We could be heroes... but just for one day.
Icarus and Lazarus.
Remember when Elon Musk was everyone’s hero? A Silicon Valley messiah, lighting the way to a green future with his fleet of Teslas. He was, in essence, Tony Stark – minus the charm and with slightly more questionable tweets. How quickly the tide of public opinion turns! Those who once hailed him as a technological genius now question his sanity.
It’s easy (and convenient) to forget that throughout history our creative heroes have been simultaneously brilliant and deeply problematic.
David Bowie slept with underage girls. He was also a Nazi sympathiser describing Hitler as one of the first rock stars. Like Elon he was partial to a Nazi salute and dreamed of being a Star Man “Is there life on Mars?” John Lennon was a wife-beater and terrible father to his son Julian who he emotionally abused and ridiculed while writing songs about peace. Picasso was in his 70s before he painted a model he hadn’t had sex with. He was such a disaster for everyone around him that one mistress, one wife, one son, and one grandson took their own lives, which is pretty much a royal flush in a game of Unhappy families.
It goes on… Walt Disney underpaid his workers and mistreated the female ones. Einstein used his wife’s mathematical genius, gave her zero credit, then abandoned both her and their children. Jean Paul Sartre groomed his philosophy students and got Simone de Beauvoir to procure girls for him – Feminist icon AND prototype Ghislaine Maxwell.
When people ask me why they’re blocked creatively, I often point them towards unconscious fears and early conditioning.
1. True creativity is co-creativity – there’s us and whatever you want to call the source of creativity (God, Grace, the Muses). But we’ve been raised to compete and win individual glory, which is why the myth of the solo genius is so prevalent. “I did it all myself!” a proud child will announce. It’s easy to forget the “co” in co-creativity.
2. Creativity and destruction are two sides of the same coin. There’s Spring and Fall. Fire, water, air, and earth can nurture life and obliterate it. Nuclear technology can heal and kill. Love, grief, and anger have inspired great works of art, while the same emotions can destroy relationships, lead to war, and cause personal breakdown, madness, or suicide.
There’s an inherent tension between creation and destruction that exists in all life. Mastering this tension is the reason we need to develop a good relationship with our co-pilot - otherwise things can go south very quickly.
Instead of saving the planet, Elon Musk is now destroying any goodwill left, one tweet at a time. He’s turned from green hero to X Villain faster than one of his self-driving cars can run a red light. We live in the age of cancel culture. Thumbs up or down. Instead of mastering creative energy we’ve gone full on binary, reducing everyone to Hero or Zero.
Which brings us to a particularly apt Greek myth: The young Icarus, full of soaring ambition, is given wings made of feathers and wax by his father, Daedalus. Being impulsive and excited, he ignores warnings and flies too close to the sun. The wax melts, and he plunges to his doom. With his ideas of colonizing Mars, Musk soared high, but the heat of scrutiny has melted his wings, and now he’s crashed into the harsh reality of the binary world.
The creative geniuses of the past got away with their moral failings because there was no 24/7 media. Some of them got the chance to apologise for their earlier behaviour. David Bowie did a full 180 and evolved beyond all recognition, creating until the day he died – from Ziggy Stardust to Lazarus. No such leeway was afforded Kevin Spacey or Louis CK whose future creative output we’re now deprived of because we’re unable to deal with human complexity. We need our heroes to be perfect. We consume their genius, then discard them when we discover they’re just flawed children with fragile egos looking for love in all the wrong places.
We need to value and encourage co-creativity, because the “co” is pretty good at seeing the whole picture… and a lot more forgiving than we currently are.
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
The Hero’s Journey and other Greek myths are part of my upcoming Creative Unblocking retreat on the Island of Agistri. This one is sold out, but you can register interest for the next one.