What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness

171 Pages·2013·1.07 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Svoboda

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?”