I’m curious as to why you so strongly think that sidekicks risk being abused, and that “healthy” communities will discourage this dynamic hard. I– I don’t want to say that I want to be exploited, but I crave being useful, and being used to my full usefulness. I don’t think this desire is unhealthy. Yes, this means that it’s always tempting to throw too much of myself at a project, but that’s the same problem as learning not to say yes to all the overtime shifts at the hospital and end up working 70 hours a week. I guess you could say that someone I was working for could “abuse” me by forcing me, or coercing or sweet-talking me, into the equivalent of “taking all the overtime shifts.” But (in my limited experience of this) the leader’s more common motivation seems to be in the opposite direction–of being afraid of pushing their sidekick too far.
I’m wondering whether you have some different experience of this, and would be interested in your elaboration if you have one.
I also had a weird reaction to your post, like emr and someonewrongonthenet. Personally, I feel that it’s healthy to work as an assistant to someone (and stop thinking about work when you leave the office at 6pm), but it’s unhealthy to be the assistant of someone (and treat them as a fantasy hero 24⁄7 and possibly sleep with them). Yay professionalism and work/life balance, boo medieval loyalties and imagined life narratives!
That’s also the advice I often give to programmers, to think of themselves as working for a company (in exchange for money) rather than at a company (as part of a common cause). That advice makes some stressful situations and conflicts just magically disappear.
You could say that a world of inherently equal professionals exchanging services, without PCs or NPCs, is too barren to many people. Some people actually want to feel like heroes, and others want to feel like sidekicks. Who am I to deny them that roleplay? Well, some people also want to fit in the “warrior” role, being fiercely loyal to their group and attacking outsiders. We have all kinds of ancient tribal instincts, which are amplified by reading fantasy and bad (hero-based) sci-fi. I feel that such instincts are usually harmful in the long run, although they seem to make sense in the moment.
Personally, I feel that it’s healthy to work as an assistant to someone (and stop thinking about work when you leave the office at 6pm), but it’s unhealthy to be the assistant of someone (and treat them as a fantasy hero 24⁄7 and possibly sleep with them).
I think this is exactly what Brienne is talking about when she points out that society doesn’t look kindly on people who want to serve others. And… I think maybe you’re pointing at something real. It does seem possible that when “being” an assistant breaks, it breaks harder than when “working as” an assistant breaks. So it’s a higher-stakes situation to put yourself in. (Both for the leader and for their assistant).
I don’t think that negates any of what I said in the post though. Half of my point is basically just “some people are the kind of people who want to be nurses, no, really.” Like, it seems to be really hard for people who aren’t those kind of people to understand that for me, roles that aren’t especially high-status but involve being really useful to other people hit all of my happiness buttons. That people are actually different and that their dream job might be one I’d hate, and vice versa.
The other part probably only makes sense when aimed at people who have taken the concept of “heroes” on board...which large portions of this community have. And that point is mainly: if you’re going to accept that heroes and people who want to be heroes are a thing, you’ve got to have the concept of sidekicks too, otherwise you have a broken unhealthy community. It sounds like you’re arguing that it’s best not to take either concept on board. Maybe. You can argue that point.
That’s also the advice I often give to programmers, to think of themselves as working for a company (in exchange for money) rather than at a company (as part of a common cause).
I’m not sure I have that switch? I’ve developed strong feelings of loyalty towards every job I’ve had. As a nurse, this loyalty is felt only a little bit towards the hospital where I work; I feel more of it for my immediate colleagues, and the rest of it towards some abstract “Profession of Nursing.” I’m not sure how to stop feeling that way, or honestly why I’d want to stop.
We have all kinds of ancient tribal instincts, which are amplified by reading fantasy and bad (hero-based) sci-fi. I feel that such instincts are usually harmful in the long run, although they seem to make sense in the moment.
This comes across a little bit as saying “hey, don’t have emotions!” Which...yeah, maybe emotions cause a lot of problems, but not having them isn’t an option. And I’m not sure that not having narratives is an option either. It seems to me that I’m going to think of my life as a narrative in any case; I might as well try to understand and analyze and shape it. (Just as I shape my emotions, trying to lean away from the emotions that seem net-negative...but the way to do that is to guide yourself towards different emotions.)
I’m not sure why we’re focusing in on narratives here, but I suspect it’s for not very good reasons. Whether it’s good for some people to “think of themselves as sidekicks” seems less important than whether it’s good for people to actually perform the actions of a “sidekick”. We can talk about how to promote or discourage the set of actions once that’s settled. I’d much rather present a breakdown of what I actually do day to day and why, and then have people point out what precisely it is that I’m doing wrong.
I’m not sure how to stop feeling that way, or honestly why I’d want to stop.
Well, one reason is to avoid driving down wages and worsening working conditions for yourself and everyone else in your profession. It’s not a coincidence that the jobs that people feel “passionate” about are the jobs where it’s hardest to make a living, like writing or music. I wrote a post about that.
It sounds like you’re arguing that it’s best not to take either concept on board.
Yeah, pretty much. The whole PC vs NPC idea feels slightly distasteful to me.
That’s also the advice I often give to programmers, to think of themselves as working for a company (in exchange for money) rather than at a company (as part of a common cause). That advice makes some stressful situations and conflicts just magically disappear.
I hope you wouldn’t give this advice to cofounders or early employees with an ownership stake, though, and that may be a better lens for viewing these sorts of relationships.
So, I think that a sidekick can feel some ownership over what their hero does, and that feeling that will make them a better sidekick (in part, because they will be less likely to stop thinking about it at 6 pm).
I’m also having a hard time disentangling this in my mind from thoughts about households: in some sense, couples cofound a household together, and it seems counter-productive to think about that in solely mercenary terms, or to ‘clock out’ of your household.
I think I also find myself unhappy with what might be reflexive egalitarianism that is unhappy with unequal splits of decision-making power or status or so on. It’s okay to be unseen; it’s okay to be a junior partner; it’s okay to be a servant. A lot of talk about ‘purpose’ emphasizes having ‘something bigger than yourself,’ and it seems to me that finding purpose in the people around you is something worth applauding.
That’s also the advice I often give to programmers, to think of themselves as working for a company (in exchange for money) rather than at a company (as part of a common cause). That advice makes some stressful situations and conflicts just magically disappear.
It is also a great way to avoid receiving job offers. “Your company is my cause” is one of the socially-necessitated blatant lies of our age.
I am from Britain and I can say with experience that working for a company in exchange for money is not an effective way to avoid 24⁄7 sleep with the hero situations. I know quite a few people who have a poor work life balance because they are working for a company and have more stressful situations and conflicts. I’ve seen people work themselves to depression, divorce, and death thanks to my involvement with the very toxic British banking culture.
Your avoidance of such things dependends on the independent variable of how assertive you are at managing your work/life balance and how good your goal setting is. It’s quite easy to overwork yourself for money. Wanting to be a sidekick or a hero or a equal professional doesn’t increase or decrease your skill at maintaining a work life balance or your goal setting skills any more than it increases your physical strength or intellect.
Banking has that reputation in America too. I would hazard a guess that the problem is banking, not Britain (I used to work in finance, though not in banking specifically).
You can’t be the sidekick of a hero anymore than you can be the student of an enlightened spiritual guru, or the patient of witchdoctor. If you go looking for a hero, who do you think you will find?
There is no chance that a Frodo-style hero exists, and that you’ve correctly identified one (versus an admirable non-hero or a fool or a charlatan), and that the hero needs the help of a sidekick to function as a hero (versus someone they can hire, or the support of standard social relationships) and that a genuine hero is going to be like “why yes I am a hero please quit your nursing job and be my (first? second? third?) sidekick in order to marginally increase my odds of saving the world”.
The danger is to those people who can recognize that they themselves are not gurus, witchdoctors, heroes, perfect rationalists or ubermensch-programmer-super-geniuses-saving-the-world, but still believe that there are large and identifiable classes of people out there who actually are. And who then feel that the only way to have a non-shameful standing relative to their largely imaginary peers to find one to team up with!
That said, my critique is more against the notion that there is a special class of heroes waiting to be paired up with sidekicks than against the value of “sidekick” role. I feel that I’m deeply sympathetic to the heart of what you’ve said. A more constructive take that tries to avoid the problems that concern me might be:
The desire to be useful and serve others is present in both roles. If anything, the narrative “hero” in (mainstream, modern, Western) culture is someone who makes themselves a deeper servant to more people at greater personal cost. There is a sacrificial theme to our hero-stories, going back at least to early Christianity.
Human undertakings are always deeply cooperative. Those who are higher up in a hierarchy of influence function in a large way as the servants of those below. As a nurse, you serve the patients you care for. The people who organize your work (assign shifts and tasks) mostly act to help you do your job better. And so the teacher serves the students; and the general serves the soldiers. Who are the heroes and who are the sidekicks? Something has gone awry if a community thinks that the arrow of agency points in a single direction.
An occupation like nursing has as much a heroic aspect as a leadership role has an aspect of service (to the people the leader is coordinating).
Once you split out status-seeking motivations, the psychological difference between those who want to be heroes and those who want to be sidekicks is probably not about wanting to useful overall, but about the specific manner in which a person wants their usefulness to be manifested: Aspiring heroes want broad and diffuse usefulness, and aspiring sidekicks want concrete and individually-manifested usefulness. As always, it’s can be pretty hard to figure out which approach is more valuable. There are plausible reasons, relating to the status concerns, to think that contributions of sidekicks are undervalued.
I don’t really identity with either role, so I’m curious if my attempt to explain the psychological difference (heroes help in a diffuse/general/far way and sidekicks help in a specific/concrete/near way) seems reasonable to those who identify more with each role.
Something else to remember: The Lord of the Rings took around six months. And considering that hobbits live longer than humans, by human standards it’s more like 4 months. In other words, heroes and sidekicks in pieces of fiction do not use up all their life or pawn their future in order to be heroes or sidekicks. Perhaps if they get unlucky (Frodo was injured), but that’s only a chance.
Even superheroes, who seem to be an exception to this, are saved by the genre conceits that 1) for some strange reason, if you’re not specifically obsessed like Batman, being a superhero doesn’t completely preclude a normal life, and 2) although the timescale of comic books means we don’t see it much, superheroes eventually stop being superheroes, and starting a family is one of the biggest reasons for one to stop.
Even if heroes and sidekicks existed in the real world, dedicating your life to Eliezer’s cause is a lot more extreme than being a hero or a sidekick, and should be thought of with appropriately greater skepticism.
Aren’t you cherry-picking, even from the single work of fiction you mention? Sure, Frodo and Samwise didn’t dedicate their lives to be heroes. But Gandalf and Aragorn did.
And your superhero genre conceits don’t seem to match what I’ve read. It’s a near-universal trope of superhero comics that heroes can’t lead normal lives and that when they do, they’re inevitably reminded of the inherent dangers, e.g. perfect hostages in the form of their loved ones. And it’s also another near-universal trope whereby the retired hero is called back into service in The Hour of Dire Need.
I agree that one should be more skeptical of dedicating one’s life to Eliezer’s cause than a character typically depicted in superhero comics might be given the prospect of super-powers. But let’s not forget that Hero is a trope with Real Life examples and dedicating one’s life to something is a pretty common occurrence.
I agree that one should be more skeptical of dedicating one’s life to Eliezer’s cause than a character typically depicted in superhero comics might be given the prospect of super-powers. But let’s not forget that Hero is a trope with Real Life examples and dedicating one’s life to something is a pretty common occurrence.
In my experience, a lot of people seem to expect that you’ve dedicated your life to something, as if plain, ordinary human beings who just want to be human beings are not even fantasy novel NPCs but just failing to follow the social rules of real life. I think this might have something to do with the pretensions to Great Purpose of the white-collar professional classes, but I still don’t really get it.
This bugs me a whole lot, because despite quite like LW-ian type stuff related to math, statistics, science, machine learning, blah blah blah, it all looks more than a little crazy from the outside, and I also just can’t wrap my head around dedicating a whole life to a thing, as if things are allowed to be bigger and more important than people.
“You’ve only got one life, but you can get a new cause on any street corner!”
-- Rincewind, summarizing my feelings on the subject of causes, including those I genuinely support.
Gandalf, yes—he does say that that the point of his existence was to be the counter to to Sauron—but Aragorn, no. He was a ranger before and became a king after, with just six months of heroism in between.
Gandalf’s essentially an angel, so I’m not sure concepts like dedicating one’s life to something conventionally apply to him. But “ranger”, for Aragorn, seems to cover an awful lot of heroism—and I wouldn’t be surprised if “king” did as well.
Being a hero in epic fantasy is often less about what you do and more about what you are. Lord of the Rings handles that in an interesting way, by arranging events such that the fate of the world hinges on the actions of characters who’re decidedly unheroic by genre standards—antiheroes in the classical, not the grimdark, sense of the word—but it plays the mantle-of-destiny thing more or less straight if we’re talking about anyone who isn’t a hobbit.
Gandalf’s essentially an angel, so I’m not sure concepts like dedicating one’s life to something conventionally apply to him.
Well, a Maia, and while I think his life was dedicated to a particular cause, there are enough hints that it’s not Gandalf himself who did the dedicating :-/ Though he certainly seemed to be perfectly fine with that.
antiheroes
I don’t think so—the hobbits are not “anti”, they are unexpected heroes, but pretty straight heroes otherwise.
Also, Gandalf is a Maiar, a supernatural being. He’s not a human, or a human stand-in such as a hobbit.
If I build a battle robot and the robot goes to battle, is it a hero?
Are angels heroes?
It’s a near-universal trope of superhero comics that heroes can’t lead normal lives and that when they do, they’re inevitably reminded of the inherent dangers, e.g. perfect hostages in the form of their loved ones.
“Normal life” is a relative term. I can think of few superheroes who are in a situation analogous to what was described by emr above with respect to Eliezer’s consort. There are certainly individual obstacles that superheroes face that normal people don’t, but the overall effect of these obstacles on the superhero’s life is limited, even if they loom large in an individual story.
If I build a battle robot and the robot goes to battle, is it a hero?
Are angels heroes?
The smartassed answer would be “decades of anime say yes”, but the real answer is that this is the kind of thing we could argue about for hours without making progress, because the word’s broad enough to encompass several mutually contradictory meanings.
This thread is happening in the context of a larger discussion about heroic responsibility, however, and I think “sidekick” here is most productively framed against that concept. Heroic responsibility means shouldering all the ills of the world; a sidekick’s responsibility is doing whatever the hero needs done so that they can more effectively get to the heroing. These approaches are rare in media; even Frodo and Samwise, the examples of the OP, only count in a kind of loose, metaphorical sense. But that doesn’t really matter, because we’re not doing media analysis here, we’re doing motivational psychology.
I’m not yet convinced that this is the healthiest or most productive way to conceptualize heroism or sidekickkery, at least for most people (you could insert a long-winded digression about Fate/stay night here, but it wouldn’t mean much to people that haven’t played the game). It beats arguing semantics, though, so let’s stick with it for now.
I think there might be some ambiguity with the “sidekick” thing. I understand framing this as a hero and side-kick dynamic, but I think it might be easier to create a mental model of a team with some people playing more of a support role. [For consistency with other posts, I’m going to largely phrase things in terms of hero and sidekick] Either way, though, I see two general way things can go, one healthy and one unhealthy.
“I am going to do whatever I can to help this hero, no matter what” is a version of side-kicking I see a lot in books. And I recently pulled myself out of a relationship where I fell into a similar dynamic (although without my partner actually falling into the “hero” role). The “do anything, come what may” aspect is very dangerous. And when I first read this post, that was the part that I found slightly disconcerting.
However, there’s another style of support/sidekicking that seems very healthy and productive to me:
“I am going to find a person or persons who are effective at achieving goal(s) I find important, and do what I feel appropriate to help them achieve those goals for as long as it seems like the right thing to do (where a condition of “right thing to do” is that they are treating me well).” This is a much more specific and conditional statement, and one that to me feels both powerful and healthy.
Reading some of the followup posts suggest that you and Brienne both fall into the second camp:
Brienne has been pretty explicit that if she’s working with a hero, and finds out that they’re wrong about a fundamental >thing and thus that she could make more impact on her own, she would do it, even though it would be a personal >tragedy.
The fiance of my best friend plays a supporting role (not a supporting actor, mind you) at a major movie production company. She doesn’t act, she doesn’t design things, she doesn’t get credit for all the big achievements. She just keeps all the different parts working together, keeps everyone on schedule, and when necessary handles the details necessary for the big name actors to be at their best (accommodating dietary needs, etc). The high status individuals like actors and animators may be more directly involved in producing the movies, but without this supporting individual and others like her, big productions would never be possible. I feel that many large endeavors (and perhaps even small ones) need people who can play such supporting roles.
I think the danger of the hero-sidekick dynamic is if there is such a strong bond of loyalty to the individual that either the hero or the sidekick is willing to tolerate being treated poorly, or interacting with someone who is no longer important in achieving the overarching goals. And because you can have heroes without sidekicks but you can’t have sidekicks without heroes, I would expect asymmetry in what sidekicks and heroes would naturally tolerate. But ultimately you are trying to WIN, which means that—emotional ties aside—the hero isn’t as important as how your contributions are helping to achieve your stated goals. Which means that, as a rationalist, you should work with a hero only for as long as that is the rational thing to do. It’s the potential for irrational loyalty that makes this subject slightly uncomfortable to me.
One of the things that I have found incredibly valuable for my romantic life, which seems equally valuable here, is to create a list of your goals, what you’re looking for in a partnership/team, what you’re happy doing and what you’re unhappy doing. While, as rationalists, we should be capable of setting aside our emotions while in the midst of a personal relationship (romantic, or platonic hero-sidekick, or really any other) to evaluate whether it’s the right thing, it’s much easier if you have a preexisting guideline. This, in turn, should drastically reduce the likelihood of exploitation by a less-than-perfect “hero”.
I’m curious as to why you so strongly think that sidekicks risk being abused, and that “healthy” communities will discourage this dynamic hard. I– I don’t want to say that I want to be exploited, but I crave being useful, and being used to my full usefulness. I don’t think this desire is unhealthy. Yes, this means that it’s always tempting to throw too much of myself at a project, but that’s the same problem as learning not to say yes to all the overtime shifts at the hospital and end up working 70 hours a week. I guess you could say that someone I was working for could “abuse” me by forcing me, or coercing or sweet-talking me, into the equivalent of “taking all the overtime shifts.” But (in my limited experience of this) the leader’s more common motivation seems to be in the opposite direction–of being afraid of pushing their sidekick too far.
I’m wondering whether you have some different experience of this, and would be interested in your elaboration if you have one.
I also had a weird reaction to your post, like emr and someonewrongonthenet. Personally, I feel that it’s healthy to work as an assistant to someone (and stop thinking about work when you leave the office at 6pm), but it’s unhealthy to be the assistant of someone (and treat them as a fantasy hero 24⁄7 and possibly sleep with them). Yay professionalism and work/life balance, boo medieval loyalties and imagined life narratives!
That’s also the advice I often give to programmers, to think of themselves as working for a company (in exchange for money) rather than at a company (as part of a common cause). That advice makes some stressful situations and conflicts just magically disappear.
You could say that a world of inherently equal professionals exchanging services, without PCs or NPCs, is too barren to many people. Some people actually want to feel like heroes, and others want to feel like sidekicks. Who am I to deny them that roleplay? Well, some people also want to fit in the “warrior” role, being fiercely loyal to their group and attacking outsiders. We have all kinds of ancient tribal instincts, which are amplified by reading fantasy and bad (hero-based) sci-fi. I feel that such instincts are usually harmful in the long run, although they seem to make sense in the moment.
I think this is exactly what Brienne is talking about when she points out that society doesn’t look kindly on people who want to serve others. And… I think maybe you’re pointing at something real. It does seem possible that when “being” an assistant breaks, it breaks harder than when “working as” an assistant breaks. So it’s a higher-stakes situation to put yourself in. (Both for the leader and for their assistant).
I don’t think that negates any of what I said in the post though. Half of my point is basically just “some people are the kind of people who want to be nurses, no, really.” Like, it seems to be really hard for people who aren’t those kind of people to understand that for me, roles that aren’t especially high-status but involve being really useful to other people hit all of my happiness buttons. That people are actually different and that their dream job might be one I’d hate, and vice versa.
The other part probably only makes sense when aimed at people who have taken the concept of “heroes” on board...which large portions of this community have. And that point is mainly: if you’re going to accept that heroes and people who want to be heroes are a thing, you’ve got to have the concept of sidekicks too, otherwise you have a broken unhealthy community. It sounds like you’re arguing that it’s best not to take either concept on board. Maybe. You can argue that point.
I’m not sure I have that switch? I’ve developed strong feelings of loyalty towards every job I’ve had. As a nurse, this loyalty is felt only a little bit towards the hospital where I work; I feel more of it for my immediate colleagues, and the rest of it towards some abstract “Profession of Nursing.” I’m not sure how to stop feeling that way, or honestly why I’d want to stop.
This comes across a little bit as saying “hey, don’t have emotions!” Which...yeah, maybe emotions cause a lot of problems, but not having them isn’t an option. And I’m not sure that not having narratives is an option either. It seems to me that I’m going to think of my life as a narrative in any case; I might as well try to understand and analyze and shape it. (Just as I shape my emotions, trying to lean away from the emotions that seem net-negative...but the way to do that is to guide yourself towards different emotions.)
I’m not sure why we’re focusing in on narratives here, but I suspect it’s for not very good reasons. Whether it’s good for some people to “think of themselves as sidekicks” seems less important than whether it’s good for people to actually perform the actions of a “sidekick”. We can talk about how to promote or discourage the set of actions once that’s settled. I’d much rather present a breakdown of what I actually do day to day and why, and then have people point out what precisely it is that I’m doing wrong.
Well, one reason is to avoid driving down wages and worsening working conditions for yourself and everyone else in your profession. It’s not a coincidence that the jobs that people feel “passionate” about are the jobs where it’s hardest to make a living, like writing or music. I wrote a post about that.
Yeah, pretty much. The whole PC vs NPC idea feels slightly distasteful to me.
I hope you wouldn’t give this advice to cofounders or early employees with an ownership stake, though, and that may be a better lens for viewing these sorts of relationships.
I don’t think a cofounder should be a sidekick. It’s more of a partnership, with voting and all.
So, I think that a sidekick can feel some ownership over what their hero does, and that feeling that will make them a better sidekick (in part, because they will be less likely to stop thinking about it at 6 pm).
I’m also having a hard time disentangling this in my mind from thoughts about households: in some sense, couples cofound a household together, and it seems counter-productive to think about that in solely mercenary terms, or to ‘clock out’ of your household.
I think I also find myself unhappy with what might be reflexive egalitarianism that is unhappy with unequal splits of decision-making power or status or so on. It’s okay to be unseen; it’s okay to be a junior partner; it’s okay to be a servant. A lot of talk about ‘purpose’ emphasizes having ‘something bigger than yourself,’ and it seems to me that finding purpose in the people around you is something worth applauding.
It is also a great way to avoid receiving job offers. “Your company is my cause” is one of the socially-necessitated blatant lies of our age.
Oh, I never said they shouldn’t lie.
I am from Britain and I can say with experience that working for a company in exchange for money is not an effective way to avoid 24⁄7 sleep with the hero situations. I know quite a few people who have a poor work life balance because they are working for a company and have more stressful situations and conflicts. I’ve seen people work themselves to depression, divorce, and death thanks to my involvement with the very toxic British banking culture.
Your avoidance of such things dependends on the independent variable of how assertive you are at managing your work/life balance and how good your goal setting is. It’s quite easy to overwork yourself for money. Wanting to be a sidekick or a hero or a equal professional doesn’t increase or decrease your skill at maintaining a work life balance or your goal setting skills any more than it increases your physical strength or intellect.
Banking has that reputation in America too. I would hazard a guess that the problem is banking, not Britain (I used to work in finance, though not in banking specifically).
You can’t be the sidekick of a hero anymore than you can be the student of an enlightened spiritual guru, or the patient of witchdoctor. If you go looking for a hero, who do you think you will find?
There is no chance that a Frodo-style hero exists, and that you’ve correctly identified one (versus an admirable non-hero or a fool or a charlatan), and that the hero needs the help of a sidekick to function as a hero (versus someone they can hire, or the support of standard social relationships) and that a genuine hero is going to be like “why yes I am a hero please quit your nursing job and be my (first? second? third?) sidekick in order to marginally increase my odds of saving the world”.
The danger is to those people who can recognize that they themselves are not gurus, witchdoctors, heroes, perfect rationalists or ubermensch-programmer-super-geniuses-saving-the-world, but still believe that there are large and identifiable classes of people out there who actually are. And who then feel that the only way to have a non-shameful standing relative to their largely imaginary peers to find one to team up with!
That said, my critique is more against the notion that there is a special class of heroes waiting to be paired up with sidekicks than against the value of “sidekick” role. I feel that I’m deeply sympathetic to the heart of what you’ve said. A more constructive take that tries to avoid the problems that concern me might be:
The desire to be useful and serve others is present in both roles. If anything, the narrative “hero” in (mainstream, modern, Western) culture is someone who makes themselves a deeper servant to more people at greater personal cost. There is a sacrificial theme to our hero-stories, going back at least to early Christianity.
Human undertakings are always deeply cooperative. Those who are higher up in a hierarchy of influence function in a large way as the servants of those below. As a nurse, you serve the patients you care for. The people who organize your work (assign shifts and tasks) mostly act to help you do your job better. And so the teacher serves the students; and the general serves the soldiers. Who are the heroes and who are the sidekicks? Something has gone awry if a community thinks that the arrow of agency points in a single direction.
An occupation like nursing has as much a heroic aspect as a leadership role has an aspect of service (to the people the leader is coordinating).
Once you split out status-seeking motivations, the psychological difference between those who want to be heroes and those who want to be sidekicks is probably not about wanting to useful overall, but about the specific manner in which a person wants their usefulness to be manifested: Aspiring heroes want broad and diffuse usefulness, and aspiring sidekicks want concrete and individually-manifested usefulness. As always, it’s can be pretty hard to figure out which approach is more valuable. There are plausible reasons, relating to the status concerns, to think that contributions of sidekicks are undervalued.
I don’t really identity with either role, so I’m curious if my attempt to explain the psychological difference (heroes help in a diffuse/general/far way and sidekicks help in a specific/concrete/near way) seems reasonable to those who identify more with each role.
Something else to remember: The Lord of the Rings took around six months. And considering that hobbits live longer than humans, by human standards it’s more like 4 months. In other words, heroes and sidekicks in pieces of fiction do not use up all their life or pawn their future in order to be heroes or sidekicks. Perhaps if they get unlucky (Frodo was injured), but that’s only a chance.
Even superheroes, who seem to be an exception to this, are saved by the genre conceits that 1) for some strange reason, if you’re not specifically obsessed like Batman, being a superhero doesn’t completely preclude a normal life, and 2) although the timescale of comic books means we don’t see it much, superheroes eventually stop being superheroes, and starting a family is one of the biggest reasons for one to stop.
Even if heroes and sidekicks existed in the real world, dedicating your life to Eliezer’s cause is a lot more extreme than being a hero or a sidekick, and should be thought of with appropriately greater skepticism.
Aren’t you cherry-picking, even from the single work of fiction you mention? Sure, Frodo and Samwise didn’t dedicate their lives to be heroes. But Gandalf and Aragorn did.
And your superhero genre conceits don’t seem to match what I’ve read. It’s a near-universal trope of superhero comics that heroes can’t lead normal lives and that when they do, they’re inevitably reminded of the inherent dangers, e.g. perfect hostages in the form of their loved ones. And it’s also another near-universal trope whereby the retired hero is called back into service in The Hour of Dire Need.
I agree that one should be more skeptical of dedicating one’s life to Eliezer’s cause than a character typically depicted in superhero comics might be given the prospect of super-powers. But let’s not forget that Hero is a trope with Real Life examples and dedicating one’s life to something is a pretty common occurrence.
In my experience, a lot of people seem to expect that you’ve dedicated your life to something, as if plain, ordinary human beings who just want to be human beings are not even fantasy novel NPCs but just failing to follow the social rules of real life. I think this might have something to do with the pretensions to Great Purpose of the white-collar professional classes, but I still don’t really get it.
This bugs me a whole lot, because despite quite like LW-ian type stuff related to math, statistics, science, machine learning, blah blah blah, it all looks more than a little crazy from the outside, and I also just can’t wrap my head around dedicating a whole life to a thing, as if things are allowed to be bigger and more important than people.
-- Rincewind, summarizing my feelings on the subject of causes, including those I genuinely support.
Gandalf, yes—he does say that that the point of his existence was to be the counter to to Sauron—but Aragorn, no. He was a ranger before and became a king after, with just six months of heroism in between.
Gandalf’s essentially an angel, so I’m not sure concepts like dedicating one’s life to something conventionally apply to him. But “ranger”, for Aragorn, seems to cover an awful lot of heroism—and I wouldn’t be surprised if “king” did as well.
Being a hero in epic fantasy is often less about what you do and more about what you are. Lord of the Rings handles that in an interesting way, by arranging events such that the fate of the world hinges on the actions of characters who’re decidedly unheroic by genre standards—antiheroes in the classical, not the grimdark, sense of the word—but it plays the mantle-of-destiny thing more or less straight if we’re talking about anyone who isn’t a hobbit.
Well, a Maia, and while I think his life was dedicated to a particular cause, there are enough hints that it’s not Gandalf himself who did the dedicating :-/ Though he certainly seemed to be perfectly fine with that.
I don’t think so—the hobbits are not “anti”, they are unexpected heroes, but pretty straight heroes otherwise.
Also, Gandalf is a Maiar, a supernatural being. He’s not a human, or a human stand-in such as a hobbit.
If I build a battle robot and the robot goes to battle, is it a hero?
Are angels heroes?
“Normal life” is a relative term. I can think of few superheroes who are in a situation analogous to what was described by emr above with respect to Eliezer’s consort. There are certainly individual obstacles that superheroes face that normal people don’t, but the overall effect of these obstacles on the superhero’s life is limited, even if they loom large in an individual story.
The smartassed answer would be “decades of anime say yes”, but the real answer is that this is the kind of thing we could argue about for hours without making progress, because the word’s broad enough to encompass several mutually contradictory meanings.
This thread is happening in the context of a larger discussion about heroic responsibility, however, and I think “sidekick” here is most productively framed against that concept. Heroic responsibility means shouldering all the ills of the world; a sidekick’s responsibility is doing whatever the hero needs done so that they can more effectively get to the heroing. These approaches are rare in media; even Frodo and Samwise, the examples of the OP, only count in a kind of loose, metaphorical sense. But that doesn’t really matter, because we’re not doing media analysis here, we’re doing motivational psychology.
I’m not yet convinced that this is the healthiest or most productive way to conceptualize heroism or sidekickkery, at least for most people (you could insert a long-winded digression about Fate/stay night here, but it wouldn’t mean much to people that haven’t played the game). It beats arguing semantics, though, so let’s stick with it for now.
In which sense is Gandalf similar to a battle robot in the way that, say, Aragorn is not?
Besides, if you think of Maiar as battle robots, not only Gandalf is not a hero, but Sauron is not a villain either.
I think there might be some ambiguity with the “sidekick” thing. I understand framing this as a hero and side-kick dynamic, but I think it might be easier to create a mental model of a team with some people playing more of a support role. [For consistency with other posts, I’m going to largely phrase things in terms of hero and sidekick] Either way, though, I see two general way things can go, one healthy and one unhealthy.
“I am going to do whatever I can to help this hero, no matter what” is a version of side-kicking I see a lot in books. And I recently pulled myself out of a relationship where I fell into a similar dynamic (although without my partner actually falling into the “hero” role). The “do anything, come what may” aspect is very dangerous. And when I first read this post, that was the part that I found slightly disconcerting.
However, there’s another style of support/sidekicking that seems very healthy and productive to me:
“I am going to find a person or persons who are effective at achieving goal(s) I find important, and do what I feel appropriate to help them achieve those goals for as long as it seems like the right thing to do (where a condition of “right thing to do” is that they are treating me well).” This is a much more specific and conditional statement, and one that to me feels both powerful and healthy.
Reading some of the followup posts suggest that you and Brienne both fall into the second camp:
The fiance of my best friend plays a supporting role (not a supporting actor, mind you) at a major movie production company. She doesn’t act, she doesn’t design things, she doesn’t get credit for all the big achievements. She just keeps all the different parts working together, keeps everyone on schedule, and when necessary handles the details necessary for the big name actors to be at their best (accommodating dietary needs, etc). The high status individuals like actors and animators may be more directly involved in producing the movies, but without this supporting individual and others like her, big productions would never be possible. I feel that many large endeavors (and perhaps even small ones) need people who can play such supporting roles.
I think the danger of the hero-sidekick dynamic is if there is such a strong bond of loyalty to the individual that either the hero or the sidekick is willing to tolerate being treated poorly, or interacting with someone who is no longer important in achieving the overarching goals. And because you can have heroes without sidekicks but you can’t have sidekicks without heroes, I would expect asymmetry in what sidekicks and heroes would naturally tolerate. But ultimately you are trying to WIN, which means that—emotional ties aside—the hero isn’t as important as how your contributions are helping to achieve your stated goals. Which means that, as a rationalist, you should work with a hero only for as long as that is the rational thing to do. It’s the potential for irrational loyalty that makes this subject slightly uncomfortable to me.
One of the things that I have found incredibly valuable for my romantic life, which seems equally valuable here, is to create a list of your goals, what you’re looking for in a partnership/team, what you’re happy doing and what you’re unhappy doing. While, as rationalists, we should be capable of setting aside our emotions while in the midst of a personal relationship (romantic, or platonic hero-sidekick, or really any other) to evaluate whether it’s the right thing, it’s much easier if you have a preexisting guideline. This, in turn, should drastically reduce the likelihood of exploitation by a less-than-perfect “hero”.