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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 Production Notes This is a DRAFT document, and everything here is subject to editing. Your feedback is encouraged! FamilyCourtGuy<at>gmail.com |
Intervention is one of the fundamental problems of life. Once you decide you want to help others, how do you go about it?
A lot of things that seem to be helping others right now don't actually help them in the long run. For example, feeding hungry pigeons in a city park doesn't necessary improve their conditions if it only helps them reproduce and create more hungry birds. You can't solve poverty by just giving people money, and you can't raise good children by merely protecting them and giving them what they want. Things are much more complicated.
Whenever you rescue someone, you run the risk of making them dependent on you, which could compromise their ability to help themselves in the future. This doesn't mean you shouldn't rescue people. It just means you have to be smart about it.
Intervention is an essential element of our lives as social beings. If we see someone in pain or peril and we have the means to help, then we want to do it. If we see a young child in the street with a car speeding toward him, nearly all of us are going to try to stop the car or pull the child away. It is the right thing to do, the human thing.
It may also be the right thing for us personally. All of us benefit when we reduce the suffering around us. We all want to live in a society that takes care of its people, because that's also a safe and comfortable community for us and our own families.
Law enforcement is a form of intervention. We can't let people randomly kill, steal or cheat on their taxes because that would jeopardize the stability of our society. Education is another kind of intervention. We would never just tell a child, "educate yourself," because we know it wouldn't work. In fact, nearly every function of government is an intervention of some kind. We are trying to prevent bad things from happening to individuals so they don't negatively impact us all.
The big question is not whether we should intervene. The main problem is how we should intervene so as to best improve the world in the long run.
All along, we have to recognize that our own resources are very limited while the needs of the world are massive and can easily overwhelm us. This is true no matter how many resources we have at our disposal.
Even if you were a superhero, you couldn't save the whole world. No matter what your superpowers were, they would never be enough. You could save some people, but never all of them.
Deciding who to save and who not to is the greatest trauma of a superhero's position. There is nothing more painful than having the power to help someone and deciding not to use it. Yet, as a superhero, that is what you would have to do nearly every day.
And that's what you are doing now. Sitting in that chair, reading these words, you are implicitly choosing not to help someone. You could be serving the needy right now. You could be saving a child from violence and neglect. You could be fighting for justice, but you're not. Instead, you're sitting in a chair.
Like it or not, you are a superhero. You have "powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary men," if only you choose to recognize them. It may not be within your ability to save the entire world, but you can certainly save part of it if you so choose.
By this point in your life, you have probably had some experience trying to save people and things didn't work out as you expected. The person you tried to save might not have wanted it, or they may have reacted in a way you didn't anticipate, actually making things worse. These disappointments are enough to drive any superhero back to his Batcave.
At this point, you are probably a little jaded and cynical, but at least you have found this book. Now we can start to discuss the hard philosophy of intervention.
This is a book for the superhero in each of us, someone who wants to help the world but doesn't know how. Hopefully, this book will give you a set of tools for planning and evaluating your own interventions and for avoiding some of the pitfalls all superheroes face.
If you think that the term "superhero" doesn't apply to you, think again. If you have any kind of resources that are greater than someone else's—money, time, intelligence, freedom—then you effectively have superpowers in their eyes and you are capable of helping them.
It is a humbling position to be in—knowing how much you could do if you choose and how much you can't do because your time is so limited. Being a superhero means that you can never rest easy, knowing how many people are suffering who you might have helped.
Superhero work isn't as romantic as it seems in the movies. In real life, it's a lot of hard work, with no-win decisions, ungrateful clients, sleepless nights, and problems that keep hitting you one after another. There's usually not much public glory in it. The best you'll probably get is the private satisfaction that you did the best you could with the resources you had.
Continued in Chapter 2
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