Heros, Villains and Quests

I just saw The Lord of the Rings on TNT (in my work I work with television). We have a lot of hero mythology - Star Wars, Star Trek, and so many others. In these myths, evil is focused in a single manifestation, and a hero slays the dragon, destroys the ring, or leads a defending army, vanquishing evil.

These myths create and perpetuate the fundamental good and evil dichotomy. As discussed earlier, good and evil is binary, black & white thinking, a kind of thinking fostered and encouraged by print media. Electronic media, and especially the Internet foster and encourage multiple ways of thinking, multiple solutions to problems.

Many of the challenges we currently face are the result of millions of us making suboptimal decisions, like driving individually-operated cars and trucks. Instead of a single hero, we need millions of them - we all need to be heros.