They Destroyed Every Hero You Grew Up With (Here's Why)

[00:00:00]Luke Skywalker believes so deeply in the good that he refused to kill Darth Vader. Now he's a bitter old man who almost murders his nephew in his sleep, throws away his lightsaber when the galaxy needs him most. Indiana Jones found the Ark of the Covenant, rescued children from the priests of the Temple of Doom, and drank from the Holy Grail itself.

[00:00:22]His last movie turns him into a divorced, washed-up old man who gets rescued by a woman half his age.

[00:00:30]Christopher Columbus, the founding fathers, the [music] men who settled the West. Now we're told they're racist colonizers we should all be ashamed of.

[00:00:39]Every hero you grew up with, fictional and real, has been systematically dismantled, and nobody is replacing them.

[00:00:48]Today I'm showing you why.

[00:00:57]What's happening to our heroes isn't an accident. Heroism requires that some men are better than others, that there's a higher standard worth sacrificing for.

[00:01:08]The people telling stories and teaching our kids are trying to flatten that hierarchy. Flatten the hierarchy and you kill the hero.

[00:01:16]Kill the hero and no man has a reason to become one.

[00:01:23]Superman is my favorite fictional character. He has been since I was a kid because of the purity of his character.

[00:01:30]He always does what's right, no matter the cost. He has the power to rule the world and he chooses to save it instead.

[00:01:39]My favorite scene in all of Superman lore comes from All-Star Superman.

[00:01:43]Superman is dying, racing against time to put the world right before he's gone, when he hears a girl in trouble about to jump from a rooftop. So he stops everything. He appears behind her, puts his hand on her shoulder, and tells her she's stronger than she thinks she is, and she doesn't jump.

[00:02:02]A dying man with the weight of the planet on him stops to stand on a rooftop with one scared girl.

[00:02:10]Amazon's The Boys took that exact scene and inverted it. Homelander is that world's Superman, only he's a monster.

[00:02:18]He shows up to talk a girl off a ledge, and at first it looks like the same scenario. He says the right words, but he's doing it for the cameras. Then, halfway through, he drops the act, looks this girl in the eyes, and tells her to jump. "Wait," she says, "I've changed my mind." She wants to live. He forces her off anyway.

[00:02:40]The people who wrote that scene did it because that's what they actually believe.

[00:02:45]The good man was never real.

[00:02:51]Now, I know what you're thinking. I'm venting about fictional characters. Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, Superman, who cares, right? It's just modern storytelling. Bad writers ruining old franchises. But how we write our heroes has always been a reflection of how we view heroism as a culture. And heroism carries with it an ideal to strive for and a truth underneath that ideal, that some men are better than others. We keep being told that moral hierarchy is unfair, even bigoted. But a hero only exists if there's a higher standard and a lower one, and he chooses the higher one when it costs him. The men who stormed Normandy and liberated death camps, men who also approved of segregated schools, are better men than a talking head journalist who never sacrificed for anyone, but holds all the right opinions. The men who crossed oceans and carved a nation out of wilderness, men who wrote that all men are created equal and still permitted slavery are better men than a career politician whose boldest act is promising free lunches because heroism was never about perfection.

[00:04:10]It's flawed men doing the right thing when it costs them. And every hero who ever lived carried sins alongside his victories. And if some men are better, then better is possible. A hero is walking proof that a man's choices matter and he isn't just a product of his circumstances. But that's intolerable to people whose entire worldview says there's no higher good or individual agency, only victims and oppressors. So they try to flatten the hierarchy, make every founder a slaveholder and nothing else, make every great man only as good as his lowest moment, teach boys that striving is arrogance, excellence is oppression. A man who believes there's no higher standard stops reaching for one. He settles for mediocrity and demands nothing from himself and nothing from the people who rule him. So what made men believe in a higher standard in the first place?

[00:05:17]There's a question underneath every hero story ever told. Is there a good so real, so fixed, so far above us that a man should suffer and die rather than betray it? For most of human history, the answer was yes. The Greeks called it virtue, the Romans called it duty, Confucius called it the way of the superior man. The names changed, but the ideal was the same. The good is real. It stands above every king and every empire, and a man's life is measured by how faithfully he serves it. Then Christianity revealed the truth underneath all of it. The good has a face. Everything the Greeks and Romans and Confucius were reaching for was a shadow, and that shadow belonged to Christ. But centuries later, a new pernicious idea began to form with men like Marx and Nietzsche and Foucault.

[00:06:14]There's no God, and therefore no fixed good, no objective truth, no ideal to strive for, nothing above us against which we measure ourselves. And if there's no fixed good, then every claim about truth and goodness is just a move for power. Follow that logic, and heroism becomes impossible. A sacrifice can't be noble because noble compared to what? Courage can't be admirable because admiration requires a standard against which courage and cowardice are measured. A good man can't exist because there is no objective good. Listen, the deconstruction of heroes isn't about the movies or even history. It's about whether the universe has a moral order or whether it doesn't.

[00:07:05]And it does. Behind every hero story is the oldest story. A good world broken and a God who refuses to abandon it.

[00:07:19]The world was made good. Sin broke it, and 2,000 years ago, Christ stepped into that broken world and began a process of restoration, and he's been building it through his people ever since.

[00:07:33]Hospitals, universities, rights for women, the end of the slave trade, the rule of law, Christian men carrying that restoration forward generation after generation. The hero's journey was never just a story.

[00:07:49]A man leaves comfort, faces darkness, pays a price, and returns with life for his people. Writers didn't invent that arc. It's the shape of Christ's own story. He left glory, entered the wreckage, went into death itself, and walked out carrying restoration for everyone who follows him. Every hero story that ever stirred your blood is an echo of that one, which means the ache you feel after watching them tear down Superman and Luke Skywalker was never really about the movies either. You were made for heroism and you know it.

[00:08:31]You were put on this earth to make the world look a little more like heaven one man at a time, one family at a time. So, let them keep their deconstructions.

[00:08:43]Let them write cynical gods and broken old men. You have a mission that was handed down by Christ himself and you stand with every unnamed man who held a wall, loved his wife, raised his children, and served his king.

[00:09:01]The world needs heroes.

[00:09:04]Be that man.