The great paradox of the modern human condition is that we build our entire societal narrative around the triumph of the independent will, at least in the Western world. Yet, when we are confronted with the actual lived experience of absolute freedom, the human psyche often just pushes the panic button. What do we do then? We submit. We do it in two distinct defence mechanisms: the first is what we can call ‘passive submission’.
This is the act of actively inviting a tyrant or rigid rule system into your life to completely avoid the burden of choice. Passive submission is incredibly common – we see it everywhere from toxic interpersonal relationships to extreme political cults.
But there is a second mechanism, a bit more subtle one: the seemingly active state. I call it ‘the hero trap’. It’s a self-image maintenance strategy where we invent (or inflate) a perpetrator to fight so we can occupy the saviour role in the narrative without actually doing much. It is a brilliant, yet destructive, form of self-deception.
It’s so interesting that the below 4500 words are put together just to talk about that mechanism. But to truly understand why we need to trick ourselves into playing the hero, we first have to understand what we’re running away from.
The Sheer Burden of Freedom
We usually picture freedom as this ultimate, universally desired destination. The very place where you can finally think, ‘I’ve made it; I am completely in control of my destiny.’
But if we look back to Erich Fromm’s 1941 work, ‘Escape from Freedom’, we get a much darker and arguably way more accurate picture. Observing the rise of totalitarianism, Fromm posited something quite radical at the time.
He argued that legal and physical freedom, while obviously politically desirable, creates a fear of aloneness and insignificance in the human psyche. The feudal systems, strict village hierarchies, and absolute monarchies – they handed us the keys to our own lives. (Fromm, 1941)
When we lose those bonds, we’re legally free, but existentially we’re totally isolated. And that isolation is excruciating. So to dodge this unbearable aloneness, the mind seeks out a substitute.
It fuses with a great person or a powerful institution or just an uncompromising ideology to get like an artificial sense of strength. This is the essence of passive submission. We literally trade our autonomy for a feeling of belonging and certainty.
We’re legally adults, but psychologically we’re frantically looking around the room for a parent to tell us what time dinner is and that we need to do our homework instead of watching a movie.
We see this concept expanded in Michael Zürn’s recent work in international theory, where he discusses the concept of voluntary subordination.
When we think of authority, we usually think of coercion, of someone holding a weapon and forcing compliance. But Zürn points out that true authority, the social paradox of it, relies on the subordinate party recognising the inequality and willingly complying with it. And this dynamic plays out at every level of society. (Zürn, 2021)
In his work, Rafakut Ali examines what he calls the ‘intermediary state’. Ali studied highly controlled community environments in Blackburn, and he describes how this passive submission works in practice at the micro level. In these controlled peer environments, normal life distress is entirely reframed. Your anxiety is framed as a spiritual failing. Exit from the group or the ideology is framed not just as a mistake but as a literal danger to your soul or your identity. Ali called it ‘soft captivity’. (Ali, 2025)
Normal safeguarding frameworks completely fail here, because safeguarding assumes that a person wants to be free and is being held against their will. But in Ali’s intermediary state, the individual is allowed to struggle, but not to leave. It creates a closed loop of moral conditioning where unquestioning obedience is reframed as the ultimate humility.
It may seem odd. We are used to thinking that if someone is in captivity, even what Ali calls ‘soft captivity’, that should just feel awful and make the person want to immediately escape. And on some level it likely does. However, when we put Fromm on top, it becomes obvious that there is something even more awful – the aloneness of breaking free.
The strict boundaries, even when designed by someone else, provide an immediate, guaranteed sense of safety compared to navigating choices yourself. On the paved path, you never have to take the blame. In this state of passive submission, people are willingly surrendering to a paternalistic caretaker system.
The Big Daddy Figure
By finding a caring figure we can submit to, we make a subconscious choice to medicate the anxiety of life complexity. So mechanism No. 1 is basically, ‘I’ll let you make all my decisions as long as you promise I never have to feel the terror of being responsible for my own life.’ That is the core of it.
Nevertheless, while passive submission provides that immediate safety, it comes at a terrible cost to the ego. Nobody wants to feel fundamentally weak or helpless or infantile. We can’t tolerate submission for long without eventually brewing resentment. And because the psyche cannot bear the humiliation of mechanism No. 1 forever, it evolves a much more sophisticated, far more deceptive strategy.
There are many things that can happen, from the obvious idealisation of the Big Daddy, which classically ends up as devaluation when the figure turns out to be not so ideal, not as caring as expected or simply not omnipotent – to the sheer reaction to the powerlessness of not being able to make our own choices, even though we submitted to the situation in the first place. But they all end us as the mechanism No. 2. And here is where it gets really interesting.
Mechanism No. 2, the seemingly active state, is the ‘hero trap’. Here, we aren’t the submissive followers anymore.
We turn towards retribution against the oppression mechanisms we either submitted to in the first place or which we finally managed to see clearly as part of our own disappointment. We create the villain while casting ourselves as tragic heroes, bravely and tirelessly fighting against an all-powerful, oppressive machine.
By doing so, we can pretend that we are not avoiding life and making our choices – we are bravely resisting the tyrant. Only, just like in Ali’s study, we fight just enough to maintain the image but not to truly leave the situation, because if we did, there would be no one else to blame.
We prefer to believe that a purposeful agent is causing things to happen rather than random chance or an incredibly complex systemic chain of events. If your life feels stagnant or if you’re failing at your career, it is very difficult to attribute that to your own lack of effort, poor strategy or even just plain bad luck.
But if you can construct a bogeyman, a corrupt system, a biased boss, or a shadowy elite cabal, suddenly your failure isn’t a failure at all. It’s the inevitable result of your heroic struggle against overwhelming odds. This serves as an ego repair mechanism, calming us down.
If there is a tyrant, especially a powerful one, you don’t actually have to do the hard work of fixing your life. You just have to dedicate your energy to exposing the tyrant. It is the opposite of the deus ex machina, yet it serves exactly the same purpose – handing the agency and responsibility over to someone else.
Here, instead of inventing a saviour to rescue us, we invent a perpetrator to oppress us, a demon from the machine. We can remain the victim, but we don’t have to look into that. Instead, we can tell ourselves a different story, becoming the retributive justice (Walen, 2015) in our own internal narrative. And yet, we still stay in the classic drama triangle dynamic with the victim, the perpetrator, and the rescuer.
In passive submission, we accept the victim role and look for a rescuer, while in the hero trap, we stay in the exact same triangulation, but we mentally promote ourselves to the rescuer role. We are going to save ourselves, and maybe the world, from this terrible persecutor.
However, the reality is that the people who invent these tyrants don’t actually do much rescuing. They remain entirely paralysed because the goal isn’t to defeat the tyrant. The goal is to remain in a permanent state of noble resistance.
Let’s ground this in a really common, everyday example – bureaucracy. Think about how often people use the system to externalise their own agency. You see it constantly in corporate environments or government offices. Someone says, ‘Look, I would love to help you. I really would, but my hands are tied by the system.’
By externalising the source of the rule, the individual completely absolves themself from any potential blame and decision implication. Bureaucracy acts as a form of distributed authority – there isn’t one single person you can point to and say, ‘You are making a bad decision.’ The authority is diffused into policies and forms, making it the perfect abstract bogeyman.
Only, there is more to it.
It’s not just those who actively submit to the authority by showing obedience and handing over their agency to it. Those who ‘fight’ it are subjected to the very same mechanism. Both roles assume that bureaucracy is that strong figure ruling the situation.
For those who act as tragic heroes whose noble intentions are blocked by the monolithic authority, this entirely eliminates the need for them to look at their own personal flaws or their own lack of creativity in solving the problem or to take any real accountability for the outcome.
Recognising the mechanisms, analysing them, understanding the system, and taking calculated, effortful action to either change it or navigate around it – that is true agency. It is taking responsibility for your outcomes regardless of the system’s flaws. But the trap is the stagnation that follows the initial complaint. The individual in the hero trap waits for the authority to change so they can feel better. They don’t build an alternative route. They don’t adapt their strategy. They don’t leave the toxic environment. They just sit there.
They remain locked in the same place as those who actively submit to it, pointing fingers at the bogeyman, waiting for an apology or a systemic overhaul that may never come. The trap is making their entire identity contingent on the system’s opposition to them. That is very comforting – it offers the victim safety under the guise of heroic resistance.
It, however, takes some effort to pull this self-deception off.
How We Lie to Ourselves
To understand just how deep this self-deception goes, though, we have to turn to Jungian psychology (Jung, just like Freud, will likely never rest in peace), particularly the work of analyst Erel Shalit. Shalit discusses the concept of the shadow. In Jungian terms, the shadow consists of all the unacceptable, weak or incapable parts of ourselves that we refuse to consciously acknowledge.
Shalit specifically refers to the archetypes of the cripple or the beggar that live within our subconscious and make us secretly terrified that we are actually incompetent. If our internal cripple is a deep fear of being a fraud, it’s way too painful for our conscious mind to face that reality.
So instead of facing the internal cripple, our psyche attributes our incompetence to the malice of an external bogeyman. It is infinitely easier to fight the enemy out there than to face the terrifying void of your own internal flaws. We tell ourselves we’re bravely fighting the monster on the hill, but we’re actually just running as fast as we can away from our own shadow. (Shalit, 2008)
Which sets up the dynamic described by Jo Nash. She looks at the intersection of victim mentality and moral elitism. It may seem victim-orientated, but a person who is trapped in mechanism No. 2 implicitly and often explicitly believes in their own supreme moral superiority. And Nash’s research highlights that this moral elitism drives profound black-and-white thinking, which destroys nuance. The whole world becomes divided between the good and the bad. (Nash, 2024)
Furthermore, this moral elitism allows the hero to completely lack empathy for anyone who disagrees with them. In their split view, anyone who questions their methods or disagrees with their narrative is automatically allied with the tyrant. That brings us to the observations made by Edith Eva Eger, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor.
She noted that victimisation comes from the outside world. Bad things genuinely happen to people. Natural disasters, crime, and systemic abuse make victimisation absolutely real. But victimhood is an inside job. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims because we choose to hold on to our victimhood as a core identity. And in the hero trap, victimhood becomes a massive source of power. To relinquish the victimhood would mean losing the moral high ground and all the social capital that comes with it. (Eger et al., 2017)
Because if we were to actually process that trauma, take ownership of our current choices and solve our problems, we would lose the protected, elevated status of the heroic victim. We’d just be a regular person who has to do the hard, unglamorous work of living day to day. And that would be… so unheroic, and so common. It is exactly the same with being a hero fighting a bogeyman – just dropping the fight and making the choices would be un-Hollywood-like.
By staying a victim or a hero, we receive sympathy from our peers, avoid the terrifying responsibility of autonomy, and maintain a feeling of moral superiority, all without ever having to risk the vulnerability of actual autonomous action. But for that, the tyrant cannot be just any tyrant; they must possess some specific traits too.
The Tyrants We Cultivate
We can’t just fight anybody. If we invent a tyrant that’s too small or pathetic, we won’t look heroic enough. And if we invent one that’s too human and complex, we might accidentally feel empathy for them, which would ruin the whole black-and-white illusion. Therefore, we must construct an ideal perpetrator.
To understand how we build this perfect enemy, we can look at Sarah Federman’s 2018 article in Security Dialogue. It’s titled ‘Ideal Perpetrators: The Social Construction of Accountability’. Federman argues that just as society constructs ideal victims, the completely innocent, helpless archetype that garners instant sympathy, we also meticulously construct ideal perpetrators to make our narratives of justice and heroism function smoothly. (Federman, 2018)
Federman identifies four specific attributes that an entity must possess to serve as an ideal perpetrator.
The first is that they must be strong. An all-powerful, seemingly invincible entity makes the hero’s struggle look appropriately epic and justifies why the hero hasn’t won yet.
The second attribute is that they must be abstractable. This is crucial. They can’t just be a flawed human being with a backstory and a family. They have to be a faceless monolith. The corporation, the media, the elite.
The third attribute is that they must be representative of the nature of the crime itself. They have to embody the entire concept of the systemic issue.
The fourth attribute is that they must possess a champion opponent. This is an individual or a group who actively focuses public or personal attention entirely on this perpetrator, ensuring the bogeyman remains in the spotlight.
Such an ideal perpetrator was, in fact, the French National Railways (SNCF).
After World War II, the SNCF was heavily targeted for accountability regarding its role in transporting deportees to concentration camps. Obviously, the actions were horrific, and accountability was necessary. But Federman asks a really interesting question. Why did the SNCF remain in the centre of the spotlight for decades, long after individual human perpetrators were dead or in prison, and often draw more ire than other similarly complicit organisations? The conclusion is that the SNCF fit the four attributes of the ideal perpetrator perfectly. (Federman, 2022)
Firstly, it was a massive, strong, state-run corporation. Second, and most importantly, trains are highly abstractable. They are mindless machines that simply follow tracks. This made them the perfect symbol to represent the mechanised, dehumanising, industrial horror of the Holocaust.
Lastly, there were dedicated champion opponents, like Serge Klarsfeld, and various dedicated lawyers who ensured the spotlight remained fixed on the SNCF for generations. And this last part works wonders here. An institution, a political opponent, an abstract monster, or a concept like the bureaucracy or the establishment is completely safe to yell at because you can’t actually punch a concept. And more importantly, a concept can’t punch you back in a way that shatters your worldview. The abstraction provides safety.
Furthermore, dehumanising the perpetrator, turning them into a faceless machine or an absolute monster, allows society and the individual to quietly diminish their own responsibility, because if the perpetrator is a pure, unadulterated monster, then we, the ordinary, decent people, don’t have to share any guilt.
We use the extreme nature of the bogeyman to avoid the deeply messy, uncomfortable reality of our own compliance, our own inaction, or our own shadow. Interestingly, this happens equally on both micro and macro levels. This mechanism does not end with the individual – organisations also fall into the same trap but with a global audience.
International NGOs (INGOs) such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and Oxfam create policy changes that are widely accepted but yield only incremental, rather than radical, improvements. Most importantly, they often only cover up the actual problem rather than solving it. This is a core component of what’s called ‘Vanilla Victory’.
As INGOs gain authority by appreciation from states, corporations, and the public, their strategic options become increasingly constrained due to visibility and perception. To preserve their hard-won status and continued access to power centres, these organisations often abandon transformative work. They must moderate their proposals to fit within a range acceptable to multiple, often conflicting, stakeholders. While their authority gives them a ‘megaphone’ to reach global audiences, it simultaneously acts as a ‘muzzle’, preventing them from pushing for radical shifts that might alienate their supporters. As a result, they go for the easy wins and tiny changes.
These victories represent ‘least-common-denominator solutions’ to social problems, becoming boilerplate strategies that are safe but often unsatisfying to more radical activists. Their own reputation becomes a master they serve, forcing them to prioritise institutional survival and incremental gains over their original, more radical missions. In contrast, smaller INGOs have the freedom to be radical but often lack the ‘megaphone’ to be heard at all.
This resembles a lot what we see in the micro-scales – those who could make things happen often lack the populistic applause, while those who gain attention by playing the hero do it only to keep their own personal status quo.
Which brings us to the ultimate question of this post: if this mechanism is so common, how on earth do we break out of this victim-hero loop?
Psychological Maturity
Paradoxically, the way out of the trap requires engaging with a concept that psychoanalysis refers to as ‘surrender’.
It sounds deeply contradictory until we look at a paper by Jeremy D. Safran titled ‘Agency, Surrender, and Grace in Psychoanalysis’. Safran argues that a healthy human development requires a constant tension between agency and surrender. (Safran, 2016)
The person stuck in mechanism No. 1, the passive submission, clearly has no agency. They’ve surrendered everything. But the person stuck in mechanism No. 2, the ‘hero trap’, actually suffers from the opposite problem; they suffer from an exaggerated sense of agency because they think they’re the lone hero fighting the entire system. (Safran, 2016)
Safran links this to a type of narcissistic omnipotence, which may seem contradictory to the actual passivity of the hero on the surface. But when we look deeper into it, we’ll see that the fight itself is rooted in the implicit belief that they can master the universe and force reality to conform to their demands. They can bend the tyrant to their will. And this obviously is not true – there are situations we cannot change, wars we cannot win and situations we cannot change. Omnipotence is a defence mechanism protecting us from seeing our own lack of power and vulnerability.
By keeping the fight, or the illusion of it, they refuse to recognise the fundamental otherness of the world, the uncontrollable, unpredictable aspects of reality, so they’re fighting an unwinnable war against a phantom. And it cuts them off from actual vulnerable human connection.
The surrender Safran is talking about is what Bennett Gilbert recently framed as ‘willing surrender as virtuous self-constitution’. (Gilbert, 2024) You are not surrendering to a dictator, a bureaucracy or a cult leader; you are surrendering the illusion of absolute control. It is the acceptance of the complex, messy and often disappointing reality of the world as it actually is rather than how your internal hero’s narrative demands it to be. It’s about putting down the sword because you finally realise you’ve been tilting at windmills; you surrender the narcissistic need to have a perfect villain to blame for your life’s trajectory.
This maps onto adult developmental theory, specifically Robert Kegan’s subject-object theory. Kegan’s model is essential for understanding how we escape. He posits that human development happens in stages and, unfortunately, most adults get stuck in stage three, which he calls the ‘socialised mind’. In that stage, a person’s sense of self-worth is entirely externalised. They need the approval of the group or need to be seen as the good soldier fighting the bad boss. This is the ultimate breeding ground for the hero trap because if their identity is defined by their relationship to an external authority, they have to either submit to it or rebel against it, but they can never just exist independently of it. (Kegan, 1982)
To escape Kegan’s stage 3, a person must do the hard work of transitioning to stage 4, the ‘self-authored mind’, where one creates one’s own internal value system and eventually reaches stage 5, the ‘self-transforming mind’, where their internal authority no longer dictates a rigid existential purpose.
In stage 5, one develops a sense of relativity and realises that one’s system is just one way of looking at the world, not the only way. That’s cognitively and emotionally flexible. When there is no need to project one’s internal conflicts or fears onto external bogeymen, one can tolerate ambiguity.
Which easily brings us to the SAFE model. The acronym SAFE breaks down the necessary steps for this psychological evolution. (Eryılmaz & Uzun, 2024)
‘S’ stands for self-awareness, which means recognising in the moment when you are using an authority figure for your own ego repair. It’s catching yourself mid-complaint and asking, ‘Am I actually trying to solve this problem or am I just enjoying playing the victim?’
‘A’ is for autonomy. This is grounding your actions in an internal locus of control. It’s the terrifying but liberating recognition that you hold the keys to your fate. The system might be flawed, but your response to it is entirely your own.
Then we have ‘F’ for flexibility, which ties right back to Kegan’s stage 5. Evaluating events from multiple perspectives to break out of that rigid black-and-white victim-perpetrator binary may result in realising that the boss might not be a villain. They might just be incompetent or stressed or operating under different incentives.
And finally, ‘E’ stands for ego resilience. The ability to cope with adversity, failure and the inherent messiness of life without needing to retreat into the illusory superiority of the hero trap. It’s taking a hit to your pride and not needing to invent a conspiracy theory to explain it.
When we successfully apply this SAFE model to our relationship with institutions and the world at large, we arrive at Michael Zürn’s concept of ‘reflexive authority’. This is the ultimate goal; breaking the trap does not mean becoming an anarchist and rejecting all forms of authority. That is just another form of rigid rebellion, another iteration of the hero trap instead. (Zürn, 2017)
Instead, it means that we monitor authority constantly and consciously; we accept decisions and follow rules. Not because they are absolute commands handed down from a master, but because they are requests based on a shared, reasoned knowledge order. We replace blind submission with reason-based recognition. We retain the right and the capacity to withdraw that deference if the authority stops acting based on reason.
True agency isn’t about finally defeating the tyrant, crushing the system or exposing the bogeyman. True agency is about realising that the tyrant doesn’t actually hold the keys to your internal life in the first place. It means stopping asking, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ which is the ultimate paralysing victim question and starting to ask, given that this complex, flawed and often unfair situation exists, ‘What am I going to do in the present moment to navigate it?’
This is what engaging with the world, not as victims or faux heroes but as adults, means. It is a shift from outsourcing your security to taking full ownership of your emotional life. Ultimately, the escape from the hero trap is the realisation that, as Fromm said, ‘there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.’
So think about the biggest obstacle in your life right now – the tyrant, the most annoying or the most oppressive system that you currently blame for your lack of progress, your lack of success or your lack of happiness. Imagine if that external force magically vanished tomorrow. The boss is fired. The system is dismantled. The obstacle is completely removed.
Would you actually know what to do next, or would you secretly panic? Because if you’ve relied on that monster for too long to give your life a plot, then without it, you are finally terrifyingly responsible for yourself.
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Sources:
Ali, R. (2025, December 27). Blackburn The Intermediary State—Rafakut Ali 2023. https://rafakut.com/about/blackburn-state/
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