What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness PDF
Preview What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness
CURRENT Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014, USA USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com Copyright © Elizabeth Svoboda, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Svoboda, Elizabeth. What makes a hero? : the surprising science of selflessness / Elizabeth Svoboda. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 978-1-101-62264-3 1. Altruism. 2. Courage. 3. Heroes—Psychology. I. Title. BF637.H4S86 2013 155.2’32—dc23 2013017671 To my parents, my first heroes Contents Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction Can Anyone Become a Hero? PART I THEORY Chapter One In the Genes? Chapter Two The Economics of Unselfishness Chapter Three Mental Blocks Against Heroism Chapter Four Inner Focus and Compassionate Action Chapter Five Suffering and Heroism Chapter Six Helping, Health, and Happiness Chapter Seven The Scientific Search for Altruism PART II PRACTICE Chapter Eight Heroes in Training Chapter Nine Corporate Heroes Chapter Ten Real-life Superheroes Chapter Eleven Taking the Hero Challenge Chapter Twelve Cultivating a Heroic Life Acknowledgments Notes Introduction CAN ANYONE BECOME A HERO? It was a sunny summer day just outside Houston, Texas, and Shirley Dygert was getting ready to skydive for the first time. Dygert didn’t fit the typical daredevil mold; she was a grandmother and longtime employee of the U.S. Postal Service. But her son lived close to a popular drop zone, and a couple years before—on his thirtieth birthday—he’d taken the plunge from 13,500 feet. He’d been raving about the experience ever since. So when Dygert’s other son invited her to come along on his first dive, she readily agreed. When Dygert’s party was summoned, she started to get nervous. “I thought, OK, don’t think about what you’re about to do.” But when she met her instructor, Dave Hartsock—the man she’d be strapped to as they executed a tandem dive—she felt at ease. He seemed really interested in getting to know her, interrupting his stream of friendly chitchat only to provide reassuring answers to her questions. When she asked him how often he’d done this before, he reassured her, “Hundreds of jumps.” She’d already done the most dangerous thing she would do all day, he told her: driving her car to the drop zone. By the time Dygert finally stepped out of the small plane into thin air, her fears had calmed a little. For a few seconds that stretched long enough to seem like minutes, the dive went exactly as scripted. During the first phase, a free fall, all Dygert could do was gape at the spectacle of the Texas plains rising up to meet her, poised, it seemed, to envelop her in a comforting embrace when she touched down. But problems started as soon as Hartsock opened the parachute to stop the free fall. The chute was supposed to billow out on all sides, but it didn’t open all the way; instead, it stayed crumpled, like a discarded napkin. Around the same time, Hartsock and Dygert began to spin in midair. “We went around in a circle and we just kept going,” Dygert remembers. “Dave said, ‘I’ll be honest with you. We’re in trouble.’” Ordinarily, the failure of the primary parachute wouldn’t have presented a serious problem. Most skydiving teams are equipped with a backup chute, which the instructor can deploy by pulling a handle. But when Hartsock fired the backup chute, it got all tangled up with the primary parachute. So he started manipulating the snarled parachute lines to try to slow their fall. “I just grabbed a bunch of lines,” he says, “and started pulling.” After a few seconds, though, it became clear that Hartsock’s emergency backup measures weren’t working well enough. He and Dygert were still falling toward the ground—and falling fast. Certain that she was going to die, Dygert frantically tried to locate her family on the ground so she could tell whether or not they were watching. She didn’t want them to have to see this. When Dygert and Hartsock were still a few hundred feet from the ground, Hartsock made a fateful—and very conscious—decision: He used control toggles to rotate himself in the air so that he was underneath Dygert. That way, his body would cushion her fall and she’d have a chance to survive even if his own odds of making it were low. But he didn’t explain his reasoning to her. Instead, he gave her a swift, direct instruction. “I told her to pull up her legs.” Hartsock’s split-second midair decision dramatically altered the course of both his life and his student’s. After the two of them hit the ground with a sickening crunch, Dygert slowly tried to reorient herself. She couldn’t believe she was still alive. “I looked over my shoulder. Dave was on the ground, and I was lying on top of him.” She hoped Hartsock had avoided the worst, but as more people began to run to the scene, it dawned on her that he was in for a rough time. “A kid from our party said, ‘Get off him. He’s not breathing.’” Though Dygert kept telling everyone she felt fine, doctors determined she’d broken multiple vertebrae in her neck and sustained other internal injuries. But that was nothing, she later learned, compared with what had happened to Hartsock. When he regained consciousness, he faced a rude awakening: His spinal cord had been injured and he was paralyzed from the neck down. In all likelihood, he’d never walk again, much less jump 13,500 feet from a plane. It took Dygert some time to realize the magnitude of the sacrifice her teacher had made. At first, she figured it was mere chance that Hartsock, and not she, had been the one to sustain permanent paralysis. “I sure would have split it with him,” she remembers thinking wistfully. But it soon became clear that her own narrow escape had been no accident. A man who’d just met her had sacrificed his own health and well-being so she might be able to keep hers. “I was absolutely amazed,” Dygert says, blinking back tears. “How can somebody have that much love for another person?”
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