In the culture that has manipulated ours children have denied history as it happened and accepted myth as it should have occurred. Paradoxically theyve done nothing wrong and thus there is no reason to be shocked when I tell you or if you notice in todays papers that teenagers in Britain believe in Churchill and Gandhi as myth and take king Arthur, Sherlock holmes and Eleanor rigby to be real. Whatevers heroic can reasonably be considered unreal. And what is unreal is always heroic. In which Hercules carries the world on his shoulders and later becomes a cycle, we can observe an appropriation of an icon, and a desecration of a personality through objectification. And in that which Gandhi offers the other cheek and becomes a gangster’s conscience the working of a happy metaphor is all too evident. There is therefore at least in the eyes of a kid no difference between heroism in life and the heroic metaphor in art. The world as will and idea is a book and the truth as the word and the phenomenon is conjecture. So while we are ready now to fight monsters gargoyles daemons on the plains and highlands and look to slay dragons in placid blue lakes, and investigate and expose murderers and thiefs in our metropolises, and reflect on the misery of loneliness and the resignation of age, we are quite unable to accept that man qua man is actually capable of such villainy as made heroes out of Gandhi and Churchill.
Most notable here is what Einstein said on gandhi’s death. Prophetic physicist.