Claim: The best way to understand the character of a society is to examine the character of the men and women that the society chooses as its heroes or its role models.Reason: Heroes and role models reveal a society's highest ideals.

There are lots of ways to know the character of a society, including knowing that society’s peoples’ beliefs, their policies and their behavior. During the history, lots of people were known as heroes. Depends on the situation and the decisions that have been made by the leaders or some remarkable people, they might be counted as the other’s role models. Some would think that examining the characters of mentioned people, would be the best way to know the characters of the whole society. Personally, I take issue with above assumption for lots of reasons.

The first reason why I abjure mentioned idea, is that, sometimes, heroes are been selected just by the majority, not all of them. Owing to the fact that the society is filled with different people and therefore different schools of thoughts, majority will not be the whole. A person would be known as a hero for lots of people, while, exactly that person would be known as the betrayer to the country. So the majority’s selection would not be the whole ones.

What is more, even if all people select a hero as their society’s representative, it doesn’t mean, that person is really the representative of the whole society. For example when a political authority, as a case in point, is chosen as the president of a country, by all members of that society’s vote, and then he turns out to be an exploiter of his position, or being known as a liar, as a representative of whole country, tag of being liar should be stock to each members of that society?

Moreover, the role models can not been counted as a person who reveals the society’s highest ideal, due to the fact that every time, the situation is changing. I remember when we were children, our president was our hero, since after war he helped people a lot, and he defended our rights, but nowadays, no one in our new generation know him, but in contrast everyone know famous superstars. And there would be no surprise if we see that they have been selected as their role models. To wrap up, since the role models would change during the times and generations, they would not be good criteria for knowing the society.

By and large, I subscribe to the theory that heroes, or role models will not reveal the whole society member’s ideal, and as the consequence they cannot be representatives of the society. Therefore, examining them would not be the best way for knowing a society.