Review of The Third Man Factor

“We are hardwired for people!”

That’s John Geiger’s conviction after researching numerous stories of survival. In his 2009 book, The Third Man Factor, Geiger writes:

The experience has occurred again and again, not only to 9/11 survivors, mountaineers, and divers, but also to polar explorers, prisoners of war, solo sailors, shipwreck survivors, aviators, and astronauts. All have escaped traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having experienced the close presence of a companion and helper, and even “of a sort of mighty person.” This presence offered a sense of protection, relief, guidance, and hope, and left the person convinced he or she was not alone but that there was some other being at his or her side, when by any normal calculation there was none. There is, it seems, a common experience that happens to people who confront life at its extremes, and strange as it may sound, given the cruel hardship they endure to reach that place, it is something wonderful.

The book is a well-crafted look at the fascinating phenomenon noted by survivors in many settings.

However, the book weakens in Geiger’s attempt to explain and exploit the Third Man Factor. Given the helpfulness of a “presence” to share a survivor’s dire straits, Geiger wonders if there are things we can do to fabricate the Third Man experience at need to help us survive:

Can the Third Man, the guiding companion called upon by polar explorers, mountaineers and other adventurers, and those in the throes of a disaster, be summoned to help people facing crises of a more mundane nature? Imagine the impact on our lives if we could learn to access this feeling at will. There could be no loneliness with so constant a companion. There could be no stress in life that we would ever again have to confront alone.

This sense of a companion, Geiger believes, is something we should figure out how to fabricate at need. And this is because, to Geiger, the eerie experience of companionship is an evolutionary development to help us cope.

But this is where the book leads to despair—unless there’s something more than mere evolutionary development to explain the Third Man phenomenon. He concludes the book saying, “The Third Man is an instrument of hope, a hope achieved by a recognition that is fundamental to human nature: the belief—the understanding—that we are not alone.” But the belief that we are not alone is, in the end, an illusion in Geiger’s view. He’s got a foot in both camps: unable to ascribe the Third Man to anything but evolution but unwilling to conclude that, if that’s the explanation of the Third Man, we are utterly, utterly alone after all.

Except that we’re not. When I read of these experiences of a “presence” at the highest peaks, or deep under the rubble of the World Trade Center, or bobbing about on a lonely sea, it reminds me of Psalm 139:

Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, [a] you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

even there your hand will guide me,

your right hand will hold me fast.