Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [109]
So we are coming around to a psychological explanation for heroism. A sense of empathy, combined with an identity as someone who helps and takes risks, may predispose one for heroism. But none of this explains how Olian’s actions make any sense from an evolutionary point of view. When I ask animal behavior expert John Alcock about heroism, he is skeptical. Tales of heroics are probably “overblown,” he says. After all, among other mammals, like lions, “Powerful predators will band together to defend themselves. [But] it’s not a matter of one lion sacrificing himself for the good of the group. If that ever happens, it happens accidentally.”
So are heroes accidental? Is Olian a mutation, genetically speaking? And what about cases of even more extreme risk-taking? There have been Carnegie Heroes who could not swim—but who jumped into bodies of water to save people anyway. Some of them died doing it. Is this not insanity, from a natural selection point of view?
Olian has thought a lot about this question since he nearly froze to death in the Potomac River. “I’ve always found it extremely interesting that people who treat each other so badly in everyday life can do tremendous things for each other in the worst of times,” he says. He can’t speak for other people, but in his case he’s concluded that what he did was self-interested. “If you didn’t get anything out of it, I mean flat-out nothing, you wouldn’t do it,” he says. “I wouldn’t do it.”
During the Holocaust, Alec Roslan rescued two young boys at great risk to himself and his family. Many years later, when he gave a speech at a temple in Los Angeles, Oliner served as his translator. Afterward, Oliner remembers, journalists crowded around and asked Roslan the same question over and over. “Why did you do this? What made you risk your life? Why?” As usual, we seek out heroes with a religious fervor, and then we act incredulous when we find them. Finally Roslan turned to them in exasperation and said, “Why are you asking me why I did this? You mean there’s another way to behave?”
Time after time, heroes explain their actions with the statement, “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t done it.” It’s become a post-disaster cliché. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the simple truth. The more heroes I interview, the more I realize that I’ve been asking them the wrong question. It’s not a matter of why they did something; the better question is, “What were you afraid would happen if you did not do what you did?”
“Basically, you’re doing it for yourself,” Olian says, “because you wouldn’t want to not do it and face the consequences internally.” In his case, he was afraid of disappointing himself. His determination at the crash site grew out of confidence—and insecurity, he says. Confidence because he knew he had the strength and skill to try to swim to those passengers, and insecurity because he needed to prove to himself that he could do it. He didn’t jump into the river to be a hero; he did it to avoid being a coward. Or, as he puts it: “It’s more a feeling of an emptiness than adding to something that’s already there.”
Olian enlisted in the military during Vietnam for the same reason. He didn’t particularly agree or disagree with the reasons for going to war. He went to Vietnam because he was scared not to go. “For that reason, I had to do it. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I could’ve done it. Could I rise to the situation, whatever it was? I didn’t know if I could survive, how I’d feel about killing people. I had a lot of questions.”
In 1969, Olian was on patrol with a small group of soldiers in the Central Highlands of Vietnam during the rainy season. They crossed a river using a small footbridge one day, only to find in the morning that the rains had flooded out the bridge—leaving them no way back but