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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 |
There are several key theoretical concepts you need to understand before you go around saving people. We just discussed Infinite Need and triage. Another is the Malthusian Dilemma, which we shall describe forthwith.
Thomas Malthus was a 18th Century British economist who postulated that any human population, if left unchecked, would eventually outstrip its food supply. Any increase in food production, while initially beneficial, would result in greater fertility, and the increased population would eventually absorb all the extra food. In the end, you'd have just as much misery as if the food supply remained constant. In fact, you'd have even more suffering people now that there were more mouths to feed and the same inadequate ration for each.
What does this have to do with superhero work? Plenty. As a superhero, you are in some way providing resources to the needy—be it feeding the hungry, fighting crime or rescuing maidens in distress. The initial heroic act may feel satisfying, but you might not foresee the ability of your clientele to adjust to your heroism. They may come to expect your help, expand their appetites accordingly and keep doing what they are doing as though you had never intervened.
A simple example of the Malthusian Dilemma is feeding the pigeons in a city park. It feels good to feed the pigeons, doesn't it? They are certainly responsive to your largesse and seem grateful. If you feed them in winter when no other food is available, you could be saving their lives. No one want to see any living being die a painful and unnecessary death, especially when the salvation is so simple.
The trouble is, once you start feeding the birds on a regular basis, they are going to take this as an excuse to reproduce. Over time, you are going to find yourself serving more and more customers until one bag of bread crumbs isn't enough. No matter how much food you bring, the need will eventually increase to accommodate it.
What's more, the quality of life of these birds is going to deteriorate. There will be more competition for nesting space and probably more violence between birds. Because they have you to depend on, they may lose the skills for fend for themselves. To the birds, you become a god—worshipped and adored when things go well but cursed when times turn bad. That's not a role you want to be in. The tragic thing about being a god is that you are never as powerful as the people think you are, and you can never live up to their impossible expectations.
This Brave New World you are creating for the birds may be well-intentioned, but it is neither sustainable nor in their best interests. Eventually, you are going to have to stop. Either you will hold the food supply at a constant daily level, or you will "burn out" and quit entirely, perhaps blaming the birds for your frustration. The former results in your permanent imprisonment in the role of feeder, without any substantial improvement in the pigeons' quality of life. The latter, on the other hand, could trigger a true humanitarian disaster in the pigeon world.
If there were 100 starving pigeons before you started feeding them, and there are 500 now, you will have increased the level of pigeon misery five fold even if you keep feeding them. If you stop feeding them, 400 of those pigeons are going to have to die to achieve previously sustainable levels. Although it may have seemed compassionate to feed that initial flock, when you withdraw you become a mass murderer.
Any act of simple charity can result in this kind of Malthusian effect. I don't mean that everyone you rescue is going to reproduce; it's more of a psychological adaptation. If you transfer a resource to someone needy, they will probably adjust to this resource, expand their life accordingly, then be even more miserable when the resource runs out.
This is why you can't address poverty by just giving poor people money. Let's say you went to the poorest neighborhood of your city, picked 100 of the most desperate families and gave them each $10,000. What do you think would happen? Sure they'd pay their overdue utility bills, but with the remaining money they would probably expand their lifestyle. They'd move into bigger apartments and buy cars and expensive entertainment systems. One of the reasons they are poor, no doubt, is that they have difficulty managing their resources over time. Inevitably, ones expectations and future commitments tend to expand with ones available income, even if the income is temporary. It doesn't take a social scientist to know that the $10,000 will be gone quickly, and when it is, most of the people you tried to help will probably be in even worse straits than before you intervened.
If you give someone $10,000 and the money runs out, what's the first thing they are going to do? They will come back to you for more money. Like it or not, you have created a dependency, even with as little as a single intervention. Having given before, there is usually pressure on you to give again.
If you rescue Lois Lane even once, she may come to expect it. The rescue inevitably discourages her own attention to safety. The next time she goes snooping for a story, she will probably be a little more brazen and careless, knowing that miraculous rescue is probable. The more times you rescue Lois, the more you set yourself up in a Malthusian-like dilemma. If you have already rescued her five times, it is hard to say on the sixth time, "No, I'm not going to do it anymore." That would be seen as cruel, and rightly so, because through your actions you lead her to believe that rescue was her right.
As another example, lets say you control a large philanthropic foundation and decide to give a million dollars to help the beleaguered public school system in your community. The next time a government budget is allocated, local leaders may look at your big contribution and figure that they can now give less. In the end, the school system's total resources might be no greater than if you had never contributed, except now the school system is dependent on you.
Strictly speaking, the Malthusian Dilemma refers only to population growth, but the basic concept can be generalized to all forms of intervention. We can refer to this phenomenon as "adjustment." Every human need is part of a system, and you can't address that need without expecting the system to adjust in some way to your intervention. If you feed the pigeons, their population is going to expand. If you rescue someone in circumstances where they are capable of rescuing themselves, they may start depending on you rather that relying on their own resources.
Adjustment tends to turn shining technological advances into eventual satanic curses. Improved agriculture and medicine may seem like godsends at first because they "save lives," but they can also result in a population explosion which eventually creates even more misery than before. Improved electronic technology, while pleasant to experience, may encourage greater entertainment addiction and breed a generation of children who rarely leave their homes. Car pollute, antibiotics encourage resistant bacteria, and the internet rots the brain. It is hard to think of any technological advance that hasn't caused unexpected damage in the long run that all but neutralizes its benefit.
Adjustment also tends to neutralize the benefit of any well-meaning social program, like the welfare safety net, social security or anti-terrorism defense. As soon as good intentions becomes institutionalized, the populace adjusts to the institution in self-serving ways that often defeat the original intent.
Let me make this clear: I'm not saying you shouldn't rescue anybody. The cold and rational Victorians took the Malthusian Dilemma as justification for not helping anyone at all. If you feed the poor, their reasoning went, those buggers are just going to reproduce, so why not build a fine and pompous mansion instead? This is as absurd a position as thinking you can help pigeons or the poor just by feeding them. As a superhero, you are here to help, but have to be aware of the hidden mechanisms working against you and learn to compensate for them. Adjustment is not a solid wall but a dynamic obstacle to be carefully studied and outmaneuvred.
For example, one way to outwit the Malthusian Dilemma is focus your attention on birth control. Unless you are of an insane religious bent, there is hardly anything bad to be said about giving people more control over their own reproduction. There can be adjustment effects in this effort like any other, but birth control is a tactic that Malthus in the 18th Century probably never considered. Indeed, in industrial countries, there is no longer a clear relationship between feeding the poor and reproduction like there was in Malthus' day. Instead, reproduction seems to be tied more to education and life opportunities—i.e., people with the lowest education and fewest opportunities tend to produce the most children.
In general, you defeat the forces of adjustment by constantly being on the lookout for them and by pushing your intervention to a higher level whenever possible. Remember the old wisdom: "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." This says nothing about how to manage our rapidly depleting fisheries, but you get the idea. The best kind of intervention is one that gives a person the sustainable tools to rescue himself.
Continued in Chapter 10
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