‘The Day the Dragon Licks Its Flank, You’ll Find Us at Your Side’: Self-Heroization and Revolutionary Organization

This article argues that people locked in extreme conditions involving life-and-death risks on a long-term basis, often undergo process of ‘self-heroization’. Self-heroization includes the adoption heroic ethos and an ‘epic consciousness’, i.e. come to experience themselves as heroes living out epic they ‘write’ through their actions. The will be explored at hand modern armed-struggle revolutionaries. Four closely entangled mechanisms explored. First, cognitively, revolutionaries’ self-understanding reflects violent high-risk (heroic) lifestyle. Second, (a hybrid courage sacrifice; knowledge; organization) emotionally endows them with fighting spirit allows perform work. Third, self-heroization helps revolutionaries coping physically existentially challenged, uprooted lives, by forging sense higher, more glorious personality. And fourth, consciousness revolutionaries, who are mostly weaker party conflict state, boosting for victory.