Bravery, Inc.: How the World Learned to Sell the Last Virtue at Wholesale Prices
The word “brave” used to come with a body count. Leonidas at Thermopylae, Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad, the anonymous soul who first looked at a blue-ringed octopus and thought, “I wonder how that tastes.” Today, the term is more likely to describe a middle-manager who posts a selfie from his standing desk captioned “Living my truth, one spreadsheet at a time.” Somewhere between Thermopylae and TikTok, bravery was downgraded from mortal wager to marketing accessory.
Globally, the inflation of valor is now a reserve currency more stable than the yuan. The Ukrainian infantryman pinned down outside Bakhmut, the Iranian schoolgirl waving her hijab like a Molotov cocktail, and the Japanese convenience-store clerk who refuses to sell cigarettes to a masked 17-year-old all technically qualify as “brave.” Yet our algorithmic attention economy flattens them into the same pixelated mush as the British influencer who bravely admits she sometimes feels bloated after gluten. The word has been strip-mined, leaving behind an emotional Superfund site where genuine courage must now compete with #Courage.
Consider the geopolitical knock-on effects. Authoritarian regimes have noticed that the West will retweet a lone protester faster than it will send antitank missiles. Beijing’s censors therefore allow precisely three seconds of Shanghai lockdown footage to leak—just enough for the West to crown a new Tank Man, forget him by Thursday, and return to Netflix. Moscow employs the same sleight-of-hand: Navalny becomes the avatar of resistance abroad while at home he’s reduced to a calorie count. The Kremlin’s insight is cynical but accurate: international bravery fandom rarely survives the next news cycle.
Meanwhile, in the private sector, multinationals have franchised courage like a fast-food chain. Nike’s “Just Do It” now sponsors both marathoners and Saudi Arabia’s first female boxing gym, a moral two-for-one that lets Riyadh launder its reputation while the brand washes its conscience in sudsy empowerment. The average consumer can purchase bravery by the ounce—$179 for limited-edition sneakers stitched by Vietnamese workers who are bravely not fainting on the assembly line.
The linguistic contagion has even reached diplomacy. When the EU parliament calls the Taiwanese semiconductor engineers “brave guardians of the free world,” Brussels is really saying, “Please keep the chips coming so we don’t have to reopen coal mines.” The engineers themselves, working 70-hour weeks in bunny suits, would settle for a nap. But naps don’t trend on Twitter; bravado does.
What remains of the genuine article? Look to the margins. In Sudan, the RSF militia’s latest sweep has left neighborhood committees to bury the dead under sniper fire—no hashtags, no blue ticks, just lime pits and hurried prayers. In Guatemala, indigenous prosecutors still walk to court past graffitied death threats to sue Canadian mining companies; their reward is a collective yawn from the international press, because environmental martyrdom lacks the sex appeal of a Hong Kong umbrella. Courage is still alive, just exiled to the footnotes.
The uncomfortable truth is that bravery was never meant to scale. It thrives in the singular, the unrepeatable moment when an individual weighs mortality against morality and refuses the arithmetic of self-interest. Once you broadcast that calculus, it becomes theater; once you brand it, it becomes detergent. Our planet-spanning megaphone has made cowards of us all by convincing us we are heroes simply for pressing “send.”
So the next time a corporation, a politician, or a lifestyle guru invites you to “be brave,” check the fine print. Real courage rarely comes with a promo code. More often it comes with a closed coffin and a family still paying off the funeral loan. The world doesn’t need more people shouting “Bravery!”; it needs more quiet instances of it that will never be hashtagged at all.
