It’s a common movie trope. The hero is stuck and desperately needs to move forward in their quest. In dire need, they turn to help from a questionable source they’d prefer to avoid. The police officer reaches out to a jailed gangster for information, a romantic lead calls up his jilted ex-lover for a favor, a politician reaches out across the party aisle for votes. “Anybody but them!” you hear the supporting side character plead before the hero picks up the phone to dial.
Out of fiction and into the real world, NASA and Boeing recently placed a similarly reluctant phone call. After Boeing’s Starliner space capsule failed safety tests, the company was forced to turn to Elon Musk to bring back the International Space Station’s stranded astronauts. SpaceX won’t be able to ferry them home until February of 2025, turning their eight-day expedition into an eight-month holiday, but they’d be stuck up there a lot longer if Elon and his team weren’t around to ferry them home.
Boeing’s failure highlights America’s conflicted relationship with eccentric billionaire Elon Musk. Here is the man whose investments and leadership brought electric cars and reusable rocket boosters into everyday life. At the same time, Musk has a number of very public character defects. His family life is a mess, and he’s prone to angry fits at work. His poor stewardship of Twitter/X and his use of that medium to insist upon his own importance is frustrating – to say nothing of his own reckless tweets. The frequent accusations that Musk is a man-child aren’t without merit. Isn’t there someone more trustworthy, less aggravating, and more stable we can turn to?
Similarly, in the New Yorker, Zach Helfand recently wrote of his lifelong love of the beleaguered New York Jets NFL team and his mixed feelings about rooting for their infamous quarterback Aaron Rodgers. A four-time league wide MVP quarterback with a Super Bowl ring, Rodgers is an excellent athlete with an affinity for irresponsible, conspiratorial thinking and a gift for frustrating the chattering classes. As the season begins this year, many Jets fans are surely asking the same question: “We want to win a Super Bowl, sure, but does it have to be him?” It’s a question Zach Helfand explores with some wisdom and insight. A sports writer himself, he reflects on the complicated psychological nature of celebrity and how both parties, not only the hero but the fans as well, are culpable for the ways that those fame-based relationships can go south.
Being a fan of a sports team is a deeper commitment than being a fan of Mozart or Colleen Hoover. We’re not just appreciating — we’re rooting. (Indeed, the rooting occurs even in the absence of appreciation: a ‘true’ fan, unlike a bandwagoner, roots hardest when their team is producing subpar work.) Sports allegiance implies not a preference but a hereditary and usually permanent fact, like your eye color. No one is a Bill Cosby fan because their father grew up in Philadelphia. When he goes to prison, you find a new comedian to enjoy. But I find myself stuck with the Jets.
In some ways, modern cultural consumption is becoming closer to sports fandom. Stan culture has a lot of the parasocial connection. The pop singer Chappell Roan recently expressed bewilderment at her fans’ perceived closeness to her. ‘This is a lady you don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m a random bitch, you’re a random bitch.’ … Dederer noted the particular dissonance that results when the Art Monster is someone you thought was on your team. You think, Not our guy.
What did I want from Rodgers instead? If I’m being honest with myself, I wanted Rodgers to take it one day at a time. I wanted him to trust the process, to recognize that iron sharpens iron, to have left it all out there on the field, to be no stranger to adversity. I wanted the easiest thing to find in sports. I wanted a cliché.
Elon Musk and Aaron Rodgers are often the targets of (justified) public criticism, but truth be told, the criticisms leveled at them go beyond mere disagreement. As Helfand articulates, we’d rather these public figures fit into their assigned roles: the stolid quarterback offering non-answers at the postgame presser and the tech genius who says little, makes more money than Jesus, and dedicates his time to philanthropic endeavors. Why can’t Rodgers just be more like Brett Favre and Musk more like Bill Gates? We act as if we are surprised that these men don’t fit their molds, but I think the real surprise should be directed at ourselves for being surprised in the first place.
It’s not as if Musk is the first tech mogul to ruffle society’s feathers. I recently learned that automobile pioneer Henry Ford was famously anti-Semitic and controlling of his employees. He would send company men into the homes of his employees to ensure they weren’t gamblers, alcoholics, or absentee fathers, and tied their compensation to what these home inspectors found. One man’s success in the realm of automobile manufacturing technology led him to believe he had the expertise to succeed in everything, including paternalizing his employees. Other big names from history, like railroad pioneers Vanderbilt and Gould and Gilded Age magnates Rockefeller and Carnegie, had their own moral defects that are often overlooked in favor of their investments in technological innovation.
And it’s not as if Aaron Rodgers is the first athlete to dabble in conspiracy theories. On a recent podcast, the famous NFL brothers Travis and Jason Kelce remarked that over twenty percent of NFL athletes in any given locker room believe in the “flat earth” conspiracy theory. In 2023, the Athletic profiled a number of Premier League football players who have also become conspiratorially minded. Rodgers may have been more comfortable saying his opinions out loud, but let’s not pretend he’s also not getting tons of texts from other players thanking him for it.
The answer, I think, is wisely summed up in Helfand’s confession: “I wanted a cliché.” These men performing heroic acts of space travel and athleticism are not fitting into the narrative box of “hero,” and frankly, that makes many people uncomfortable. It’s good to have role models to learn from and work with, but Aaron Rodgers and Elon Musk are mixed bags. One is forced to qualify their admiration of these men: “He’s an electrifying player, but if I hear another word about ayahuasca retreats …” or “He’s a man-child, but without his leadership, we wouldn’t have charging stations for EVs at every gas station.” Helfand writes: “I can’t be the only Jets fan who prefers the heroic version to the messier personal one. The interesting thing about Rodgers is that he seems to recognize that this is a little dehumanizing.”
Perhaps our greater discomfort with Musk and Rodgers is what they represent about humanity at large. As Simeon Zahl explained at our conference in Minneapolis last year, our world has devolved into a sort of twenty-first-century Manichaeism, where everyone can be divided into good guys and bad guys. He likened it to a Marvel movie, where the highest and happiest expression of justice was The Hulk violently smashing enemies of goodness and truth. We like to think that we are aligned with the forces of goodness and truth and that the powers of goodness have aligned with us. It’s a simple worldview that does not require much of its adherents outside of ingroup adherence and outgroup hostility. Perhaps, worst of all, it reduces all of us to a dehumanizing cliché: we are all fellow soldiers in the trenches for good or a nameless, faceless enemy stormtrooper whose only purpose is to be dispatched.
Elon Musk and Aaron Rodgers are glitches in the matrix of this black and white world, shades of gray that challenge our modern good-guy and bad-guy standards. Their existence demands one of two responses: they must be demonized and recategorized as enemies of goodness and truth, or the whole Manichaean framework of the world must be rejected for something more nuanced. And since people aren’t interested in rejecting a moral framework that aligns them with goodness and truth, Musk and Rodgers are exiled into the outdoor darkness. Until, that is, we need them to win a Super Bowl or rescue our stranded astronauts.
A Christian orientation of the world is more complex: it supposes that God’s love and care is for mixed bags like Musk and Rodgers, and lavishly so. As the apostle Paul observes, someone will occasionally lay down their life to save a good person, as might be witnessed in the Manichaean brotherhood of the trenches. Jesus’s death, however, turns the world upside down because he dies for the ungodly, for enemies on the opposite side. It’s this attitude and disposition of God that drew Christianity’s most famous Manichaean convert away from his religion: St. Augustine of Hippo. It’s also a disposition of God that permits mixed bags to roam the earth, not as exceptions but rules. As Jesus lamented over the troubled and helpless crowds, figures like Musk and Rodgers are not enemies to be defeated, but sheep without a shepherd.
The line between good and evil is not, as the Manichaeans suppose, present in the division of persons, but as Solzhenitsyn famously wrote, it cuts through the human heart. Musk’s tech prowess and social failures and Roger’s athleticism and contrarian persona make them a public monument to human duality, a testament to the inner contradictions that define us all. It’s an affront to the Manichaeans among us, who rightly see them as threats to their own righteous story. But as the binary morality of our age glitches at these public figures, a better way of understanding emerges — one that recognizes human frailty, answers with unexpected love, and doesn’t reduce anyone to a cliché.
As Dr. Luther put it: “Simul justus et peccator.”