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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 |
In previous chapters, we described four important philosophical concepts: infinite need, triage, adjustment (or the Malthusian Dilemma), and the Prime Directive. You shouldn't engage in superhero interventions without understanding what they mean and how they effect you.
No matter how great your superpowers may be, the demands of the world will always exceed them (infinite need). Therefore, you have to carefully choose where you direct your limited resources to achieve maximum good (triage). When intervening, you need to be aware of how your clientele may adapt to your presence, possibly neutralizing your good work (adjustment). You should avoid intervening in environments you don't fully understand (the Prime Directive).
Now that we know intervention is more complicated than it seems, let's examine the actions of a superhero in more detail.
In the comic book view of superheroism, intervention is simple: Someone is in peril, so you swoop down from the sky and save them. The client thanks you; everyone applauds your performance, then you fly away. Alas, real-world interventions are much more complicated.
Intervention isn't just an action; it is a process. That timely and heroic thing you do to save someone, like pulling them from path of a runaway truck, is only one part of the process. The press and public always seem to focus on the one act that saves the day, but an experienced superhero knows this is only a fraction of their job. There are important things that happen both before and after the saving act, and you can't ignore them or your intervention is likely to fail in the long run.
Before you can save someone in peril, you have to know they are in peril, which is involves some sort of intelligence gathering process. Once you know of the problem, you have to make a plan for your intervention, weighing the options and potential risks so you don't end up doing something that makes matters worse. After you implement the plan and actively intervene, you can't just fly away; you have to linger for a while to monitor the results of your actions. Eventually, however, a new stability is reached, and you can withdraw from the situation.
This whole process can play out over the course of 30 seconds or thirty years. It is the same general process regardless of your powers or what you plan to do with them. No matter how great your raw powers may be, if you neglect any part of the process, you are destined for a fall.
The intervention process involves these six steps:
Step 1: Resting/Scanning. In this beginning state, you aren't doing much of anything. You have no obligations to anyone. You are "resting," but you are also scanning your environment for trouble.
Step 2: Alert. You become aware of a problem in your environment that may be appropriate for your intervention. Perhaps, it is somebody calling, "Help! Help!" or maybe it is a problem you notice on your own.
Step 3: Analysis and Planning. You collect more information about the problem, and try to decide whether it is suitable for intervention. If you decide to proceed, you make a plan about how you will intervene, and you think through all all the options and risks. You also have to think about the aftereffects of your action and how you are eventually going to withdraw from the situation.
Step 4: Active Intervention. If your analysis says it is prudent, you will engage in some sort of action to try to address the problem. This is where you could actually swoop down and save someone, but the action can be as small as a word or even the rearrangement of a single atom. The point is, you are causing an event in the world that would not have happened had you not initiated it.
Step 5: Monitoring and Rebalancing. No matter how good your planning may have been, you can never be sure of the effects of your action until after it has happened. After your intervention, there is bound to be some cleanup to do before you can responsibly exit the scene.
Step 6: Withdrawal. After a new stability is reached, you have to find a way to withdraw from the situation. Ideally, this will put you back into the resting/scanning state where you have obligations to no one.
If there is such a thing as "art" in the superhero world, it lies in designing elegant, low-energy interventions that cleanly solve the problem with minimal force then return you quickly to your no-obligation state. An example of this might be a surgeon removing someone's infected appendix. The problem is detected; the surgeon intervenes by removing the appendix, and the patient goes on to a complete recovery. In the real world, not all interventions are this clean and simple, but this is still what a superhero should be striving for.
Scan the horizon, detect a problem, make a plan, take action, fine-tune the results, fly away — that's how an elegant intervention should work.
Let's look at each step in this process in more detail.
[To be continued]
Continued in Chapter 12
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