THE RACK: the story behind one VOICWAR design, with sources. The newsletter, TEETH, arrives every other week. Subscribe.
"Never meet your heroes" is advice about disappointment. This is the harder version: stop keeping any.
Everyone we were told to look up to has had a bad decade. That is not a run of bad luck. It is what the chair does to the person sitting in it, and somebody wrote it down 139 years ago.
April 5, 1887. Lord Acton writes to Bishop Mandell Creighton. Creighton has argued that popes and kings deserve gentler judgment than ordinary people, on account of the offices they hold. Acton tells him the opposite: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
Read the second sentence again. It is the half that gets cut every time. Not "power is dangerous." Great men are almost always bad men. The heroes. The ones you were handed.
And Acton was not a cynic. He was a devout Catholic saying this to a bishop: no title makes the person holding it holy. He believed. That is exactly why he wanted the judgment stricter, not softer.
That letter describes this week.
We were told the branches would check each other. They watched. We were told the pulpit was for the least of these, and a lot of it has gone into explaining why the cruelty was necessary. Every one of those failures came wearing a title somebody told you to respect.
1886, one year before Acton's letter. Nietzsche, from the opposite end of everything: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster." Translation: watch who you turn into while you fight them. A believer and an atheist, same decade, same warning.
Wear it with your eyes open. Not because everybody is a monster, but because you are done needing anybody to be a god. Check the record, never the title. There is plenty left to fight and nobody is coming to do it for you.