Move Over. I’ll Drive.

What is heroism?

American culture has usually answered that question by celebrating the exceptional individual: the person who stands apart from the crowd and imposes his will upon the world. The hero is the creator, the conqueror, the self-made man. He owes little to the community because the community, we are told, owes everything to him.

This is Garrick Cripps's idea of heroism. Garrick imagines greatness as the triumph of the individual over obligation. He believes that the strongest human beings create civilization while the rest merely consume what they have made. Freedom, in his understanding, means liberation from the claims of others.

Strip away the vocabulary of markets and sovereignty and destiny, and what remains is a child's demand. I want it all, and I want it now. Garrick has simply found adult words for it, and millions of followers willing to supply the tantrum with an army.

Carson McCready represents the kind of hero Garrick's worldview cannot comprehend—and one American culture often fails to recognize. Garrick's version of the heroic individual has been so deeply imprinted on American society that Carson's form of heroism is routinely dismissed or undervalued, even though it may be the kind that keeps the species alive.

Carson does not stand above the human community. He remains responsible to it when others do not. His heroism is neither romantic nor theatrical. It does not arise from a desire for glory or power. It is closer to an evolutionary adaptation: the recurring emergence of the few who protect the many because protecting the many is simply what they do.

When fear overwhelms others, they act. When power seduces others, they resist. When people who did not create the damage are nevertheless required to confront it, they stay.

In Chapter 24 of Lord Atlas, Carson McCready and Laura are preparing to enter the county prison after midnight.

They believe Garrick Cripps is about to launch a cyberattack against the government from inside the prison's telemarketing network. Laura has created a countermeasure that may be able to stop it. To deploy it, they must enter the prison after hours, deceive the guards, reach the computer room, and insert fifteen jump drives without being discovered.

Neither of them caused the danger. Neither holds official authority to stop it. If they are caught, they may be arrested before anyone understands what they were trying to prevent.

Before they leave Carson's apartment, Laura asks him a question:

"Why do some people act and others don't, I wonder? To save ourselves? Blind faith?"

Carson thinks of the ordinary moments when human beings fail one another. A driver who does not stop for an animal suffering on the side of the road. Bystanders who watch while an old man is attacked at an ATM. Armed officers who remain outside while children are murdered inside a school.

"Maybe being a hero isn't as hard as people think," he says. "Maybe humans are hard-wired to be heroic—for one another, for human survival."

Then he gives the novel one of its clearest definitions of heroism:

"You're the scientist, Laura. How do you think humans have survived this long? When we stop being heroic, the species dies. That's my take on human evolution."

Laura considers what he has said.

"In that case, we better start evolving, again. I'll drive."

Carson returns to the question on the day of the charity football game, when his son Michael asks him whether he had been afraid during his years in the military.

"Fear came with the territory."

"But you did it anyway. Because you were brave?"

Carson glanced sideways at his son, who'd never shown such interest before.

"Fear is powerful. One of the most powerful human instincts. As strong as love and sometimes stronger. I'd do anything to keep you safe, no matter how scary the monster I'm fighting. But there's something else too. Duty. I loved some of my guys in the platoon, but not all of them. It's more that I loved my platoon—the whole platoon as a unit—as much or more than I loved any single man in it. As their chief, it was my duty to protect the platoon. Guard it from all the bad that fear creates. Being over-confident was one. Hate was another. All ignited by deep gut-wrenching fear. Love first, son. Do your duty second. That was my prescription for dealing with fear. Hopefully you get to a point where fear doesn't enter the equation. You love, you do your duty, and you act. It's not bravery. Why put that pressure on yourself? You do what you promised. It's not complicated when you think about it."

Carson is not describing heroism as an ideology.  Its' not about conquest, courage for its own sake, or exceptional behavior performed by exceptional people. He is describing it as an evolutionary imperative.

Human beings have not survived because they learned to live apart from one another. They survived because they learned that the fate of one human being could not be separated from the fate of others.

For Carson, heroism is not the triumph of the individual over the community. It is the act by which the individual preserves the community.

In one passage in Chapter 18, Laura and Carson talk about her fear of Garrick, trying to make sense of her experience with him at MIT. The conversation turns to the idea of meritocracy. From the novel:

"Is that how the SEALs worked? Pure meritocracy?"

"Actually, it's not that simple. Some were stronger than others. Others had special skills in areas the strong didn't. Above all the team mattered most. We were all lost without the team. No matter how strong any one guy was."

"You were a leader. Does that mean you were the strongest?"

"God, no. I was a leader because I could lead. I could keep the team working as one. Without the team, there is no leader. Without the team, we're fucked."

Carson's understanding of the hero is the antithesis of Garrick's.

Garrick's hero is the sovereign creator, the exceptional man who imagines himself standing above society because society depends upon him. He claims to produce while others consume. He claims to act while others obstruct. He regards obligation as an infringement upon greatness and dependence as evidence of inferiority.

In Garrick's imagination, the world rests upon the shoulders of men like him. Because he believes he carries civilization, civilization owes him freedom from its claims.

But Garrick's heroic identity is built upon a fraud. The man who condemns takers constructs his power by taking.

He deceives by convincing others that men like him hold up the world, when in fact it's the world that holds him up. He plays the king, but peel off the clothes and the emperor is but a child.

Suzanne illegally gives him access to cyberwarfare technology she acquired through her work at the Pentagon. Working under contract for the Pentagon, Laura Cavendish creates the algorithm for a cyberbot. Garrick takes it, alters its code, and puts his signature upon it. That was his way of claiming authorship over something he did not create.

Carson knows that no one survives, nor thrives, alone. The hero does not prove his greatness by escaping those obligations. He becomes heroic by accepting an obligation he could reasonably refuse.

Carson and Laura could have refused. They did not create Garrick's movement. They did not weaponize Laura's work to make the government seem incompetent. They're not responsible for national security. They could walk away and insist, truthfully, that Garrick's threat belongs to someone else.

Instead they enter the prison at midnight, when Carson should be at home. He's not due to report for work until the next morning. His presence is out of place and out of time. He brings Laura to distract the prison guards and to manage a cyber-defense against Garrick's attack. It's not their job to do this. But nobody has Laura's expertise to counter Garrick's attack. He stole her genius—an AI cyberbot of unprecedented power—and now she must devise a countermeasure against her own creation to protect a government that nobody else can or will protect.

They risk arrest and exposure. They plant the countermeasure. They stop the attack, at least for the moment, without recognition, ceremony, or any assurance that anyone will ever know what they did.

Their heroism produces no mythology. There is no audience, no declaration of greatness. Afterward they sit in Carson's apartment drinking whiskey, petting Diego, and watching Laura's program neutralize the attack before it spreads into government networks. Then they begin discussing what must be done next.

Garrick imagines progress as the liberation of the exceptional individual from the claims of others. Carson understands that no species organized around that principle could survive. Human beings endure because, when fear, passivity, selfishness, or the seductions of power overwhelm some people, others step in.

They fight wars they did not begin. They bury people they did not kill. They rebuild institutions they did not destroy.

They clean up damage created by people who believed responsibility belonged to someone else.

This does not mean Carson regards heroism as self-sacrifice without limit. Nor does it mean the individual disappears into the collective. His life is defined by judgment, independence, and a fierce resistance to ideology.

But his independence does not sever him from obligation. It makes him capable of recognizing obligation freely.

For Carson, the hero is not the person who rises above humanity. The hero is the person who refuses to abandon it.

Laura does not praise Carson's ideas of heroism. She does not turn it into another speech or ask him to lead while she follows. She accepts the obligation beside him.

"In that case, we better start evolving again. I'll drive."

This is Laura being Laura. And Carson being Carson. They are a scientist and a former warrior. They do not talk philosophy. They live it.

Their survival, and perhaps the survival of many others, depends upon their willingness to act together. That is the evolutionary imperative of heroism in Lord Atlas.

But we live in a culture of children, trained to admire the loudest tantrum as strength — the man who takes what he wants and calls it destiny. Garrick never grew up. Human beings remain alive not because men like him carry the world upon their shoulders, but because ordinary people continue to carry one another.

When people like Laura and Carson decide to move, as they did that night to stop Garrick's cyberattack at the county jail, she takes the wheel.

They are the only ones who see the danger and have no choice but to drive right into it.

There are no heroes here.

There are grownups, in a culture that celebrates the child king.