is survival selfish argument by lane wallace when the ocean minor titanic sank in april of 1912 one of the few men to survive the tragedy was jay bruce ismae the chairman and managing director of the company that owned the ship after the disaster however ismae was savaged by the media and the general public for climbing into a lifeboat and saving himself when there were other women and children still on board ismae said he'd already helped many women and children into lifeboats and had only climbed in one himself when there were no other women or children in the area and the boat was ready to release but it didn't matter his reputation was ruined he was labeled an uncivilized coward and a year after the disaster he resigned his position at white star the women and children first protocol of the titanic may not be as strong a social stricture as it was a century ago but we still tend to log those who risk or sacrifice themselves to save others in moments of danger or crisis and look less kindly on those who focus on saving themselves instead but is survival really selfish and uncivilized or is it smart and is going in to rescue others always heroic or is it sometimes just stupid it's a complex question because there are so many factors involved and every survival situation is different self-preservation is supposedly an instinct so one would think that in life and death situations we'd all be very focused on whatever was necessary to survive but that's not always true in july 2007 i was having a drink with a friend in grand central station when an underground steam pipe exploded just outside from where we sat we heard a dull boom and then suddenly people were running streaming out of the tunnels and out the doors my friend and i walked quickly and calmly outside but to get any further we had to push our way through a crowd of people who were staring transfixed at the column of smoke rising from the front of the station some people were crying others were screaming others were on their cell phones but the crowd for the most part was not doing the one thing that would increase everyone's chances of survival if in fact a terrorist bomb with god knows what inside it had just gone off namely moving away from the area we may have an instinct for survival but it clearly doesn't always kick in the way it should a guy who provides survival training for pilots told me once that the number one determining factor for survival is simply whether people hold it together in a crisis or fall apart and he said it's impossible to predict ahead of time who's going to hold it together and who's going to fall apart so what is the responsibility of those who hold it together i remember reading the account of one woman who was in an airliner that crashed on landing people were frozen or screaming but nobody was moving toward the emergency exits even as smoke began to fill the cabin after realizing that the people around her were too paralyzed to react she took direct action crawling over several rows of people to get to the exit she got out of the plane and survived very few others in the plane which was soon consumed by smoke and fire did and afterward i remember she said she battled a lot of guilt for saving herself instead of trying to save the others could she really have saved the others probably not and certainly not from the back of the plane if she tried she probably would have perished with them so why do survivors berate themselves for not adding to the loss by attempting the impossible perhaps it's because we get very mixed messages about survival ethics on the one hand we're told to put our own oxygen masks on first and not to jump in the water with a drowning victim but then the people who ignore these edicts and survive to tell the tale are lauded as heroes and people who do the smart thing are sometimes criticized quite heavily after the fact in a famous mountain climbing accident chronicled in the book and documentary touching the void climber simon yates was attempting to rope his already injured friend joe simpson down a mountain in bad weather when the belay went awry simpson ended up hanging off a cliff unable to climb up and yates unable to lift him up and losing his own grip on the mountain ended up cutting the rope to simpson to save himself miraculously simpson survived the 100-foot fall and eventually made his way down the mountain but yates was criticized by some for his survival decision even though the alternative would have almost certainly led to both of their deaths in yates case he had time to think hard about the odds and the possibilities he was facing and to realize that he couldn't save anyone but himself but what about people who have to make more instantaneous decisions if in fact survivors are driven by instinct not civilization how do you explain all those who choose otherwise who would dive into icy waters or under subway tracks or disobey orders to make repeat trips onto a minefield to bring wounded to safety are they more civilized than the rest of us more brave more noble it sounds nice but oddly enough most of the people who perform such impulsive rescues say that they didn't really think before acting which means they weren't choosing civilization over instinct if survival is an instinct it seems to me that there must be something equally instinctive that drives us sometimes to run into danger instead of away from it perhaps it comes down to the ancient fight or flight impulse animals confronted with danger will choose to attack it or run from it and it's hard to say which one they'll choose or when or maybe humans are such social herd animals dependent on the herd for survival that we feel a pull toward others even as we feel a contrary pull toward our own preservation and the two impulses battle it out within us leading to the mixed messages we send each other on which impulse to follow some people hold it together in a crisis and some people fall apart some people might run away from danger one day and toward it the next we pick up a thousand cues in an instant of crisis and respond in ways that even surprise ourselves sometimes but while we lob those who sacrifice themselves in an attempt to save another there is a fine line between brave and foolish there can also be a fine line between smart and selfish and as a friend who served in the military for 27 years says the truth is sometimes there's no line at all between the two