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Nostalgia can make us blind to the shadows. (11/16/2025) [Cults are not unlike music heroes, where you worship their work for about 5 years, and you move on, although vestiges of it remain for life because of the nostalgia for the time when they were your heroes. We can tend to forget about the dark sides of hero worship when they have fallen from grace, and we blind ourselves to it--usually the result of relating our own lives to theirs in some ways. We're actually painting ourselves with the same paints and brushes on the same canvas, allowing us to adore the painting we've made together without doubting that it's the greatest painting that's ever been made, when it's actually not that good. We collectively capitulate to the idea that the Mona Lisa is a great painting, but I don't have a framed print of it, and seeing it at The Louvre is not a bucket list item. Not that the Mona Lisa or da Vinci have "shadows", but when we exalt people or objects to that level, that's when the shadows begin to appear.

Also 0550:  On heroes: some are born, some are reluctant. The effect on the rescued is the same; whereas the effect on the hero is different: the former readily embrace heroism, the latter are conflicted. Many conflicted heroes grow to accept the conflict, but never completely reconcile it. They do it only in honor of the rescued—all the while they themselves feel vulnerable and abandoned, awaiting their own hero to rescue them. It won't matter if the hero was born or made.