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The Superhero Handbook A Do-Gooder's Guide to Saving the Planet A Book in Progress by Glenn Campbell Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next Chapter>> Production Notes   This is a DRAFT document, and everything here is subject to editing. Your feedback is encouraged! FamilyCourtGuy<at>gmail.com

Infinite Need

Chapter 7
11/5/07

In the next few chapters, we will introduce some philosophical concepts that make intervention very complicated. In most cases, you can't just swoop down from the sky, save someone and fly away again—at least not in good conscience. There are always implications and repercussions, and things don't always turn out as you expect they will. Good intentions are never enough; you also have to have a solid knowledge of how the world really works.

To put it bluntly, the world is a mess. It is a place of numbing pain and senseless waste of human resources. If you think that you and everyone around you is happy, you are living in a cocoon. No matter where you live, if you look just a little below the surface, you'll see vast and unnecessary suffering, much of which you are technically capable of doing something about but probably won't.

If you had the good fortune of being raised in a stable family in a nice neighborhood, you probably have an innate belief that the world is basically a sunny place with only a few faraway problems blocking the light. As you fly around the planet, however, probing beneath the surface with your x-ray vision and super hearing, you'll see quite the opposite: that the world is a grim and terrible place with only a few tiny islands of deluded happiness.

This is a planet that wastes people on a massive scale. Most infants come into the world with huge potential, which is crushed and beaten out of them by the time they reach adulthood. Adults who can barely care for themselves continue to reproduce, stretching the resources of the planet ever thinner. And I don't mean just our natural resources: The biggest problem of the planet is a shortage of parental resources—the ability to care for and adequately assimilate all the new souls we are bringing into the world. Most of the visible problems of the world, like poverty, war, crime, drug abuse and environmental collapse, can be traced to overpopulation and defects in child rearing.

As you scan the planet with your super senses, you will detect senseless suffering and tragedy in every corner, nearly all of which would have been preventable by some input of parental care. Most superheroes aren't prepared for the immensity of it. It is one thing to save a distressed maiden from an obvious villain, but what do you do when hundreds, thousands or millions of innocent souls are crying out for your help? Whatever your superpower may be, it is never going to be enough.

The magnitude of suffering on this planet is not something that a superhero can just brush aside. Somehow, you have to integrate it into your philosophy. Even if you choose to limit your interventions to a specific neighborhood, you have to be aware of what is going on outside. If you defeat all the villains in Metropolis, larger forces such as war or recession can still overwhelm it from the outside, in which case all of your local efforts will be for naught. To be effective in any domain, you have to keep an eye on the big picture and understand how it might intrude on the small one.

There is a core concept here you need to understand before trying to save people. I call it "Infinite Need." This is simply the idea that the needs of others will always exceed your resources to address them. No matter how great your superpowers may be, they are merely finite. The needs of the world, however, are essentially infinite and will easily overwhelm your powers if you don't have firm mechanisms in place to regulate the exchange.

Infinite Need means that any superhero, once established, is always going to be overwhelmed with calls for service. If you set yourself up as a savior of the masses, then—by God!—the masses will call on you—probably until all of your resources are depleted. Once you start helping people, you'll soon discover how deep their needs are. If every case is tragic and you believe that none can be turned away in good conscience, then you will eventually be drained of everything that made you super to begin with.

Infinite Need may sound like a very pessimistic philosophy. If the problems of the world are infinite, then why even try to solve them? I don't mean it to be taken this way. Infinite Need is simply a statement of fact about the world, at least in the global domain. It doesn't mean that things can't be changed in your local neighborhood, provided you have some boundaries in place to protect you from demands that are greater than your abilities.

I see Infinite Need as liberating. It means that you don't have to be everything to everybody. In a world of Infinite Need you absolutely have to make compromises. You have to let some worthy causes go, and you have to invest in self-maintenance. When you decide to intervene, you can't expect perfect solutions. All you can hope for is "good enough" solutions, because once you have reached that point, you are going to be called away by some other problem that is more pressing.

Infinite Needs means that in the big picture you are probably going to fail. The world will probably be just as miserable when you leave the scene as it was when you entered. Accepting this concept is like walking up to the edge of a tall building intending to commit suicide. If you decide at the last minute not to do it, then you have essentially gained a new life, a new go-around. Now, anything you do is an accomplishment, because it is better than jumping. Embracing the utter hopelessness of the world can sometimes give you, paradoxically, a fresh chance to do things well.

Do you follow me? Maybe the real aim of superhero work isn't to save the whole world but simply to do the best you can within the constraints you have found. It is noble enough to improve as much of the world as you can—at least the part that's in front of you—even if it turns out to be a futile gesture in the long run.

Accepting Infinite Need lets you relax a bit. If you know that tragedy is the natural and permanent state of things, then you are not under as much pressure to respond to every tragedy. You can pull back and start looking at things from a systems perspective. Instead of worrying about each individual tragedy, you can become more concerned with wholesale techniques to help greater numbers of people with less energy.

Infinite Need also forces you to specialize. To be effective in the world, you can't tackle it all at once. You have to find your "domain." Superman has his Metropolis while Batman is concerned mainly with Gotham City. A domain can be geographical, but it can also be defined in other ways. Perhaps your focus is child welfare, traffic safety or world population control. Having a clearly defined domain gives you an opportunity to build a set of precision skills and gain a thorough understanding your environment, which will ultimately give you a better chance of effectiveness.

Every superhero has to specialize; otherwise, you aren't going to get anything done. Within the domain of, say, a classroom, it is certainly possible to make a difference. As you mature, you may seek ever larger classrooms, until you are dealing with education on a highly theoretical level. In the end, you may indeed make a significant impact on the world at large, but you can't expect to go there directly without building a speciality first.

Infinite Need means that your available resources are always going to be inadequate to the task at hand, so you have to direct them to the selected places where they will do the most good. This means that you have to make hard and painful decisions to withdraw resources from some projects so they can be better used elsewhere. Infinite Need means that you will win some battles and lose others, so you have to be gracious and pragmatic in defeat. If you lose one child, you can grieve for a while, but you have to move on, because you know there are a million more who need saving.

The opposite of Infinite Need is blind and undisciplined compassion: You cannot bear to see someone suffer, and this sentiment overrules all other reasoning. For example, if a child you know is in jeopardy (especially your own), there may no limit on what you are willing to spend to protect them. You forget about the countless other children who need you; you care only about the one in front of you, and aren't open to any compromises regarding them. This may be the natural inclination of parents, but it is not a sustainable position for a superhero.

Seasoned superheroes, operating in an environment of Infinite Need, recognize that they can't expend unlimited resources on anyone. Yes, they are probably going to spend more on people who are part of their own domain, but there still has to be a budget. If the inherent problem of the world is lack of resources, then when you do have resources you have to parcel them out intelligently.

If one sick child, close to home, requires a million dollars to save while ten others far away can be saved for the same amount, the superhero has to make the cold, difficult and probably unpopular decision of who is more important and how his limited resources will be allocated.

Continued in Chapter 8