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.

The statement claims that the most efficient way to understand the quality of a society is via the assessment of the men and women chosen as heroes or role models. The statement further reasons that this is because heroes and role models are highest ideals* of a society. While by this method we can illustrate a significant share of the features of a society, it has its own drawbacks.

To begin with, the angel which a society recognizes its individuals as a hero, can reveal the features of that society. In recognizing the heroes’ characteristics, we can efficiently understand what are the values, hopes, priorities, and wants of a society. For instance, when Christ is the hero of a society we can recognize that society as a religious one. Therefore, as heroes are the emanation of the ultimate goals of a society, we can find out about the characteristic of any society.

However, such an approach has its own drawbacks rendering it not the best way to qualify a society. First, as the reason holds true, heroes and role models are emanations of ideals. Thus, we can find out about the positive features through that method. The characteristic of a society comprises positive, negative, and neutral forms. To find out about a desperate, hunger-plagued, or a poverty-plagued society, staring at the heroes’ features does not give a clue.

Furthermore, when a society gets bigger, heroes and role models become so diverse that we cannot characterize the society by knowing them. Consider the society of youths in Iran. While there are young people who admire national heroes such as Cyrus or Darius, others are praising Imam Hussein. Many of adolescents' role models are Selena Gomez, Michael Jackson, and so on. If the only way was to consider the role models and heroes, we could never even put these youths in a united society. Hence, in such a heterogeneous society, examining the heroes, fails to help us discover the societies’ qualities.

Finally, there are many other ways that can, help us to characterize a society. Disordered societies can be recognized by observing the behavior of people during driving time; anxious society can be determined by the hospitals' reports of anxiousness attacks. A patriarchal society can be found where the woman has little influence in their society and so on. As there are many direct and indirect efficient methods to characterize a society, the author's claim does not hold true.

In short, as discussed above, in any sociological study, via recognizing pertaining heroes and role models, we can have access to values and many positive features of a society. But it can not be the best method as negative features could not be extracted from this approach, and furthermore it is inconsistent with the big heterogeneous societies.