherwise is to imagine a psychology insulated from consequence, which in reality belongs less to strength than to pathology. For most people, the execution of force carries with it dissonance, a weight that marks the body and mind. The myth, then, sanitizes by omission, representing coherence where there is none.

Yet the deeper paradox lies in how cultures transpose this false immunity into a model for action. The heroic figure who displaces entropy by imposing order does not erase it; the disorder is simply deferred into hidden registers, including the suffering of those whose consequences cannot be ignored. Entropy, here, is not only physical but experiential: the friction of uncertainty, the psychic abrasion of consequence. By exalting figures who appear to bypass this burden, societies encode a distance between myth and life — a distance that structures identity itself. What emerges is not strength but a recursion of rupture, where detachment is mistaken for coherence and consequence is buried, only to return as fracture within the very systems and selves that deny it.