Superheroes and the worship of power. Middle Nation Podcast (E:10)

This is the Middle Nation podcast. I'm Shahid Bolson, and this is episode number 10. This is gonna be sort of more of a cultural critique, if you will. Popular media is informative. It's sometimes hard to watch because a lot of it is really garbage, but it's important if you wanna know what's going on culturally and for society to sort of reveal itself to you.

Popular media can be informative, both as a barometer of society's attitudes, maturity, and worldviews, and as an indicator of what the managers of society wish those views and attitudes to be. I remember an old George Orwell essay in which he talked about a then popular series of novels which were quite blatantly fascist in their message, though they were not at all political. The idea was that they basically worshiped brute power and violence, these novels he was talking about. I think this is undeniably the message in most popular American films of the last fifty years, particularly action movies. But there's something somewhat new in today's most popular film franchises or new at least in terms of their extremity, and that is the indestructibility of the hero.

Technically, in order for you to be invested in a cinematic thriller or action movie, the hero has to face some palpable danger. Now, of course, it is always a given that the hero will survive and will triumph in the end. That's always been the case, but the suspense and the drama comes from how he will survive, how he will endure, how he will navigate the risks that he faces within the course of the story. I mean, even if the hero's ability to survive often requires the suspension of disbelief, traditionally, the action hero was exposed to genuine peril. Violence could hurt him.

The fights were dangerous. But today, in the wildly popular superhero genre, this has been almost entirely dispensed with. In today's popular movies, the superhero can get struck and knocked literally miles across the city, and we all know he's gonna be fine. We watch battles between indestructible characters now, knowing full well that none of the blows, none of the explosions, none of the fires, none of the blasts of weird glowing energy beams or what have you, none of these are going to have any serious impact. What there will be, however, is massive collateral damage.

When two titans face off on screen, we know neither of them is going to get hurt, but we know that their fight will level entire city blocks. Buildings will be reduced to rubble. Roads, bridges, cars, trains, buses, will be decimated over the course of the confrontation between superheroes and supervillains, while they themselves will remain more or less unharmed. It goes without saying, of course, that hundreds, if not thousands of people must surely die in the background of all of this. People like everyone in the audience, people who can't fly and don't have superpowers.

And this is precisely why we watch to see the general destruction, the obliteration of everything in proximity to the battle between superhero and supervillain, the destruction and obliteration of our comparatively powerless irrelevant existences. And what's more, the conceit of all this devastation is that it is undertaken for our sakes to save us, the common people. Now if you think about this in terms of its political messaging, it's pretty horrific and also pretty revealing and surprisingly frank. The worship of power is inevitably accompanied by an indifference to, if not contempt for, the powerless or, anyway, for those with less power. And that's us, all of us.

We're not the heroes. We're not even participants. We, the public, the masses, are merely the milieu, the setting and the props that frame the great battle between forces of unimaginable power. As propaganda, superhero movies are tremendously disempowering and self negating for the population and highly useful to the unaccountable powers in society, but also incredibly insightful about the dominant perspectives held by those powers with regards to the population and with regards to themselves. It is noteworthy that by and large, the superheroes in these movies are not agents of the state, but are independent entities that both cooperate with the state and at times defy it, and are often seen as dangerous by the state.

They represent, in other words, private power. And just as action movie heroes have become indestructible superheroes with unparalleled strength in the cinema, so private power today has reached a level of dominance far beyond what has ever existed before. And again, we, the public, the people, are cast in these films only as either spectators or victims whose only function in the plot is to serve as the rationale for the great destructive battle that will wreak havoc on the world in the process of saving it. When the villain is vanquished and the cities lay in ruins, the superheroes fly home. If the dime novels in Orwell's day were fascist, these pop culture messages of modern blockbusters are something far more inhumanly brutal.

The message is clear. The masses do not matter except insofar as they can be used to justify wanton destruction on the pretext of rescuing them. Regular human beings are inadequate, cannot compete, cannot participate, are inferior, and as such, must accept being collateral damage in the conflict between the powerful. The super powerful always know best, and any efforts to impose accountability upon them is viewed as irrational and irritating. This is a very corporate message.

Note that the line from Spider Man, with great power comes great responsibility, is not with great power, there must be great accountability. Whether you're talking about the Avengers or the Justice League or any individual superhero, these characters represent the 1%. And these films promote the worship of their unequaled power and the counterpart of that worship, the disregard for the masses. This should not be ignored because it reveals the true nature of Western non Muslim society, particularly in The United States. Democratic liberal values have never taken root in this culture.

That is itself propaganda. It is a culture that worships power and brute strength. It is not a culture that truly believes in accountability or the consent of the governed. It believes in and admires ruthless rule by force and the unalienable right of the powerful to dictate the way society should be managed. The narratives of superhero movies and most action blockbusters express the morality and world views of feudal lords from the dark ages as much as they do the morality and worldviews of the current elite.

This is not a civilized morality. It is not an enlightened worldview. It is primitive, nihilistic, and brutal. Don't dismiss popular media as unimportant. These are messages that reveal the culture, and what they reveal is the ugly truth about a society that has utterly failed to ever absorb or even truly believe the values that they proclaim.

Just as in the old days in Europe, and indeed, really, since at least the time of Firaun, when people attributed divinity to the king. This is a culture that continues to view the powerful as gods. After the prophet the closest thing that we ever had to a superhero was perhaps Khalid bin Al Walid, the sword of Allah, who never lost a single battle. And removed him from leadership in Syria precisely because he feared that the Muslims would rely upon him for victory and attribute their success to Khalid instead of to Allah. We do not worship power.

We do not believe anyone is unaccountable. We believe and that all men are slaves to the rabbi al Amin. These narratives in Western popular media reflect a disease of the heart and a diseased society. Pay attention to the contradictions in what they proclaim about themselves and what they actually celebrate and promote about themselves because these contradictions reveal who they truly are.