All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

You are probably familiar with this bit of Aristotelian logic known as a "deductive syllogism," whereby the inherent truth of a proposition can be deduced by the truth of two other propositions.

Let's offer a modern version: All idols must be destroyed. Cesar Chavez is an idol. Cesar Chavez must be destroyed.

I want to start with that second proposition: Cesar Chavez is an idol. We can probably agree on this. As the most visible leader in the United Farm Workers, Chavez has been heralded across the world as a humanitarian and civil rights activist. His name graces many a street and park and building across the United States, and his birthday is a holiday in several states. Chavez easily ranks as one of the most well-known progressive activists and thinkers of the 20th century.

However, on March 18, 2026, Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes of The New York Times published an investigation into reports that Chavez sexually abused women within his own organization, and molested girls as young as 13. Granted, many historians had already uncovered the fact that Chavez had coerced many women into having sex with him, but the Times reporters were the first to reveal that he had raped fellow organizer Dolores Huerta multiple times and actively groomed young girls.

As labor historian Erik Loomis wrote on the Lawyers Guns Money blog later that day, Chavez "was a great organizer. But there's long histories of organizers being terrible to other people. By the early '70s, he was full-on cult leader, the cult revolving around loyalty to himself."

In fact, Loomis went on to tell his readers that "if you are wanting to read history to be inspired, don't. Because people of the past are just as screwed up as they are today. Martin Luther King was a womanizer, W.E.B. DuBois was a slumlord, Margaret Sanger was an eugenicist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony became intense racists, Thomas Jefferson was a slave raper; I could go on and on and on."

But many people, even his victims, covered for the crimes of Chavez, believing that any revelation of his true nature would be used to attack the movement as a whole. It is the same reason that many a true believer has remained quiet about their priest or preacher raping children--you don't want to cause a scandal that might damage the church, do you?

That Chavez was a terrible person, it does not follow that he must be destroyed. That Chavez was an idol is the reason we must cast him down and break him to pieces. Because all idols must be destroyed.

In his 1980 essay "Institution of Society and Religion," Cornelius Castoriadis writes, "Every religion is idolatry--or is not socially effective religion. In religion, words themselves--sacred words--function, and can only function, as idols." What he means is that religion, at least of the dominant Western traditions, typically posits an ineffable god beyond perception and understanding, but when we give words to this concept, we reduce the experience of the ineffable to a societal issue, for words are tools of social coordination rather than accurate labels we can attach to reality.

"Religion covers the Abyss, the Chaos, the Groundlessness that society is for itself; it occults society as self-creation, as source and unmotivated origin of its own institution," writes Castoriadis. "Religion negates the radical imaginary and puts in its place a particular imaginary creation."

We don't have to accept such a radical proposition--the equation of religion with idolatry--to find applicability for his larger conclusion. After all, we use terms like "state" or "nation" to cover over social formations that, at their bottom, have no ground. Any state is but a temporal and temporary governing structure, any nation an agglomeration of folks from different backgrounds and tribes pretending that they share some collective history. In fact, famed political scientist Benedict Anderson referred to nations exactly as "imagined communities" in his 1983 book of that title.

But we cover over the collectivity of state and nation creation with tales of "founders" who operate in this schema like the gods of mythology. We ascribe to individuals the actions of multitudes too wild to encompass in easy narratives.

We create idols, or we have idols created for us by the powers that be. Idolatry is part of the standard tool kit of authoritarianism.

Authoritarian systems are frequently described as being founded upon "cults of personality," but such a term obscures more than it reveals. Because authoritarian systems make "the Leader" the most important person in the nation, they make that leader a celebrity.

As Sharon Marcus observes in her 2019 book "The Drama of Celebrity," celebrities often "perform shamelessness," defying dominant social norms in a manner that challenges society's regulatory power. As she writes, "Defiant celebrities occupy what we might call a state of social exception, a playpen for the antisocial that creates a highly visible zone of freedom for the few celebrated figures without extending those liberties to anyone else."

Or as someone more recently, in an unconscious echo of Cesar Chavez's own behavior, once said, "When you're a celebrity, they let you do it."

The celebrity's state of social exception does not extend to the rest of society, and this goes for the variety of celebrity at the head of authoritarian regimes. Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was famed for his lavish displays of wealth even as his people lived in poverty. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is known to have had numerous mistresses but publicly advocates that his people return to the strictures of the Russian Orthodox Church.

"Shameless celebrities capture public attention and even elicit adulation by displaying abnormalities rather than hiding them," writes Marcus. "Complex societies generate fantasies of individual autonomy and omnipotence; celebrity outliers cater to those fantasies."

Fantasies of individual autonomy lie at the heart of all celebrity culture, be it the repressive authoritarian regime wherein Dear Leader is to be obeyed without question, or the activist organization whose world-renowned figurehead must have his reputation protected at all cost. We like to imagine that such systems are actually collectivities, but this is not the case. Each citizen relates as an individual to the individual at the center of the system. The lines of power run vertically. There is no space for relating to your fellow traveler horizontally.

Such systems are by their very nature idolatrous. But how do we avoid idolatry? Do we not always need some bold person to guide us from the darkness of oppression?

In his article "Infrastructures of Escape," published in the spring 2026 issue of Film Quarterly, professor Peter Coviello ruminates upon the experience of watching the now Oscar-winning movie "One Battle After Another," a centerpiece of which is the military roundup of immigrants in 2025 in Chicago while ICE agents were terrorizing the local population.

"This conceptualization of the fascist present--of our moment as fascist--is so vibrantly alive in the contexts and contours of the film that anything else one might say can seem a good deal downstream of it," Coviello writes, but this does not stop him from saying something else. Namely, he points out that while Thomas Pynchon, author of the 1990 novel "Vineland" that served to inspire the movie, is regularly labeled as a postmodernist, such labeling overlooks the antifascist heart of his several novels.

If authoritarian systems such as fascism constitute case studies of idolatry, what would be the opposite? For Coviello, this question is at the heart of the film: "No one arrives at their resolve in John Wayne-like stolidity, or because of any generic outlaw individualistic fearlessness. What alchemizes their fear is something else again, and it's here that the film comes into what I take to be its greatest achieved gravity. For the agent of transformation, depicted again and again and then again, is nothing other than collective endeavor: joinings together, of every size and ad hoc configuration, in which ordinary people collaborate in the work of counter-mobilization."

I find this idea best reflected in the very end of Pynchon's 2009 novel, "Inherent Vice." Our main character, Doc Sportello, has ended his current adventures and is driving on the Santa Monica Freeway at night when the fog starts to roll in, and he "watched everything slowly disappear, the trees and shrubbery along the median, the yellow school-bus pool at Palms, the lights in the hills, the signs above the freeway that told you where you were, the planes descending to the airport."

In the confusion of the fog, Doc falls in behind another car for safety, and then someone falls in behind him, and he discovers that he is "in a convoy of unknown size, each car keeping the one ahead in taillight range, like a caravan in the desert of perception, gathered awhile for safety in getting across a patch of blindness." None of them know each other. None of them can communicate with each other or have any expectation that their part in the caravan might be remembered or heralded or compensated down the line. Each one simply holds the line in the caravan until they have reached their exit.

In his 2024 book "The Uses of Idolatry," theologian William T. Cavanaugh describes idolatry as encompassing "a type of entrapment or self-isolation from God and from other people; it results in self-diminishment." For when we reduce our reality to some simple unity, a person or object whom we worship (a famed activist, a president, a religious leader), ascribing that person or thing a unique position in our created world, we lose sight of the power that actually belongs to us all. When we hold out for a hero, we sideline our own potential for heroism.

Moreover, when we hold out for a hero, we imagine heroism to be something significant, historic. But liberation as a collective endeavor need not be such. Civilization is the work of all of us, not just mythical founders whose heralded lives will no doubt assume a darker hue the moment you examine them just a bit more critically. The guiding lights we need to follow are not those of any long-dead men or women deemed worthy of public statuary. Or as Marcus writes, "Celebrities do not exist without publics, but publics can and do exist without celebrities."

No, the lights we need to follow, if we are to make it out of this fog, are those of our fellow travelers generously and anonymously guiding us down this highway. If we do that, then maybe when the day rolls back around, we will find, when the fog has burned off, "something else this time, somehow, to be there instead."

Guy Lancaster is the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System. The views expressed here are his and his alone.

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