Does everyone truly have the capacity to be heroic? Let’s review. These conditions must be met for an action to qualify:
- Action must be in response to others’ needs and/or in defense of a principle
- There has to be an element of risk and/or personal sacrifice involved
- The action must be taken without the expectation of reward
So, yeah. Anyone can act heroically. You don’t need any extra resources; you don’t have to be wealthy. You can be heroic regardless of your age, gender, race or nationality. Yay! The question then is, Why don’t more people act heroically? I’ve thought of two reasons:
- We’re waiting for someone else to do it.
- We’re not giving ourselves permission to do it.
I’m going to tackle that first reason today and tomorrow and then we’re going to spend a good week or so on reason #2.
You know, it’s just so much easier if someone else does things, isn’t it? Hey – will you pick up that pen for me? Get me a glass of water? Run down to the store for abc; pick up that xyz? And oh, by the way, would you tell me what to think about everything important and about the state of the world in particular? (If someone else does it for you, it keeps your brain from hurting so much and it keeps your soul safe from the painful contradictions of life.) You don’t have to invest anything if you don’t volunteer, do you? So yeah, most of the time, we wait for someone else to do the heroic because it’s kind of a lot of work. And we might get hurt. And anyway, what’s in it for us at the end? Nothing. Which is why we just let Netflix take over and start the next episode.
(Okay, so now I sort of hate myself.)
But if you looked up this article https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_banality_of_heroism (and I’m really hoping you did!) you might remember that it talks about cultivating a ‘personal habit of heroism’. Turns out heroism, just like any other character trait, can – and should be — practiced.
The idea that heroes are born or that they just ‘leap to life’ one day when given an opportunity? It’s a fallacy. The truth? They’ve been training for that opportunity even when they didn’t know it. That tells me that all of us can be heroic. We don’t have to wait for someone to act on our behalf. What we need is to find a way to get off the couch and start practicing.