Superheroes: The Delusion of Power

Power is typically seen as the capacity to act – with obviously varying degrees. A prisoner can pace their cell, do push-ups, and so on, but can’t act outside the limits of their cage. The President of the United States might not have the power to verbalize a complete thought, but he can do all the things the prisoner can, and more besides. They both have power, but one of them has far more power than the other.

I think this is a narrow view of power that is lacking one of its key components: need. The variations in power aren’t so much across the capacity to act per se, but the capacity to act without considering the needs of others. The prisoner must accommodate the needs of the warden, the guard, the parole board, and so on. His needs are ranked quite low when contemplating which actions to take. The President of the United States, on the other hand, can skate by without acknowledging the needs of most of the planet. He might have to consider the needs of Benjamin Netanyahu, to a degree, as the Israeli Prime Minister has considerable power in this regard as well, but he certainly does not need to consider the needs of the Palestinians who are, for all intents and purposes, power-less.

Taking this needs-focused perspective of power opens up further understandings of how power works, and how impotent our approach to it actually is. If we consider our human needs (using Maslow’s hierarchy for the sake of simplicity), what we consider powerful can really only help us meet our most basic needs: food, water, safety, shelter. This can also help us define what might be considered ‘power’ as anything that can help us obtain these things without considering the needs of others – money, celebrity, access to opportunity (think Harvey Weinstein), and so on.

There are way more needs than the basic ones, and power is useless in obtaining them. Love is elusive to those whose identity is based solely in their power, and this is highlighted in the common trope of the rich person worrying over whether they are loved as themselves or if those close to them are only after their money. Similarly with esteem: we think we respect power, but we really only respect what one does with it. Elon Musk isn’t respected because of his money, but because of his advocacy for free speech and his pursuit of a better world for humanity through clean energy and space exploration; or, he’s not, because of his advocacy for racism and his massive ego whose projects offset any climate good his cars might produce. His power is irrelevant; he is judged by his actions based on the capacity that he has to act – as anyone would be. Self-actualization goes without saying.

So why is there this fixation on power? Why do so many people strive for it, often at the cost of their other needs? Why do we delude ourselves that power is somehow going to fulfill our lives when it literally cannot? The answer is obviously capitalism, you goons; it’s always capitalism.

Capitalism as an ideology requires an underclass to use their labour to produce the things needed by the more powerful. This required scarcity forces people into a situation of never having enough power, so our most basic needs can never be met. A housing market that makes shelter out of reach; low wages to make food and security luxuries; a “flexible labour market” (i.e. gig work) to make the underclass even more precarious in their ability to meet their basic needs.

We are then told that in order to get our needs met, we must compete laterally with others in our class. We must gain power by any means necessary, and that’s the only way we’ll be able to afford rent. Do not consider the needs of your neighbour; they are in competition with you! The only way for society to function is if there are winners and losers, and winners don’t need to accommodate anyone. This is the way.

This isn’t to say that power didn’t exist prior to capitalism. Feudalism obviously had lords going head to head to obtain more power – it’s just that the regular people didn’t give a shit because they had their basic needs met. More people had access to a more diffuse power: land. If you had access to land, you had food, security, family, and so on, and didn’t see the point in striving for anything else. If you didn’t have land, there was still the commons which allowed a degree of needs to be met. There wasn’t as much wealth as we understand it today, but there didn’t really need to be; people had enough. Industrialization created urbanization which increased inequality and poverty which reduced the average person’s power, and the shrinking of the commons increased commodification which reduced normal people’s ability to get their needs met as basic needs became more and more unaffordable. As the West went through this transition, we peasants and proletarians gained political power through the institution of democracy, but lost it economically as the means of production shifted more and more to the ownership class.

This manufactured scarcity and proselytized ideology has deluded us into thinking that with power, we’ll finally be able to live the lives we want to have. To a degree this is true: we cannot achieve anything without our basic needs being met, and power is required to obtain them. The delusion arises when we forget that our goal is to get our needs met, and not power in-and-of itself. We want money in seeming ignorance that the entire purpose of money is to buy stuff – do we want the money or do we want the stuff? Do we want the power or do we want to have our needs met?

Also, wasn’t this article supposed to be about superheroes?

Superheroes have superpowers which would include them in this analysis. It’s a little campy, but being more powerful than a locomotive is technically a power. As David Hume said, “Strength is a kind of power; and therefore the desire to excel in strength is to be considered as an inferior species of ambition.” Could Superman achieve his basic needs without taking into consideration the needs of others? Absolutely! That’s how we get Injustice and Homelander. This shit counts, however nerdy an ambition it might be.

Superman, of course, would never do such a thing in the traditional canon. That’s what makes him heroic. He doesn’t use his power for himself, and I’m going to argue that he doesn’t do it for the people of Metropolis either. The people of Metropolis don’t exist – they’re fictional. Superman doesn’t technically exist either, but the story of Superman does. The writers are producing this power, and the power of Superman is used to meet the needs of person reading his story. We feel secure against the threat of Zod. We feel safe from the machinations of Lex Luthor. This is how empathy works.

If our needs don’t supersede the needs of the hero, they become the villain. This is why the villain Homelander is still seen as a hero in an ever-increasing fascistic America – the people who watch The Boys don’t see any issue with what he’s doing, and their needs remain met by his actions. But traditional villains rob banks and try to take over the world, using their superpowers to meet their own needs. Disney’s new “sympathetic” Marvel villains have high ideals, but don’t consider the needs of others in their quest for it – this is how their villainy is displayed despite the validity of their ideology.

The thing is, this glomming on to the powerful with the assumption that they’ll meet our needs exists outside the world of the superhero as well. In the traditional model, women (who are limited in their power) will seek out powerful men as a means of linking themselves with his power to help them get their own needs met in a world that wouldn’t allow them to be met otherwise. If there is abuse or violence, it is often endured out of a fear that her needs won’t be met without him – his power is all she has to keep herself from becoming powerless.

Under capitalism, there are more powerless people than just trad wives. Many of us live our lives with the bare minimum of power, scraping by as best we can. Wouldn’t it be nice to attach ourselves to some hero who would use their power to uplift our own? This is the allure of the tyrant. Surely I’ll be taken care of if we give more power to this person with whom I identify! Surely my station will be reduced if they are overthrown! We connect to the tyrant as we would to Superman, as some of us bizarrely do with Homelander – they will use their power to keep us safe. Our needs will be considered; the needs of the outsider be damned. But is the solution to our abusive boyfriend to make sure we land a nice one, or to adjust society so that women and men are equitable in their power, limiting the potential for abuse to happen in the first place? Such a world appears to be possible!

The thing is, power is the capacity to act without considering the needs of others. The powerful don’t need to consider us, so why would they? That’s how power maintains itself, so why abandon the working model? We, however, as a collective have more power than any individual. This is why platitudes are made about how the powerful will take care of us, as a manipulation. We are given speeches and scraps to delude us into thinking that we are better off with them having all the power, with us remaining powerless and allowing them to go unchallenged. Superman is a propagandic myth: the boyfriend who tells his girlfriend to never leave him, he’s going to take care of her, trust him.

Power cannot escape what it is; we have to escape power. We have to recognize the value of our neighbour and accommodate them accordingly. We have to recognize the life beyond our basic needs. Both of these perspective require giving up our pursuit of power. Power will never go away, our basic needs will always need to be met, but we can diffuse it. Just as democracy diffused political power, we must identify other aspects of power and diffuse them as well. Power where it exists today must be counterbalanced – this is often the project of the Left as we try to convince governments to allow the otherwise powerless access to their basic needs. It’s a faulty system as power remains relatively undisturbed, and this liberal redistribution does not address the root causes of the concentration of that power, but it’s what the system currently allows. We still have room to dream for more.

To quote a super-villain (notably, one later purchased by Disney), “When everyone is super, no one will be.” And we’d be better off for it.