I do believe that “toxic heroism” will cause citizens to seek for honors at any cost and to engage in destructive behavior toward society or themselves if their personal honors are unrealized or underestimated. For instance, in the book “Ajax,” Ajax tried to kill all the Greek army simply because he didn’t get Achilles’s armor—the symbol of honor. In the book “Iliad,” Achilles prayed to the god hoping his people, Greece, to die simply because Agamemnon deprived most of his honor and humiliated him. Hector would have escaped from death by going back to his city Troy if he hadn’t become crazy about protecting his honor.
In addition, toxic heroism is reinforced by both the social culture problem and self-restraint problems. The ancient Greek culture focuses too much on hero-like behaviors, which include negative behaviors such as killing—the symbol of courage and warrior-like spirit. Consequently, it hurts society’s development by asking everyone to pursue the toxic heroism culture. On the other hand, about the self-restraint problem: in the “Ajax”, Ajax could not resist the anger caused by the fact that Ajax didn’t get the armor of Achilles, leading to his misbehavior of slaughtering his “allies” and later his commitment of suicide.
Besides, I agree that toxic heroism isolates certain groups of people. Women are clearly discriminated against because they neither can do hero-like behaviors such as fighting nor can they have a hero-like characteristic such as emotionless. For example, in Greek, women are the awards or spoils for the man warriors: In “Iliad,” Agamemnon chose the woman robbed from the conquered city. In “Ajax”, Ajax’s wife Tecmessa was robbed by Greece from her hometown Troy.
In modern society, certain people still pursue toxic heroism culture. For instance, the show “The Mask You Live In” indicates that boys from American primary school generally think that they are not supposed to cry, or they will be considered as cowards. Besides, they also believe that beat or fight with other boys are an important way to show their powers. Even such behaviors have no connection with heroes, those children believe they have. In more extreme cases, as mentioned in the passage, certain people commit massacre in order to show their heroic characteristics. Why? According to the author, it is because the individualism culture of the US makes people to focus too much on personal achievement. Consequently, if some people don’t have harsh control over themselves, and if they notice that their privilege has been deprived, they will engage in disastrous behaviors.