Time & Perspective Quote by Danielle Dax

Danielle Dax nails a bleak little feedback loop at the heart of pop culture: we crown people so we can borrow their glow, then we tear them down to get our own power back. Coming from a musician - someone who’s been literally watched, reviewed, desired, dismissed - the line reads less like armchair sociology and more like field notes from inside the machine.

Her phrasing is doing a lot of work. “Wants heroes” isn’t admiration so much as appetite: a craving for a figure who can hold our projections. “Get a buzz off” pins hero worship to consumption, the quick hit of uplift you can buy with attention. Then the turn: destruction as emotional self-defense. Dax calls it “mass insecurity,” which reframes scandal and backlash not as moral correction but as crowd therapy. If the hero is too shiny, they become an accusation. Their excellence, beauty, confidence, or access highlights what the audience lacks - so the audience reasserts equality by puncturing the myth.

The subtext is about control. Building a hero is a way of outsourcing meaning; destroying them is a way of reclaiming agency. It’s also about the cruelty baked into celebrity: the same people who demand authenticity also punish it, because real humans don’t behave like symbols. Dax is pointing to a culture that insists on icons while resenting the distance icons create. The hero must be elevated, but not too elevated - and the crowd keeps a leash in the form of ridicule, rumor, and the thrill of the fall.