Review: ‘Nobody is Coming to Save You’ by Scott Mann
Scott Mann is a former Green Beret turned writer, playwright, actor and activist. He has written a new book, Nobody is Coming to Save You: A Green Beret’s Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done. The Conciliators Guild is founded on the premise that our emotional and psychological space drives much of our behaviour, including in politics, unaware of it though we may be. Mann’s book brings this reality to vivid life alongside a spectrum of answers and responses that few others have summoned up.
Through a brutal honesty about his personal tribulations and his challenges serving as a Green Beret in Afghanistan, Mann manages to give life to abstract ideas and he proposes practical ways to manage what he calls the "Churn", that mess of high emotions that makes us polarised and violent. His Green Beret team’s success in protecting an Afghan village from its rooftops leads to Mann’s concept of “rooftop leadership” and leading by example. His descent into personal darkness that almost led to a suicide attempt is transformed into how to be generous with our scars as a path to healing.
Indeed, the book is an arc of related ideas about how to manage the heaving elephant of emotions and motivations driving much of our behaviour. From the power of stories, including the sheer physicality of telling them, to the importance of connecting to others as if your life depended on it, Mann makes his point about the need to bravely face, rather than ignore, our emotional reality.
In a critical section for our comfort laden world, he also paints the virtues of struggle, explaining how he created and acted in a successful play entitled Last Out, without any previous experience in the field. Mann is telling us all to get out there and build a healthier world, rather than sit on our screens musing.
Living in Afghan villages also taught him something critical: that “context is everything”, and that the quality of our interaction with the world we face, and the context we live in, is all-pervasive. He points out that our entanglement with the digital domain does mean local context is the first thing to go because we are distracted by exciting but distant, and often irrelevant, events.
This loss of connection and the erosion of relationships has a direct impact on our lives: whether we know it or not, we become more anxious, prone to manipulation and groupthink, and from there to violent polarization.
Nobody is Coming to Save You is about re-connecting to life around us in as authentic a fashion as possible, including by accepting the inevitable struggles and pain that this involves. It is a kind of straight and practical honesty that marks the best of America from Mark Twain to Teddy Roosevelt. Mann is hopeful about his country’s future despite its divided present, and points to the fact that, like in many other countries, it is the overwrought one-third on either end of the extremist spectrum driving the harsh and fragmented reality for the other sane two-thirds. The latter are flexible in their views, not ideologically rigid, fed up with polarization, and believe in common ground. You would not know it from the discourse in the media or politics. Mann recommends connection across communities of the sane, including through a list at the end of the book of organizations and individuals working towards such constructive ends.
Above all, he leaves us with this important thought: “These days, we are so disconnected from our nature and so inundated with fear that we are in a permanent state of semi-consciousness, unaware that our primal emotions are getting the best of us.”
We could not agree more and this book helps to gather up the courage to tackle this problem with knowledge, action and the magical power of stories. Mann paves the way with this rich account of his life and key ideas garnered along the way – all dedicated to helping others.
*
Nobody is Coming to Save You: A Green Beret's Guide to Getting Big Sh*t Done
By Scott Mann, Hachette Book Group, $18.99 US
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