Everyone’s the hero of their own story

How to comprehend the incomprehensible

Illustration by Alexander Naughton

If there’s a universal law of human behavior, I think it’s this: People will believe whatever allows them to be the hero of their own story.

When I say “hero,” I don’t mean someone thoroughly virtuous. Few people walk around with an exalted sense of self, thinking they’re a prophet or Great Man of History. I mean someone whose choices matter to the overall plot, and whose faults are redeemed by their good qualities. A sympathetic character in a struggle of real significance.

What this boils down to is: We all need to maintain a belief that we are fundamentally (if incompletely) good, reasonable, decent people. That we are doing the best we can, given what we have to work with. This belief is so load-bearing that abandoning it is basically never on the table. If we come into contact with evidence that might contradict it, we will instead do one of two things: (1) deny the evidence, or (2) revise our concepts of what it means to be good, reasonable, or decent. (Often, these strategies are sequential: find facts that align with your narrative first if possible, and if that fails, retreat to “those facts are good, actually.”)

This theory is, of course, incomplete; there aren’t really universal laws of human behavior. Depression, moral scrupulosity, and psychopathy are all, to some extent, disorders of this drive. But I think the rule is still often useful for being able to understand why people sometimes do things that are otherwise incomprehensible, or for predicting how they will behave in the future.

Note that at no point do you have to win in order to be the hero of your story. Being a victim is an easy way to stay the hero, especially if you view the game as rigged against you. Maybe things aren’t going so great, but you’re not at fault: You’ve been placed in an impossible position by vast forces that conspire against you — the landed Boomers, the globalist elite, the patriarchy. In a tragic story, the hero can lose, and they are all the more laudable for their suffering.

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The basic drive to be a hero is almost certainly good, on the whole. It’s one of the cornerstones of a behavioral system that largely works. The cooperative nature of our species is borderline magical. We share most of our internal machinery with wild animals who are unable to live in peace with rival groups. If you put a bunch of people who dislike each other together on a long flight, you’ll probably land with some grumpy people. Replace those humans with chimpanzees, and you would land with a plane full of dead apes. The need to maintain a self-image of ethical uprightness probably plays a big role here.

But the downsides are significant. One issue is that we keep committing atrocities that are seen as morally defensible until some preference cascade makes us sit up and collectively ask, “Hey, what the fuck?” We frequently look back at things humanity just recently stopped doing with incredulity and horror.

Another downside, which may end up destroying our civilization, is the way this instinct plays out in politics. Maybe it seems like this is a Republican issue in particular — the pattern of “deny the facts, up until you full-throatedly embrace them” is one we see playing out in the news a lot lately. (As an example, if you need one, consider the mental gymnastics some people had to do to defend the tariffs.)

But I think hero stories contribute to hyper-partisanship at a much deeper level, by dividing us into teams that not only disagree with one another but essentially inhabit totally different realities. The more loudly our opponents insist that we’re wrong, bad, deranged — the more intensely they oppose the hero of the story — the more we’re forced to conclude that they’re villains, and must be reflexively resisted at every turn, even on the occasions when what they say aligns with our interests. Belief in our own goodness, and therefore their badness, is the one non-negotiable, the one central pillar around which facts and positions and interests can all bend.

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I find this “everyone’s a hero” framing useful for a few reasons.

It makes the world more comprehensible. I think if you really absorb this frame, you don’t find yourself bewildered and alienated by the behavior of others as often. You start to get the core mechanism, even if its manifestations confuse and sometimes repulse you.

For the last few decades, self-styled “environmentalists” have been one of our civilization’s greatest adversaries in the fight against climate change. They have blocked progress on clean, safe sources of energy, including nuclear power, and at times hydroelectric, solar, and wind. They have opposed carbon capture and carbon removal technologies on grounds of moral hazard — the claim that mitigating the downsides of fossil fuels will only prolong our dependence on them. They have opposed research on geoengineering technologies that might be our only hope of avoiding catastrophic climate tipping points.

This is all incomprehensible from the viewpoint that what environmentalists want, fundamentally, is to reduce the catastrophic effects of climate change. But what they actually want is what we all want — to believe their effort matters, that they’re fighting the good fight. That means their team has to win, with its aesthetics, allegiances, and preoccupations. So the oil companies have to lose, and the solution has to be anti-capitalist and non-technological.

Many mysteries can be solved like this. Why do left-leaning activists insist that we need to deal with housing costs via rent control or other anti-market measures, despite every single piece of available evidence showing that the only way is to actually let developers build things? Because “the people” need to prevail, and we can’t let the greedy developers win, or let rich people have more nice things. Why is cutting funding for science and reducing high-skilled immigration a good way to make America great again? Because we are defeating the villainous liberals who own the corrupt institutions. Why is Eliezer Yudkowsky so habitually condescending in public communication, despite claiming that the fate of humanity hinges on his being listened to?

It helps me to be more compassionate. For the first half of the past decade, I felt a lot more anguish and disgust toward other people than I do today. I had a story that I was trying to be a good person in a way that was attuned to the reality of the world, and other people were deliberately deciding to be bad people who rejected reality. I am guessing that this still rings true for many people today.

But I now think this is largely an illusion. I think that most people, like me, are doing the best they can, given what they have to work with, and that most of them just don’t have as much to work with, frankly. It is very easy for me to maintain my belief that I am the hero of the story when the world conspires to help me — when I have a job I take pride in, and enough money in my bank account, and the respect of my peers. But those are all downstream of basic facts about myself that I didn’t choose, that I just lucked into at birth.

I write here often and enthusiastically about developing personal agency, but nothing I say contradicts this core belief that I also hold: People largely don’t get to choose who they are. We are a reaction to our environment the way a form is a reaction to its mold; we expand to fill the narrative spaces available to us. If I was poor, uneducated, and had no job prospects let alone “career options,” but kept hearing the message that I was keeping other people down, would I just accept that? Or would I come to see the people saying that as villains?

This framing also helps me realize that I am almost certainly wrong about some things in my life — that I, too, am seeing things through a lens distorted by my psychological needs. When I say “people will believe whatever allows them to be the hero of their own story,” I am people too.

It exposes a path to (some) progress. Facts are the first thing to go, which is why it’s typically impossible to persuade someone via direct debate. If you’re the protagonist of your story, and you find yourself beset by people who are telling you that what you believe is wrong, who are those people? Antagonists, obviously. They must be bravely opposed, even if you can’t answer their arguments — it takes a real hero to resist the clever, well-rehearsed words of a deceiver!

That facts don’t matter doesn’t mean nothing matters, or that people do things for no reason. It also doesn’t mean changing minds is impossible. It’s just unpleasant, because it requires stepping into their frame in a way the whole psychological immune system we’ve been talking about is designed to avoid.

If your goal is to actually change someone’s mind — not just to feel like you won, or produce a nice YouTube clip, but to actually change their mind — then you should be operating in the conversation as if you’re talking to the hero of the story, who is basically good but has been misled.

Almost no political discourse we see in public is like this. People want to try to persuade other people — or just mock them — on the basis of facts, repeated more and more angrily. If they just hear this airtight case I’ve constructed, they’ll be forced to concede that they’re wrong. Even if we know this isn’t how it works, our brains refuse to accept it, because we operate under the fundamental misperception that we choose our own beliefs because of facts.

I don't think this ever succeeds in convincing people. It’s possible that’s because most people don’t want to convince people — they just want to keep the infinite feud going, because that’s a psychologically comfortable place to be.

But if you do want to persuade, you have to offer people an alternative narrative. A new heroic story they can inhabit. With some emotional intelligence, you can make someone feel as if you’re not a villain mocking them, but rather, a sympathetic helper who can bring them new information. After all, many heroic plots involve the hero breaking free from a false allegiance, with the help of an unlikely sidekick who alerts them to some deception.

In fact, this is maybe the only approach that allows us to make progress. You will never find the bottom of people’s willingness to change their factual views about the world in order to maintain their self-image — the last 10 years have been a lesson in nothing if not this.

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Throughout this essay, I’ve been speaking as if there’s no escape from this iron law. But actually, there is one available to each of us. The escape is a state of suspended judgement, in which you don’t believe that you’re either a hero or a villain, a loser or a winner.

You are an animal, trying your best to be good with limited information, in defiance of all of the fear and stupidity that is part of your human heritage — and everyone else is, too. You are trying while being completely unsure of what the ultimate moral balance of your life will be — and everyone else is, too.

We are all in this together, in a state of almost complete ignorance, hurtling through the darkness, occasionally capable of small acts of true nobility — spontaneous gifts of love and charity that are beyond what could be expected.

Entering into this perspective of non-superiority, briefly, is what allows us to actually be better, to temporarily see the ways we could really be kinder, more curious, more humble. It’s what empowers us to think daring thoughts like “maybe this company I’m building isn’t good for the world” or “maybe I’m the problem in this relationship.”

It’s not something one can reside in permanently. This is evidenced by how people try to solidify this state of mind with a status, like “Kegan stage 5,” or “enlightenment,” attempting to assure themselves that they’ve obtained faultless maturity, a permanent vacation from the structures of the human mind. This is hero thinking, once again, and it’s not true.

This is one of the things we face when we step out of the hero mindset: the frightening knowledge that we can only achieve temporary glimpses beyond our moral frame, that our frail human psychology isn’t built for consistent re-examination. The best we can hope for is to demand a few moments of lucidity, a few seconds here and there when we can rise above our automatic trajectory, or maybe even try to set a slightly better one. Come on — it’s what a real hero would do.

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