What makes men do stupid things?

For years, I’ve been watching men endeavor to become superheroes, like the ones they see in the movies. Some believe they can fly. This was apparently the dream of Hervé Le Gallou, a 51-year-old base jumper who recently leapt off the French Alps wearing a wingsuit — and plummeted to his death. Of course, he was a skilled base jumper who had done such stunts before; of course, he knew all about wingsuits, and air currents, and the attendant dangers. “I just go for the pleasure,” he said before the fatal leap last June. He said he was trying to replicate a childhood dream of “flying with my arms.”

What makes men do stupid things that court death? Is there a bit of Icarus in all of us, a part that just thinks it’s “cool” to do the impossible, to defy physics like a Looney Toons cartoon character? Jerry Seinfeld notes that men enjoy “skull-cracking activities” so much, they will “choose to wear a helmet, instead of refrain from the activities that are cracking their skulls.” I think of that when I see people weave through stuck traffic on EDSA on motorcycles, oblivious to the fact that motorists are oblivious to them. I’ve seen motorcycles try to pass on the inside lane, car doors open suddenly, cyclists flip across the road. The easy riders look around in stupid surprise: How’d that happen?

There’s probably a formula to this stupidity, something along the lines of Speed + Sense of Exhilaration = E.R. Visit.

Speed is the key. There was the horrible train crash in Santiago, Spain last week involving what appears to be a speed demon douchebag behind the controls of a commuter train. The driver, Francisco José Garzon Amo, hit a concrete wall at double the normal speed (a black box reading eventually will determine how fast he was actually going when the train hit, killing 78 people and snuffing out the scheduled Santiago de Compostela festivities that week). Amo bragged about his need for speed, posting a picture on Facebook prior to the crash of his speedometer reading 200 kms an hour, according to the Herald Tribune. He boasted the picture “has not been tampered with.” Friends who apparently thought this worth a chuckle commented on the post: “Dude, you’re going full speed, braaaaaake.”

Beyond the need for speed, though, I sense something else: a need to return to childhood, or a sense of no limits. Call it arrested development. Under the surface — the surface of adulthood — you’ve got a guy who wanted to be Superman, and another guy who wanted to crash his Lionel trains at high speeds. That’s arrested development. It’s a strange condition that has afflicted the modern world, where relative affluence (you don’t see people from the Fourth World doing stuff like base jumping for “thrills” or to recapture a childhood dream; they can’t afford the equipment, for one thing) leads to a constant search for new thrills. Thus you’ve got the bungee jumping, the zip-lining, the dining on poisonous blowfish. And the obligatory posting of such “extreme” experiences on Facebook, as though to affirm what a badass you are.

I can’t help bringing up someone like Steve Irwin, the Australian conservationist who courted dangerous encounters for years on TV before a stingray punctured his chest. Yes, Irwin was a guy who loved nature and the environment, but there must have been something about television that spurred him on to greater visual feats. After all, if it’s not dangerous, who’s gonna watch?

I also watched one of those hidden police video shows recently, and there was a drunken idiot weaving around on a highway shoulder, repeatedly baiting the cops to arrest him. But what he really wanted was an extra special kick: “Taser me!” he kept slurring out, as though jonesing for a new experience.

Another exteme sport that was popular for a while was skysurfing. As you might expect, this involves “surfing” the air before your parachute engages, doing wild spins and maneuvers and whatnot (which, hopefully, someone up there is shooting video of). It’s said to be quite a rush, and was really big for a while in the ‘90s, until the number of qualified instructors dropped down to zero: they all died in skysurfing accidents. (You see the hall of famers listed as “the late Jerry Loftis” and “the late Patrick de Gayardon,” etc.) The sport became way less popular after that. Go figure.

And it’s not just dudes who are addicted to skull-cracking activities: hundreds watched in horror in 2010 as Australian base jumper Kylie “Buffy” Tanti tried to parachute off the 165.5-meter Alor Setar tower in Malaysia. She was training for a future jump off the Petronas Tower, but her chute never opened. Game over.

Personally, I blame it all on Parkour. That trend started people thinking any urban surface can be scaled, leapt over, vertically surmounted. Hey, if James Bond and Jason Bourne can do it, so can I! Does physics tell us that concrete is meant to be scaled vertically? Or is that why engineers built those handy stairs?

There’s this sense that, if somebody does it in the movies, people can just go out and recreate it in real life. The movie Kick-Ass opens with just such a yahoo plummeting to his demise, much like the wingsuiter in the French Alps. The sad truth is, more than one person has no doubt attempted to duplicate that movie stunt, just for the thrill of sharing it on YouTube. With predictable results.

Some people might call it natural selection.

ERRATUM:

In last Sunday’s article “Japan’s other wonderlands” by Scott Garceau, only Philippine Travel Agents Association and Japanese National Tourism Organization were sponsors for the trip.