The sad reason we love superheroes, and the cure

Summary: Here is why we love superheroes, a sad reason pointing to our biggest weakness. Understanding the problem points to a cure.

“All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.”
— Max Beerbohm’s novel Zuleika Dobson: Or, An Oxford Love Story (1911).

Super-empowered individuals (using Tom Friedman’s neologism) have always played a large role in American myth. It is a long list. Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo, the frontier hero in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales. Tarzan (1912), Zoro (book 1919, film 1940), The Lone Ranger (1933), the libertarian hero John Galt in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and James Bond. When it comes to our heroic myths, it’s always High Noon. We are just bystanders – ignorant, passive, perhaps even cowardly – while heroes do all the work.

During the Great Depression, our dreams took a new direction. We invented comic book heroes such as Green Arrow and Batman – rich Jesus figures who sacrifice themselves for the peons. And actual gods like Superman and Thor.

“It’s individuals, and individuals alone, who matter. {Heroes} do great things. And they do them alone. This is Hollywood’s …enduring, conservative belief.”

— From “Hollywood’s Real Bias Is Conservative (But Not in the Way Liberals Often Say)“ by Elias Isquith in The Atlantic, 9 January 2012.

These fantasies have seeped into our beliefs about the real world, as described by Charles A. Beard in his great classic “The Myth of Rugged American Individualism“ (Harper’s, December 1931).

Until now these dreams existed in creative tension with our true greatest strength: people working together to build America. The Mayflower Compact, the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, wagon trains, cattle drives, unions. And mutual organizations from Franklin’s Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire (our first property insurance company, 1752) to the Boy Scouts of America.

Other organizations fought for our rights during the generations after the Civil War: unions, progressives fighting for clean food and water, activists fighting for civil rights for Blacks, women, and gays. Groups of brave people working together against giant powers, often sacrificing all they had – eventually gaining enough popular support to make their reforms happen.

Our greatest triumphs came from our tight social cohesion, such as during avoiding totalitarianism during the Great Depression and WWII (in which we mobilized more than Britain and Germany). Alone we are weak before the awesome power of wealth and large predatory entities (public and private). We are dust in the wind.

Teamwork and powerful institutions used to populate not just our history books but also our legends. Such as Marvel Comic’s SHIELD, E. E. Smith’s Triplanetary, Robert Heinlein’s Space Patrol, and U.N.C.L.E. (as in “The Man From”).

No longer. During the 1960’s and especially the 1970’s we became alienated from our institutions. Organizations that should have led us into the future, like NASA, failed us. We learned that institutions which should protect us, such as the FBI and CIA, were often criminal oppressors. Institutions that we admired, like the military, often displayed gross incompetence.

Now organizations most often appear in fiction as irrelevant, inept, or evil.

Our response is not a commitment to reform of these institutions, whatever the cost or effort. Ignoring the great problems facing our nation, we retreat into fantasy. As the punch line to the Russian joke goes, we pull down the blinds and pretend we’re moving. We dream of having superheroes fix our problems. The Blue Fairy will solve everything – if we believe in fairies.

“A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group.”
— Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth (1988).

Conclusion

Our confidence that one person can make a difference is (and hopefully will remain) a core part of the American character. But this must remain in balance with its opposite, our ability to work together. Otherwise, we’ll be sheep, controlled by powerful interests beyond any individual’s ability to influence.

The ability to balance contradictory values is a distinguishing strength of western civilization. Freedom and equality. Science and humanities. Nature and art. Human rights and multiculturalism. The periods in our history where we lost that balance, as we have today, usually end badly.

We can do great deeds in the future. We lack only the will to put aside the fantasies of children and act together as citizens. We need stories that help lead us to a better future. Otherwise, our ruling elites will treat us as children to be ruled with a firm hand.

“People need stories, more than bread, itself. They teach us how to live, and why. …Stories show us how to win.”
— The Master Storyteller in HBO’s wonderful Arabian Nights.

For More Information

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.  See all posts about heroes, about reforming America: steps to new politics, and especially these…

1. Can Americans pull together? If not, why not?
2. The philosophy behind the legend of Batman.
3. Are our film heroes leading us to the future, or signaling despair?
4. Why don’t our dreams of a better world inspire us to act?
5. We like superheroes because we’re weak. Let’s use other myths to become strong.
6. Inspiration. The missing element that can reform America.
7. Where we can find the inspiration to fix America?
8. Make a better future. Pick up the War Arrow.

The best possible ending for a lone hero

Here is the conclusion of Rollerball (1975), a new-born hero in a world without heroes – a world designed to prevent the rise of heroes. At the end, James Caan’s character is a heroic survivor – battered, alone, and vulnerable. Nowhere to go but in circles. Skating around and around.

What kind of sequel could we write for it? Nothing inspiring. Caan could retire with a large pension, perhaps hitting the speaking tour for fat fees.