Consider the following comments on heroism.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The age that produces heroes is usually the age that most needed not to.
We do not so much admire heroes as invent them to excuse our own inaction.
Unhappy the land that has no heroes. No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.
Bertolt Brecht
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A sharp thesis is that the cult of the hero often signals a failure of ordinary systems, and that our hunger for heroes can be a way of avoiding shared responsibility. Begin by honouring genuine courage, the firefighter or the whistleblower. Then turn the argument: societies that depend on heroes are often societies that have stopped functioning fairly. A third angle might examine how heroes are manufactured for political or commercial ends. Caution: do not become so cynical that you deny the reality of moral courage altogether, which would flatten the essay into mere debunking.