When Role Models Disappoint: How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Hero Worship

The files arrived like a slow-motion tsunami. Each wave, each release exposing another name, another instance of our role models falling from grace. By February 2026, when the latest batch surfaced, the list of prominent figures associated with Jeffrey Epstein had grown long enough to make you wonder if anyone in positions of power and influence had escaped his orbit.

As I read through the names and the correspondence, I felt a strange sadness, a dull, familiar ache, the kind you feel when you realize you’ve been taken for a ride, even though you should have known better.

When Role Models Disappoint: The Epstein Files

A Personal Reckoning

In December 2022, I spent a day at a seminar conducted by Deepak Chopra in India and had the chance to interact with him closely before, during, and after the sessions. In those moments, he came across as gentle and polished, though somewhat detached. He was courteous, but not especially warm. I’ll admit I was never an ardent follower of his approach to spirituality and wellness; it often felt a bit too market-driven for my taste. Even so, I respected what he had built and the influence he had, despite the criticism that frequently surrounded him.

Now, three years later, newly released emails suggest a disturbing facet of Dr. Chopra. In his 70s, he was writing about young girls in ways that made my skin crawl. In those emails he is objectifying them, expressing enjoyment of their company in contexts unrelated to spiritual pursuits or wellness, and at times encouraging behavior that seemed at odds with the persona he publicly presented.

It’s distressing enough for me to consider that the spiritual awareness, wellness advocacy, and gentle wisdom he projected might have been just a persona, something carefully sustained over decades while a very different reality may have existed behind closed doors (and on private islands). Even more troubling, though, is that he reportedly maintained a years-long association with a known and convicted pedophile.

Disappointment Galore

There are other names, too, in the latest batch, which left me disheartened.

Dr. Peter Attia, who had cultivated a no-nonsense, science-driven approach to health and longevity, turned out to harbor thoughts that revealed a mind far less disciplined than his public image suggested. I have read his book Outlive, and have heard many of his podcasts and interviews about the latest science around how to increase not just our lifespans but “healthspans”.

Noam Chomsky, who advised Epstein on how to navigate “the horrible way he was being treated in the press and public”. This was in February 2019, 11 years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to pedophilia and illegal solicitation from a minor. I had always looked up to Chomsky for his incredible clarity and intellect, and these latest revelations saddened me.

Bill Gates continues to maintain he showed poor judgment in associating with Epstein for years but insists there was no wrongdoing beyond a few dinner meetings. The emails suggest that the relationship went deeper than business discussions, though Gates denies any illegal or immoral activity. This, despite Melinda, his now ex-wife, publicly declaring that she was never happy with Bill Gates’s association with Epstein.

The files contain many more names and interactions that have shaken public trust. Many, including Chopra and Attia, have put out posts expressing regret for their associations while maintaining they never indulged in wrongdoing, only kept bad company. Perhaps that is true, perhaps not. What matters is this: we believed in the image they projected, and that image has cracked beyond repair.

An Old Pattern, A Recurring Lesson

As I ponder on all this, I am reminded of articles I’ve written on this theme over the years. The first was back in 2007, when I argued that we should admire but not imitate our heroes. Even then, I was intuitively aware of the dangers of hero worship, though I couldn’t have imagined how prescient that warning would become. Years later, when Lance Armstrong confessed to doping, I revisited the theme in another article. Back then, the cancer survivor and seven-time Tour de France winner admitted to Oprah Winfrey that his “mythic, perfect story” was built on deceit. He’d cheated throughout most of his cycling career and bullied those who tried to expose the truth. An Australian library even announced that it would move his books to the fiction section.

I wrote then about how we elevate our role models to positions of infallibility, only to feel devastated when they prove otherwise. I argued that a role model merely plays a role—that of being an igniter of the spark within us. That we give them power because what they stand for resonates in us. And that we ought to remember not to blindly imitate them, because it’s one thing to derive inspiration from someone and quite another to make them accountable for our values.

I still believe that premise. But I also think I was a tad too generous.

Why the Powerful Disappoint

There’s a psychological phenomenon called the Halo Effect, first identified by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920. It describes our tendency to let one positive trait color our perception of someone’s entire character. If a person is accomplished in one domain, we automatically assume they possess wisdom, integrity, and moral clarity across all domains.

This is why we trust wellness gurus to guide not just our diets but our values. Or assume tech billionaires who’ve built successful companies must also understand ethics, relationships and the greater good. Or believe that people who speak beautifully about consciousness and enlightenment must embody those qualities in their private lives. Celebrity worship and the psychology of the Halo Effect feed off each other.

The Halo Effect can make you intellectually lazy. You stop asking questions. You grant exceptions easily. When small inconsistencies appear, you explain them away because the overall glow is too bright to let a few shadows matter.

Understanding these psychological mechanisms, from the halo effect to celebrity worship syndrome, can help us recognize when we’re sliding from healthy admiration into dangerous dependency

What makes all this worse is that the powerful know this. They understand that once they’ve established authority in one arena, they can leverage it everywhere else. A doctor who’s respected for his medical expertise can sell you supplements, life advice, and a worldview. And you’ll buy all three because the halo extends that far. A spiritual teacher who’s mastered the language of mindfulness can use that same vocabulary to justify behavior that contradicts every principle he preaches.

Power also does something to people. Research on power and morality shows that as individuals gain influence, many become less empathetic, more likely to break rules, and more convinced that normal standards don’t apply to them. They begin to see themselves as exceptions. The rules they advocate for others become obstacles they’re entitled to bypass.

Related reading » Does Power Really Corrupt?

The High Cost of Trusting Uncritically

When I read Chopra’s emails, my first reaction wasn’t anger but sadness—and perhaps a little embarrassment. I’d met this man; I’d listened to him speak about consciousness and wellbeing; I’d quoted him in my articles; I’d given him a measure of respect, even if I didn’t fully embrace his teachings. And while I never worshiped him, I’d still operated under the assumption that his public and private selves were broadly aligned. How wrong I was!

The bigger blunder, though, is the one our culture makes collectively: we build industries around individual personalities. We don’t just consume their work, we consume them. We buy their books, attend their seminars, follow them on social media, adopt their routines, quote their wisdom, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, we start to delegate our own moral reasoning to them.

It’s OK to admire someone’s work; the danger lies in outsourcing our values to them. It’s reasonable to learn from someone’s expertise; the trouble is that we often unwittingly allow this to command our uncritical trust.

How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Hero Worship

So how do we move forward? How do we learn from our role models without making ourselves vulnerable to their inevitable failures? As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been dwelling over, and writing about, these questions for over two decades. Here’s what I’ve learned…

Separate the idea from the person. If someone teaches you a useful concept, that concept doesn’t become invalid because the teacher turned out to be flawed. Mathematics doesn’t stop working because a mathematician behaved badly. A meditation technique doesn’t lose its effectiveness because the guru who taught it was a hypocrite. We must take what’s useful and leave the person behind.

Assume everyone is performing. Public figures construct personas. They emphasize certain traits and hide others because that’s how you build a brand. Our job isn’t to see through every performance, but to remember that we’re watching one. Let’s never confuse the performance for the whole person.

Diversify your sources of wisdom and inspiration. If we draw all our inspiration from one guru, one author, one thought leader, we make ourselves fragile. When our role models fall, which they often do, we feel like everything we believed has collapsed. But if we’ve built our understanding from multiple sources, the failure of one doesn’t destroy the whole structure.

Cultivate your own critical thinking and independent judgment. I think this is the most important point. We can learn from everyone, but we must build our own value system. We must test the ideas against our experience. We must ask questions and notice contradictions. If a respected figure says something that doesn’t feel right, we must trust that discomfort. Our inner voice, our intuition, is designed to protect us, and we must take this voice seriously.

Be especially wary of spiritual exploitation. Be especially wary of spiritual exploitation. This deserves special mention. Spiritual predators understand that it is when we’re searching for meaning, purpose, or connection with the divine that we’re at our most vulnerable. Such false gurus and babas promise enlightenment and exclusive access to truth, but what they really seek is control over us. We should be wary of anyone who claims exclusive access to God, demands unquestioning faith, expects unreasonable financial sacrifices, or insists we surrender our critical thinking in the name of faith. Authentic spiritual teachers empower us find our own path; fraudulent ones demand we follow theirs.

Maintain emotional distance. Let’s remember to admire someone’s work from a distance, without worshiping them. Appreciating someone’s insights doesn’t require them to be a good person. Once we become aware of this, we won’t be distraught when the mask of one of our role models slips

A Final Thought

French novelist Marcel Proust was on point, wasn’t he, when he warned that we should never meet the people we admire, or we’ll be disappointed?

I don’t regret meeting Deepak Chopra. I don’t regret the time I spent listening to him speak or reading a few of his books. What I do regret is the assumption I made, that a man who spoke and wrote so elegantly about awareness must possess it himself.

The people we admire are human, which means they’re capable of extraordinary things and terrible things, sometimes simultaneously. Our job isn’t to ignore their work when they disappoint us, or to excuse their behavior because we value their contributions. Our job is to take what’s useful, discard what’s harmful, and never, ever hand over our capacity for independent judgment.

When gurus and role models disappoint us, instead of becoming cynical, we should learn from the experience. In the end, we escape disappointment not by avoiding others, but by becoming someone we can trust when we look in the mirror.