Against role models

If Hitler told you a good joke, would you laugh? It’s an uncomfortable question, one that makes us squirm a little. After all, who can laugh with a monster?

But what if the joke was really funny? What if it appeared in a book many years after his death? Would the joke still work?

The honest answer is that it well might. The trouble with a joke is that it bypasses our internal monitor and acts directly before we have had the time to inspect it for correctness. It depends on surprise, on incongruity.

Some of us may feel some shame afterwards, but in the moment, a joke might well just be a joke, no matter who told it. The truth is that we don’t always process people as a whole, they come to us as fragments— a joke, a limp handshake, a gesture, a bored expression.

This is what makes our quest for role models so perplexing. The desire to find people to emulate is rooted in the idea that someone as a whole is worthy enough to try and replicate. One can understand why this need arises.

The world is a complex place, with far too many contradictions. A role model gives us a ready script to read off. Here is someone who has apparently figured things out and reached a destination we would love to reach.

It could be a parent, a teacher, a cricketer, a founder, a saint, or a film star. Someone who embodies qualities and outcomes that we can currently only dream of.

The phrase role model itself is an interesting one. A role is something performed. A model is something simplified so that it can be copied.

First, a person is turned into a role. Then the role is turned into a model. What remains is not a life, but an instructional diagram, a formula that can be applied.

One can understand why this works when we are young, or when someone makes a previously unimagined optiona viable one. Abstract qualities like courage or determination need to be made concrete. And a human figure does just that.

Courage becomes meaningful when somebody stands up for a conviction while others turn the other way. The idea of integrity becomes real when a person loses something because they stood their ground.

And yet, the idea of a role model is not only inherently flawed but even dangerous. For everyone is imperfect in some way. This is obvious. The deeper problem is that no human quality exists in isolation. Courage is never just courage.

It comes mixed with temperament, vanity, fear, discipline, injury, ambition, resentment, faith, insecurity and luck. Gandhi’s courage cannot be extracted from Gandhi as if it were a vitamin. To admire courage in him is legitimate. To convert him into a total template is childish.

We simply cannot transplant one life into another. There is no way to splice the outward apparent reality of someone into an internal mechanism for us. When we do, often what we imbibe is a distorted version of the original quality. Their discipline becomes our anxiety.

Their boldness becomes our recklessness. Their simplicity becomes our affectation. Their refusal to compromise becomes our inability to listen. Without the totality of their experience, which gave birth to an admired quality, our imitation is likely to be a warped version of what we seek.

Admiration is valuable because it allows us to acknowledge qualities that we may lack but desire. But when carried too far, we are giving someone authority over our imagination.

We are being colonised by our admiration, without even realising it.

One way to think about it is that having a low bar for liking people and a very high one for admiring them might serve us well. Lik- ing is social, forgiving, and everyday.

There is something guileless about lik- ing someone; explanations are usually not necessary. Admiration needs more thought, for in admiring someone, we submit to a hierarchy of our creation.

Today, there is no dearth of people who offer themselves up for admira- tion. We are surrounded by celebrities, social media influencers, sportspeople and politicians who are people we ‘follow’.

The problem is that most often, the admiration is not even linked to an inherent quality but to their external success. Admiration is often outcome read backwards as worth.

Someone achieves something, and we retrofit a story around the victo- ry. We interpret aggression as clarity. What was pure luck gets reframed as vision. Rank cruelty gets seen as toughness. Every event in the person’s life gets seen as some sort of lesson, something to glean meaning from.

The answer is not to stop learning from people. That would be foolish.

Who we are is often a pastiche of oth- er people’s actions and ideas. A teach- er’s inflexion, a parent’s stoic silence, a cricketer’s swagger, a writer’s way of phrasing a turn, a friend’s ability to take things in their stride. These things enter us almost invisibly.

But when we seek to be like someone, we set ourselves up for disappointment. Because the image we have in our mind was never true. The part was mistaken for the whole. The statue we had erected must be taken down, not in anger, but be- cause it is blocking our view.

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