Readers learn that hero worship runs deep in the human psyche. So deep that non-human primates have been conceived as heroes. After citing a variety of human and non-human hero types, the author explores the argument of a Scottish historian who claimed the worship of heroes is innate. Digging into Thomas Carlyle’s pre-Darwinian insight, the evolutionary foundation of hero worship is explored. The infamous case of Beaudry “Bowe” Bergdahl—a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant stationed in Afghanistan who was captured by the Taliban—is used to argue that humans appear to be biased in favor of honoring, esteeming, and worshipping fellow humans willing to sacrifice their lives for a fantasied god, a country, fellow humans, or an idealized system of beliefs, unlike fellow humans whose inviolable grip on life suggests that survival is the alpha and the omega of existence. In fact, humans putting themselves in harm’s way, thus risking death, or humans choosing death in a moment of self-sacrifice, are likely to be praised, esteemed, honored, perhaps elevated to sacred status, becoming worthy of veneration in the “theater of heroism,” to use William James’ metaphor. While fellow humans who choose life over death have been vilified, evidence from the neurosciences is offered to support the argument that organismic survival is a biological imperative exercised by means of urgent changes in the brain and the body. But in the worst of worlds, a world of beastly barbarism, traumatized captives are not only driven by the body’s involuntary response to threats to survival, captives may also be informed by an ethics of survival that can produce a gnarly conflict which has the potential to draw beleaguered captives into a fierce internal struggle, pitting organismic survival and the internal revolt against death against the more lately evolved moral learning that there is a decent, honorable, heroic way for a human being to die.