Another fine work Citizen. Timely, accurate, relevant, pointed, important. Gattaca was well done.

I would add - human beings are worshippers by nature. It is how God wired us. We are spiritual beings first, physical ones second. Worship is spiritual in nature. It is unavoidable. Inevitable.

Part of the problem of despising the one who created you is that a perverted, disordered worship system will replace the one you were designed to exist within. All human beings are powerfully inclined to indulge this perversion, the result of Adam's fall. The ancients had better clarity, because they weren't inclined to lie about their spiritual nature. They called it idolatry.

Bottom line. When the one who created you is the only entity you truly worship, then politicians, sportsballers, actors, money, success, importance, legacy, whatever it is that you would potentially make an idol, falls away. The Holy Spirit provides discernment. The necessity for the false god withers away, its falsehood transparent.

If you truly love Truth, then you are necessarily inoculated against idolatry, or false heroes, as you describe them. At the same time, it is quite predictable, in a society that despises Truth, that every sort of idolatry would be rampant.