On Marginals: Heroes and Criminals

Among the multitude of subjects living in the society they happened to be born into, I see certain bright, colorful figures that differ from the others, or that the Others strive to separate from themselves. A certain part of society is inevitably subject to marginalization, which does not necessarily mean exile to the social bottom or total ostracism. A marginal may not appear to be a victim at all but, on the contrary, someone who has achieved success, having earned it through personal effort or simply by drawing a lucky lottery ticket. Or perhaps he is even at the very top of this society, respected by the majority and given universal gratitude for his existence. In my view, a marginal is someone who has lost the privilege of being part of the mass, someone who has been pulled out of it—voluntarily or not—and then left out in the cold, alone in being a solitary unit.

The mass (as the main part of an anonymous society) is a fairly autonomous entity; it is multitasking, flexible, adaptive, but it still needs a few separate units with a different set of roles and tasks. In this sense, a member of the mass is someone who shares a common normality or naturalness with the other members of the mass. In this essay, I do not use any of these notions in a positive or negative way, so the term “mass,” like the others, is neutral for me (I can consider myself part of the mass as well). I am certain that, when analyzing the broad monotony of society, one could identify far more types of marginals, but in this essay, I decided to focus on two. One of the “distinct cases” I have chosen is the one customarily called the “hero.” If we refer to Wikipedia, in the more general sense the term sounds like this:

A hero (feminine: heroine) is a real person or a main fictional character who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage, or strength. The original hero type of classical epics did such things for the sake of glory and honor. Post-classical and modern heroes, on the other hand, perform great deeds or selfless acts for the common good instead of the classical goal of wealth, pride, and fame.

I agree with Wikipedia’s definition, but I would like to expand it within the context of this text. A hero really is an example of exceptionalism, or more precisely “extraction”—an inevitable removal from society for what he has done. In an instant, a person becomes the violator of an unwritten law, the destroyer of the mass’s rich homogeneity. But is there only one single mass? Hardly, so the abduction of a person from normality depends greatly on the place and situation in which they were born or happened to live. From those circumstances also stems the type of this “abduction,” whether it is a sacrificial transfer to the “alley of fame” or, conversely, a sacrificial transfer to the “alley of chains.” Thus, crime and feat are always on two sides of the same coin, tossed by each subsequent generation once its hand grows enough to pick up the coin that has fallen from arthritic fingers of predecessors. Nevertheless, regardless of how the coin lands, a marginal remains a marginal. He remains that which was washed ashore from the ocean of society—a product and a concentrate of what he was torn from. Precisely because of this, we can rather successfully discuss the tendencies that predominate in society, divining, in the famous greek tradition, by the “entrails” of marginals, whether criminals or heroes. After all, in both cases we see a transgression of certain social norms and some form of self-sacrificial or “selfless” act, as Wikipedia says: “selfless acts for the common good.” It would be fitting to add “selfless acts for the common evil” as well. In both cases, we have a figure who has carried out a deed not characteristic of the majority and therefore considered unnatural by that majority. They are violators and are, in essence, phenomena of the same type.

Heroes and criminals are equally exalted, singled out, and punished for what the majority fears to become and what the majority fears to do. The fear of killing is equal to the fear of saving, but those who take life are often (if not more often) also called heroes. Toward a criminal, it is quite typical to feel fear, hatred, or anxiety, while toward a hero, pride, respect, humility, and perhaps fear as well. Why be afraid of someone who has performed (supposedly) very good, even radically good deeds? An overabundance of good can provoke contradictory feelings—for example, overeating chocolate or the euphoria that is followed by emptiness and fatigue. It is precisely the radical nature and “extremeness” of the hero that elicit awe, fear, apprehension, because by his very existence he undermines the norm, calls it into question, and possibly demands that this norm be changed. Thus, he threatens the established naturalness. A hero ceases to be an object of ordinary respect (tinged with awe and apprehension) and becomes a threat when his otherness—what makes him a hero—can no longer be neutralized with a medal as a chance excess and begins to become an obligation for the mass. I will return to that point shortly.

What about the hero as a role model? How can one aspire (and all the more so fear aspiring) to something that culture positions as an ideal to be emulated? In that case, we must ask whether the status of hero is something one can actually achieve (even theoretically). My answer is no. A heroic act or a hero as a role/state of a person in society is always an event that occurs post factum relative to the real situation in which that person found themselves. The situation where heroism becomes possible is a place and time when the system is unable to handle something on its own, and then an individual appears who fills that vacuum. In turn, the criminal points to the vacuum itself, which then either remains open (leaving space for a hero to emerge) or is closed by society’s efforts. The complexity lies in the fact that the questions of whether the vacuum existed at all (whether there was a crime) and whether it needed to be filled in exactly that way (the nature of the heroic act) are decided post factum. Yes, one can be inspired by a large number of heroes universally recognized by society, memorize every remarkable deed, wait for a similar occasion in order to personally do something comparable, but in the end only chance and the system decide whether one will become a hero or merely a foolish coincidence. A person cannot know in advance whether helping a sick person by themselves was necessary or whether it would have been better to wait for an ambulance, nor can they know whether their current achievements will be glorified by the political regime or, on the contrary, condemned or forgotten. If I beat someone up, how do I figure out whether I am a hero, a lyncher, or merely a hooligan? This very dilemma often stops people from acting in critical situations. If it were possible to emulate a hero the way people emulate Elvis Presley’s costume, it would turn into a joke, which it has in fact become in certain corners of the world.

The hero as a role model is an unattainable ideal not because of the special qualities of the people who have attained this status, but because of the specificity of the procedure by which it is bestowed. A hero is always the choice of the mass or the system (for example, the state) that governs this mass. A person won’t suddenly start killing just because they see a killer, witness a killing, or play a game in which the main character is a murderer. The belief is that a person must already have something in them that, over time, will develop into the desire to kill. By the same logic, a person will not become a hero simply by seeing a hero or a heroic act, etc. There must also be a certain inner foundation that needs a trigger or the right situation to develop. Hero and criminal are extremes of “how one should not be.” Each of them must exist and do what they do, then be “digested” and isolated (isolation through being assigned a role and all its consequences) for being who they are. All of this is necessary so that most people have an idea of viable normality, so that the community can survive. Each society has its own viable model on which it exists, its own normality, the violation of which leads either to changes within that society that cause deterioration or improvement of its functioning (by the criteria adopted in that model) or to its destruction, a critical violation of viability. Heroes and criminals are the framework of naturalness: one from above, the other from below, and somewhere in between, where they intersect, is that “gray ethics” so beloved by many (which, however, is only possible given a clear presence of white and black).

Such situations are usually regulated by cultural or societal institutions: they imprison rapists and call firefighters to the scene of a fire. For firefighters, a burning house remains a dangerous situation, but it fits comfortably into the ordinary, normal concept of “a job.” A firefighter works within the system: he draws on the collective that the system has formed, he possesses a set of skills the system has given him. Yet he does not violate the foundations of society, although he is often called a hero simply by virtue of his profession, which is, in fact, an important detail. The fire service and similar institutions are heroic domains of the mass or the system, holding the exclusive right as a collective entity to bestow this characteristic on those involved. Herein lies the difference: the heroic firefighter is primarily the system or part of it, a collective entity, rather than an individual. There can be no single heroic police officer without the police as the holder of “copyright,” which confers that status on those who devote their time, energy, and often their lives to it. These institutions protect the normal majority from the destructiveness of “extremeness,” enabling the system to survive by saving the mass from actions and behavioral patterns that are foreign to it. They do not exist on the same plane as the mass; they demand nothing unnatural from it and thus do not disturb its peace. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and keep our own normality for us. We fear the one who looks the same as we do yet behaves radically differently; the fear or awe arises when someone breaks an unspoken natural order. If he is just like me, within the accepted boundaries, but does something unnatural to me, it might make me think that I, too, could—or must—do the same. This is why, for instance, conservative communities often react sharply to nonconformity, since merely by existing, nonconformists call their lifestyle into question.

Admiration for a hero does not differ from condemning a criminal in the sense that the one who glorifies or condemns is, in fact, saying, “I couldn’t do that” or “I wouldn’t dare.” I couldn’t kill someone unjustly or save someone, or “justifiably eliminate” someone. Typically, people are expected to fear, condemn, or hate a criminal because, by his very existence and actions, he offers society an ideal that frightens most people simply because it is possible. For example, killing for gain announces that the strong can take the property of the weak and deprive them of life. The hero, on the other hand, is frightening because he demands becoming an individual who denies the mass through his own individuality, while simultaneously sacrificing or harming himself for that same mass. He is frightening because he offers (almost forces) the majority a model of behavior that is unrealistic, impossible for the mass.

Robbery, murder, rape, or other crimes not justified by culture or ideology have a destructive effect on society just as a heroic act does—an extremely risky rescue of a stranger’s life (or several lives), or a very risky taking of others’ lives to save one’s own or to gain some significant benefit. If most people were to regularly commit rape or rush into burning buildings to save children, society would not survive due to the destructiveness of each of these acts. It is as if society’s “immune system” is continually on the lookout for deviations and tries to isolate them; people, as part of this collective immune system, want to identify the unnatural and remove it from the organism—if not by imprisonment, then at least by elevating it to a “sacred cow” status. They find unstable “cancerous cells” and try to neutralize them through glorification or condemnation. Yet if they get carried away and start reproducing criminals or heroes en masse, these figures, like cancer cells, will no longer be a contained anomaly but rather an alternative to the existing mass order, inevitably clashing with the old system. This becomes a confrontation between the “old” and the “new” naturalness. In such a case, the system must gradually and confidently reform its normality by nudging the old model and the new model toward a compromise somewhere “in the middle”. All this is done to reduce the number of criminals or heroes to a minimum and to create a new foundation of normality on which the mass will settle. But when the old system fails to do so and labels too many people as criminals (or heroes), it undermines itself, making its “immune system” unworkable. If “violators” are not much fewer than “upstanding citizens,” the question arises of what is actually natural, and society splits. There must be few marginals, and they must always appear as the “outermost fringe,” or else they form a separate “organism” that wars against the old one. The outcome of this war is destruction, numerous victims, and the transformation of a handful of warring “cancerous cells” (if they win) into an ordinary organism with a structure conceptually identical to that of the old system. In the end, everything either reverts to its original state or disintegrates, disappears, and becomes part of something else.

That is why it is impossible to make many people heroes (whether due to a real increase in the number of those who break the natural order or because everyone is proclaimed a hero irrespective of their radicalism), for that would be too cruel both to them and to the mass around them. Hero status is an exceptional punishment, in some ways akin to how criminals are punished, because once a person becomes a hero, he is as though removed from everyday life, from the crowd, and now his status dictates a special attitude toward him. Hence there must be few heroes, just as there must be few criminals, so they remain a striking exception offered up for the common good. As already stated, they serve as the frame of normality; if this frame grows too large relative to the “picture,” it becomes part of that picture itself and is seen as an element in contrast to the main body. Then they can no longer carry out their primary task: removing from society those behavioral patterns unnatural to it, which either significantly alter the understanding of normality (provided the new normality proves at least minimally viable) or doom society to destruction by undermining the collective whole.

The difference between a criminal and a hero does not lie in a typical dichotomy but rather in different shades of the same thing. They are much closer to each other than to ordinary people, and transitioning from criminal to hero or vice versa happens quite easily and often—unlike among those who make up the mass. Both cases are a kind of curse a person must live with, dealing not only with internal societal processes but also with the role of figures on which heightened attention is focused. This attention leads to the system as a whole using them, as does each of its members, should they have the desire and capacity. In the second essay of the pair devoted to this topic, I will examine precisely this aspect of a marginal’s life. This part remains a detailed introduction to the ideas that will be further developed.

P.S. A hero and a criminal are needed as untouchable guarantors of freedom and injustice, for if the system could do without them, it would mean it no longer provides us the familiar space for tragedy, death, and injustice. And giving up that space would be akin to a perhaps less bloody, but more un/happily anti/utopian reality.