KILL YOUR HEROES: "IF" AND JINGOIST KIPLING

Who is a hero? 

How deeply does a hero affect our lives?

Where do we put a stop to our praise of these heroes?

Are they really as perfect as we imagine them to be?

Would we hate them for their bad sides once we get to know them, or is it unconditional admiration despite the negatives?

Note: I'm talking about people of celebrity status and influence. The kind you probably won't ever meet but know only through books or media.

Some of you might have come across the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling at some point. 

The occasional YouTube search “Inspirational Videos” brings up this poem (among a lot of other poems and quotes) in black and white videos with some dude in a deep manly voice reading out the poem. And it is arguably one of the most uplifting poems ever, the YouTube video, if administered at the right time, can possibly fill your willpower reserve and enable you to fight through an extra hour of study or work.

I’ve read “If” a lot many times. And Rudyard Kipling seemed a really awesome person to write this poem. Plus he’s created the iconic Jungle Book stories of Mowgli and friends which I used to read in ‘Baalarama’ the Malayalam children’s weekly. Most everyone's been called Mowgli when trying to climb trees as a kid. 

Plus he’s the youngest person ever to win Nobel Prize for literature too (he was 41 years old at the time... that's young by Nobel standards). What an accomplished and inspiring guy!

Only recently did I come to know some startling facts about Kipling’s not-so-agreeable side. Kipling is also the author of another poem, “The White Man’s Burden”. Through the poem, Kipling urges the Americans to colonise and civilise the Filipino people, as the British have done everywhere.

What exactly is the white man’s burden? Well, Kipling was one of the many like-minded colonists who firmly believed that it was the duty of the culturally and technologically advanced Europeans to take up the burden of civilising and morally correcting the lesser races of humans, in all the other crappy continents. 

And what really got me is the word "Burden". Damn, it's not that he reckons that it is like, "Hey brown dude, I'll help you guys start living a better life". Rather, it's as if he thinks it is the pain-in-the-ass duty to morally correct the other races, it is a duty, a manifest destiny. 

Kipling, that's close-minded and rude, man! 

It doesn't stop there. The Jungle Book is claimed to have a racist undertone too, as did many of his works. 

                                                   

Kipling was an imperialist jingoist. That’s the cool way to address a white man who thinks he’s superior to the coloured folks and wants to take authority over the coloured folks and “fix” them.

So here I have Rudyard Kipling, who’s written this truly inspiring poem that gives me a boost of motivation every time I read it, and here’s also Rudyard Kipling, who might’ve pitied me as a below-par brown dude if I ever went to see him. So is he still a hero to me, or does coming to know that he was apparently a condescending racist make him someone I should hate?

I have to say that I only have superficial knowledge about his racist motives. I’m not an expert in his writings or ideology. But it seems to be true that he was indeed a jingoist.

The question is whether I should admire him as the author of this favourite poem of mine, or hate him for being a y’all-are-inferior-savages dickhead?

Is Kipling a hero for me? Or is he a very conceited and cocky man who wrote this amazing poem that resonated with me?

The move I made to make peace with this situation is to acknowledge the fact that there is no objectively good person. We’re all deranged and selfish in many ways. The more you get to know a person, the more his faults start showing past all the good things.

Never meet your heroes. Kill your heroes. The idea is to stop putting them on pedestals, to stop idealising them blindly.

     

I can hate Kipling for his mindset and denounce all his works as written from the perspective of a jingoist, but I can also choose to ignore the dark side of him and appreciate the poem. The poem does not change a bit in value whether read with the inspiring English writer Kipling in mind or the arrogant imperialist Kipling in mind. I guess the local Lorentz frame idea can be applied here. 

Kipling is someone I look up to for this awesome poem he’s written. But I don’t like him for his ideology, it's horrible and messed up and arrogant. That’s okay. I choose to respect the good parts in him.

So I choose to admire Kipling as a hero. He might’ve had his reasons for his beliefs, however distorted and appalling. If we ever meet I could just tell him, “You’re wrong, Mr Kipling. We're all right. We don’t need your "help". But hey, that poem was dope.”  

If you have a hero, be it a pop star, writer, actor or athlete, it's possible you may be holding on to the best version of him/her. Well, coming to terms with the possibility that they ain’t only filled with the good points you see in them might be a smart move. Stop idealising them, comparing their many achievements to your few, and thinking if only you could be exactly in their status and fame you would reach the peak of happiness and grace.

Coming back to our jingoist, ultimately it's all okay really. Kipling was okay. He wrote a really cool poem, wrote a lot of good stories and poems actually. I'll leave it at that. Focus on the good, right? 

PS: One important message. I command thee to add a comment to the blog post. Google tells me it will help in ranking the post high on google search. Prophet wants to rank high. Help Prophet rank high. Do this and you are guaranteed prosperity and success in life.