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I would have actually tuned in to the Super Bowl last night if I were a timezone or two to the East. While I’m not the biggest sports girlie, I am a Bad Bunny fan—and so are a lot of other people lately.
Since his big night at the Grammys last week, the Puerto Rican artist has been all over the media, rightfully haloed in the lead-up to his historical (and controversial) halftime show. For some quick background enrichment, Rolling Stone did a breakdown of the top five Bad Bunny songs, and the justifications are inspiring and representative of why he’s so important. Examples:
He gave heart to Puerto Ricans after hurricane María savaged the island’s shores (“Estamos Bien”).
He’s secure enough in his masculinity to dress in drag while advocating for leaving women the hell alone on the dance floor (“Yo Perreo Sola”).
He respects his musical forebears (“Safaera”) in creative, surprising ways.
He’s nostalgic <3 (“DTmF” which expands to “Debí Tirar más Fotos,” I Should Have Taken More Pictures).
He uses his platform to raise young and up-and-coming Puerto Rican musicians into the light (“Baile Inolvidable”).
And then, of course, there’s the fact that he pre-empted touring in the US to protect his large Latinx fan base from being targeted at venues by ICE, forgoing millions in ticket sales in exchange for his fans’ safety.
Bad Bunny is snatching up awards and hearts because he stands for something and, in times like these, that’s pretty heroic. My knee-jerk reaction after watching the aforementioned Rolling Stone roundup was to immediately tap “repost” on Instagram and caption it “What a hero!† Bad Bunny might save us all if we just let him.”
But then I paused and deleted the post. A) that’s a lot to put on one person, even if he’s as principled as he is jacked, and B) Since talking with journalist and author Jane Borden I have made it a mission to question my very American tendency to search for heroes—because even though I come by it honestly, I think it’s a trap.
Jane Borden, this week’s Simplify guest, wrote Cults Like Us: How Doomsday Thinking Drives America. It’s a fascinating, funny pop history of how the doomsday thinking of the US’s Puritan founders still drives US-American culture today and provides context for the rise in far-right extremism. We talked about how power corrupts, where the US’s obsession with work came from, Jane’s thesis that the United States is the largest cult of all, and how cult leaders are essentially really good salespeople. She also exposed me to my favorite new thing to talk about: The American Monomyth. It’s a hero-driven narrative pattern in pop culture discovered by two academics named Robert Jouet and John Shelton Lawrence. Jane summarizes it as follows:
“There's a small Eden-like community that's under some kind of threat and is unable to save itself. The cops are bumbling, the politicians are corrupt. What are they gonna do? Suddenly this outsider appears and saves it through righteous, cleansing violence.*”
Once you see it, you see it everywhere. It’s in old-timey cowboy movies and every contemporary superhero movie. But more significantly, it’s the pattern that primed exhausted, frustrated Americans to elect Trump—a political outsider with an inexhaustible supply of righteous, “cleansing” vengeance—and then sit back and wait to be saved. The US doesn’t look particularly safe now. Instead, it looks suspiciously more like a cult. But why listen to me? There’s a simple, academically-sanctioned way to check for cultishness, which is another thing I learned from Jane.
To qualify as a cult, a group must meet sociologist Robert J Lifton’s three criteria. It’s got to…
Have a charismatic leader
Exert thought control or thought reform
Have done real harm (usually financial and sexual exploitation)
I’ll just leave that list there and let you draw your own conclusions.
Here’s the thing about cults and hero stories: when we run the script of the American Monomyth, we surrender our agency and wait for a larger-than-life someone to fix things for us. The problem isn’t even that endowing one person with a vast amount of power immediately stands to curdle their principles (which it will). It’s that when we look toward a hero to deliver us from our circumstances, we set ourselves up to be disempowered and divided. Jane says:
“Division fuels cult-like thinking at the societal level as well as cults themselves… because they know it serves their ends. Bad actors in power want us to dehumanize one another because when we're fighting each other, we're too distracted to stop them. When you see someone, when you actually know someone, that person is human and you cannot dehumanize them. When we can turn toward one another, we can stop the exploitation. It doesn't require political will. It doesn't require legislation. It's just turning toward one another.”
Very little is more philosophically US-American than believing a hero will sweep in from the outside and save us from ourselves. But we’ve got to stop scrambling for heroes—because only we can do that saving, together.
So, what next? For one, listen to Jane’s episode of Simplify! It’s in the running for one of my top 5 favorite interviews ever. It’s surprising. It’s fun. It’s a little dark, but ultimately uplifting. Also, go read her book, Cults Like Us. She’s a fantastic writer and you won’t be sorry.
For my part, I’ve been thinking about the tender might of turning toward one another, and also, great as he is, prospecting for a word more apt for Bad Bunny than “hero.” Hero reinforces our passivity and disempowerment, but “role model?” Now that’s got energy! It implies agency on the part of the beholder, and there’s no one-up/one-down dynamic. It’s shoulder-to-shoulder, humanizing, heartening. United.
Role model says “I aspire to match my actions and values to those of this decent person.” Hero says “I’ll wait for intervention from this person bigger and braver than me.”
So, here’s to role models—both being them and being with them. I may never have Bad Bunny’s BMI or musical talent, but I can sit here at my laptop, lead with my values, and remind people to turn toward one another.
‘Til soon,
Caitlin
* In no way do I believe that Bad Bunny would ever visit righteous violence upon us all, nor am I contending that his being Boricua puts him in a position to be an “avenging outsider”—only that he was outside mainstream white awareness.
† Bad Bunny was actually once cast as Marvel’s first ever Latinx superhero!?
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