Imagine a scenario where a careless driver hits a young man riding a bicycle, causing him life-threatening injuries. A nearby witness quickly calls 911, a pair of paramedics arrive to stabilize the man, then immediately rush him to a hospital, where a talented doctor expertly repairs the damage, and starts him on the road to recovery.

My question to you is, who saved the young man? Was it the witness who called 911, the paramedics who got him safely to the hospital, or was it the surgeon? All of these people might have a claim to being a hero, but did any of them individually save him?

I would claim that the one who saved the young man was not an individual, but the society in which he lived. After all it was the society that created the 911 call system (plus wireless telephony for the call to be made). This same society also trained and paid for paramedics, evolving their job over the years into a highly effective medical intervention. The society is also responsible for having trained doctors at the hospital (for which it paid) not to mention staffing that hospital with all kinds of workers and specialists, who collectively developed a complex series of medical procedures, all to create an environment in which a terribly injured young man might be quickly and effectively healed. 

This may be the most logical answer to the question of who saved the young man, but it is admittedly a very awkward one. Humans do not tell stories like this. We like to center individuals in our stories, even if that centering is entirely without logic or reason. We like to say things like, “the President is responsible for the economy,” which is absolutely untrue, because it makes for a quick and dirty logical argument. Even then, if centering an individual into a place that they absolutely do not belong is somehow too unrealistic (a very high bar) then we will happily substitute that individual with a group of people. But then will conveniently speak of that group as if they were working in lock-step, exactly like an individual, even though we know this to also be impossible (that darn Congress better act soon). Hell, I can’t hardly get two friends to pick a time and date to watch a movie, and yet someone thinks that every Congressman (or every Jew, or every Conservative, or every Black person, etc) will somehow all magically work perfectly together? Have you been around people before?

The worst part of all of this “false centering” of individuals—sticking a person into the middle of a story where they really do not belong—is that it allows us to completely ignore all the social underpinnings that witnesses, paramedics, or even talented doctors rely upon to function. That is, it covers the truth. After all, none of these people (witnesses, paramedics, doctors, cops, etc.) are going to do anything heroic if the power is out, or if they are at the point of starvation, or cannot get to work because the roads need repair. In a complex society like ours, we constantly rely upon others to do our work, regardless of how heroic it might seem. Crazy as it sounds, doctors cannot do their work without real estate developers and plumbers. None of us can.

So why do we do this? Why do we make heroes out of ordinary people? Why are some people given the assumption of being heroic, and others not? It’s pretty weird when you think about it. Why do we center individuals in this way?

And why do we so happily ignore all the trappings of the larger society that supports us?

In reality, the only individual in the above scenario whose direct actions actually “caused” the young man to be saved is the careless driver. They are the only ones who had both the agency, and effect, that didn’t require support from others. But centering the potential villain in the story as a hero is just plain silly. Of course the driver is not the cause of the young man’s healing, but this does a good job of illustrating our rather insane need to order the events in our lives into some kind of narrative. 

Our culture is full of weirdness.