Hello and welcome to

Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left.

I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friends Jeremy Gilbert.

Hello.

And Keir Milburn.

Hello.

And today we are talking about heroes.

So guys, why do we want to talk about heroes now?

This was my suggestion. In fact, it was a comment by a friend of the show, Alan Finliss, and we were discussing something or other, and he was going on about the centrality of the idea

of heroism and the heroism and the hero's journey to the contemporary far right,

which made me start thinking about heroes and whether the idea of heroes is like necessarily

reactionary. And then at the same time, there's been these debates around on the left about,

you know, perhaps he should form a new party or something. And it become pretty obvious that

Jeremy Corby must be central. He's probably the only figure who could sort of like bring different

things together to form, have a new party or a new electoral alliance or something like that,

basically, which made me think about, you know, the way people identify with political figures and whether we can have political

heroes. And I was, I realised I was quite confused about the whole issue. So that's sort of what

I'm interested in. One of the things I'm interested in is the whole absence of heroism from

politics, especially from progressive politics, and especially actually

from kind of liberal, centrist politics today. I'm in the process of developing this idea

of careerism, like not just as a habit, but as like a whole ideology, a whole world view and

form of subjectivity. And I think one of the features of the technocratic careerist

...