Quote:
Originally posted by ARTelevision
Our absurd romantic obsession with the heroic status that disaffected anti-heroic youth hold in this media-soaked society is a sad situation. There are so many instances where alienated crude and violent, even criminal young people are held up to be some sort of paragon of cool that many contemporary humans have a knee-jerk emotional affection for the stereotype. Countless children, adolescents - and adults who should know better - identify with sociopathological pseudo-role models.
Of course it is to their detriment. And it is our loss.
As long as the purveyors of popular culture continue to profit from producing a constant stream of such figures for the consumption of young and impressionable minds, these obsessions will continue. Inept dramatists and uninspired artists create the cliches while generations of media-trained children and adults eat them up like so much brain candy.
Personally, I have come to loathe this stereotype for what it is - a cheap and manipulative attempt to popularize losers and another example of how a corrupt cultural hegemony profits by appealing to the lowest common denominators of human behavior.
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Yet simply reading the Myths of Heracles (romanized as Hercules) reveal that the Greek Hero was a rapist, a murderer, and a drunkard... Which media conglomerate profiteered from the propagation of these stories?
If you say that the Greek institutions such as the many Heraclean Cults -I should point out that the stories are probably much older than those institutions. (see Graves -The White Goddess -I forget which page). Heros and Anti-Heros have always been around.
During the "Dark Ages" such stories were repressed to the general masses for very similar reasons that you are citing here. The Vatican thought that immoral entertainment somehow caused illicit behavior. The church could cite that the cause was the devil trying to tempt mankind. His influence was supernatural.
Here, the influence of these "immoral stories" over minds is less definite. I think you said previously that it was just a matter of opinion -adding that the whole Science of Psychology -didn't have the wherewithal to know anything about it.