Life & Wisdom Quote by David Brin

Brin’s line smuggles a democratic impulse into a genre that loves coronations. Sci-fi and adventure stories routinely treat “heroic events” like private clubs: chosen ones, bloodlines, special forces, singular geniuses. Brin pushes back with a rule that’s less about plot logistics than moral physics. If something is truly world-shaking, it can’t stay contained in the hands of the exceptional; it spills, it drafts bystanders, it forces the allegedly “normal” into decisions they didn’t audition for.

The phrase “try to follow” matters. It’s a craft confession, not a slogan. He’s admitting the default setting of narrative is to simplify: give the crisis to a hero, keep the crowd as scenery. His “rule” is an antidote to that laziness, a reminder that scale demands social texture. The subtext is skepticism toward the Great Man theory, and an insistence that agency isn’t a rare mineral. Heroism, in Brin’s framing, is often an emergent property of systems under stress: families improvising, bureaucrats bending procedure, neighbors forming ad hoc networks, frightened people discovering competence.

Contextually, it tracks with Brin’s broader preoccupation with accountability and transparency in future societies. Putting ordinary people inside epic moments is also a political move: it relocates responsibility. If normal people are in the room when history happens, then they’re not just collateral damage or cheering chorus. They’re witnesses, co-authors, and sometimes the inconvenient check on the hero’s mythology.