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Why Are Heroes Bad

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The tendency for us to want of need heroes and villains impacts us dramatically in a number of ways. Firstly, the heroes that we have, especially as children, do affect us dramatically in our behaviour towards others and views on ourselves. One of the major problems with this is that we don't choose the right people to idolised a lot of the time, which in turn reflects on our societal values needing to be deeply questioned. Take a sports star, for example. A huge number of children will grow up having a sports star or stars affecting their attitudes and values. These athletes can no doubt have some very positive impacts, as many of them come from poverty or tough circumstances. It's these athletes that give children in similar situations hope. …show more content…

The way our heroes and idols act has a strong influence on how we behave as well. This can be seen in many circumstances with the most obvious being celebrities setting trends. The caricatures we create can also be very harmful to ourselves. Another example of negative role models is kids growing up in a ghetto often idolise local gang members. This tends to lead to those same kids replicating gang member behaviour, murdering, stealing and raping. The end result is some of these kids either in jail or dead. This is a huge problem in our society. We value people with self centered and lack of empathy not because we value these qualities within the person, but we look up to the people that are revolting against the systems and cycles of poverty and pain that we are trapped in. Young children in impoverished areas look up to gang members because they see that even though they started from nothing, as they did, they became part of something that stands up to the idea that all they will ever be is at the bottom of the food chain, picking up the scraps others have left behind. For this reason, it’s easy to see why these common thugs are idolised, they have respect and this is something that every person wants, especially people that aren’t given any. However, it does not do us any good to look up to people that slip through the cracks of the system, but rather we should try to change the system so this build up of resentment between different facets of society does not

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