"Star Lords: ‘Star Wars’ and the monomyth of Silicon Valley"

"The correspondence between Campbell’s “monomyth” and the plot details of the originalStar Wars trilogy are now well known: “A hero [Luke Skywalker] ventures forth from the world of common day [humdrum desert planet Tatooine] into a region of supernatural wonder [a galaxy far, far away]: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power [the Force] to bestow boons on his fellow man.” The “boon,” in Campbell’s analysis, typically involves some sort of radical renewal in the social order. This “Hero’s Journey” narrative, post Star Wars, is, increasingly, the means by which tech titan biographies are received and structured.

The high water mark of this tendency is the sanctification of Steve Jobs in the wake of his death in 2011, when the Apple CEO was memorialized in grandly heroic terms by no less than George Lucas himself, who explicitly reconstituted the details of Jobs’ biography into the monomyth in a sidebar in a Wired magazine remembrance of Jobs’ life, “The Hero’s Journey.” The crucial stages are the expulsion from Apple in the eighties, and the subsequent failure of the NeXT computer (“a sort of purgatory”), before Jobs’ triumphant return: “That’s when his story really became the hero’s journey,” Lucas wrote. Ed Catmull, current president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios (and former employee of both Jobs and Lucas) has a similar view of Jobs’ life, in which his exile from Apple also constitutes a trial in “the wilderness.”

This heroic-CEO narrative is not simply a descriptive move—a fantasy told by and to capitalists in order to bolster their self-image or reputation—it’s also a prescriptive formula: something expected of new generations of tech aspirants...

Thiel’s own ambitions as a venture capitalist have a decidedly heroic bent. In a 2009 essay for the libertarian publication Cato Unbound, he claimed that purveyors of technology have a mythic responsibility to guard against political encroachments on freedom (constituted largely as the free market). “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism,” he wrote, in an unmistakably Campbellian narrative sketch."
http://www.theawl.com/2015/12/star-lords

Hmmmmm. There is so much here. It makes me want to read a longer analysis of the American idea of the 'hero', and figure out on what basis we apply the term. And figure out who thinks of themselves as heros or potential heros. And who gets praise and grand narratives for "heroic" behavior.

Because "hero" sort of seems to be involved in capitalism and maintaining status quo, and it's a certain kind of hard-working white man. And heroes also hold this function of proving that human beings are capable of things, that we might be capable of those things, that we can count on someone in our society to do those things. Someone we look up to and trust and give power to. It's a model that pretends that individuals can be turned to to to do what needs to be done, that ignores the need for systems and communities and accountability.

And it ignores the 'why'. There is always some kind of deus-ex-machina that comes in to create the 'why', because otherwise their behavior tends to be ridiculous.

Related: The woman who follows Donald Trump + why