Three People Teaching Us How to Be Better in 2023

What Leadership in the 21st Century (Really) Looks Like

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How are you doing? I ask because, well, it’s kind of blue out there. A long, cold winter, and one of discontent, too. Looking around the world these days, it can be hard, if not next to impossible to find some…inspiration. Leadership. The world seems directionless, beset by crisis after crisis, so many that scholars have invented a whole new discipline, studying the “polycrisis” of the 21st century.

It’s easy to point out the villains of this age, isn’t it? Take a hard look at the house of democracy, the one that civilization built. It’s not exactly in good shape. There, in the great room? It’s the misogynist who built an empire of hate…became a household word…finally being marched off to prison for…sex trafficking. In the study? Why, it’s the Creepy Billionaire Who Bought Twitter as the world’s biggest Christmas present for…who’s that in the bathroom smoking the thrilling opiate of supremacy? Why, it’s the lunatics, crackpots, and fascists. They’re stamping their feet, so you might not notice that in the penthouse, billionaires — who are getting mega-richer because theplanet is boiling — are hiding out and smoking cigars. And hiding in the closet? Well, in there are the world’s politicians, hoping nobody notices, and all this just magically goes away.

Whew. It’s too easy to point out the villains of this age. Precisely because, well, where are the heroes? See how our culture’s obsessively addicted to hero fiction? Superhero movies, comic books coming to life, so much so that people talk, slightly ridiculously, about their “fandom” for these “universes”…grown adults escaping into children’s make believe? All that’s a classic symptom of an age without heroes. So we go and look for outsize ones where we can, in these fictional universes. But adults retreating into infantilism like this isn’t exactly healthy — not on the scale we do it.

It’s not that this age doesn’t have heroes. It’s that, well, we’re blind to them. Not just because we’re surrounded by doom and gloom (guilty! Set up the guillotine, friend) — but for a deeper reason. We’re drowning in escapism. For men and boys, there’s the superhero variant above, and before you accuse me of gender stereotyping, well, let me come to girls and women. They’re presented with an alternate universe of “influencers,” where being a worthy person is…skin deep. Feminism wept. If man-children get superheros forever, then women, these days, are acculturated by the influencer industrial complex into believing that worth is about what kinds of cosmetics you buy and how much plastic surgery you get to look like some poor depressed soul faking a life for Instagram pics.

Worth. What’s it really about? Why do we hold heros in such esteem, assign them worth that echoes down through the ages? Leftists of a certain kind, pretty sophomoric ones, will insist that Marvel superheroes are just Odysseus, but that’s eminently untrue. Odysseus was just a person. The entire point of his story — that of the “man of twists and turns” — was that he didn’t have superpowers. He was just trying to…return home.

As are we all. But to where? The hero’s journey teaches us about that. It’s lived on, through the ages, because these people we call heroes are always teaching us how to return home. Where’s that? To our better selves. The people we can be, if, only, along the way, we learn how to cultivate a little thing called virtue.