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"Syndrome" Syndrome: or the Fallacy of "Special"
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<blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4992907" data-attributes="member: 40961"><p>I think the biggest problem with trying to derive political messages (or make political messages) from superhero stories is that there aren't any real life superheroes. The </p><p>unfairness that we feel when Dash wants to win races by just blitzing everyone else with special magical powers that he was born with and never worked for really hasn't got a real world equivalent. </p><p></p><p>Even someone like Michael Phelps got there by a combination of natural talent, body type, and insanely hard work over a long period of time. And even then, he doesn't exceed other real life athletes as far as the fictional Dash does. So our normal, every day life assumptions about fairness and who "deserves" victory are built around a set of assumptions that are violated by the superhero genre.</p><p></p><p>Basically, superhero stories tend to assume that some people are just plain born <em>better</em> than others (or instead of born, radiated, gifted, mutated, etc).</p><p></p><p>And in contrast, in real life, that assumption has existed in a lot of different contexts and a lot of different historical places, and has, in every case been false, and in many cases hideously evil.</p><p></p><p>So... yeah. Not sure you can draw too much from superhero comic morality, since it assumes an entirely different human experience than the one we actually have. I mean, we tend to think that its morally wrong to believe that, I dunno, people with blue eyes have a natural intellectual superiority to people with brown eyes. We think that this is morally wrong because its not true, and false beliefs like this have led to a lot of pain over the years. But if we lived in a fictional universe where having blue eyes meant that you'd be born as a comic book level supergenius, well, we'd need different morality, wouldn't we? But we're not in that universe, so imagining how we'd feel about blue eyed supergeniuses if they existed doesn't tell us a lot about how we should think about real life problems.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Cadfan, post: 4992907, member: 40961"] I think the biggest problem with trying to derive political messages (or make political messages) from superhero stories is that there aren't any real life superheroes. The unfairness that we feel when Dash wants to win races by just blitzing everyone else with special magical powers that he was born with and never worked for really hasn't got a real world equivalent. Even someone like Michael Phelps got there by a combination of natural talent, body type, and insanely hard work over a long period of time. And even then, he doesn't exceed other real life athletes as far as the fictional Dash does. So our normal, every day life assumptions about fairness and who "deserves" victory are built around a set of assumptions that are violated by the superhero genre. Basically, superhero stories tend to assume that some people are just plain born [I]better[/I] than others (or instead of born, radiated, gifted, mutated, etc). And in contrast, in real life, that assumption has existed in a lot of different contexts and a lot of different historical places, and has, in every case been false, and in many cases hideously evil. So... yeah. Not sure you can draw too much from superhero comic morality, since it assumes an entirely different human experience than the one we actually have. I mean, we tend to think that its morally wrong to believe that, I dunno, people with blue eyes have a natural intellectual superiority to people with brown eyes. We think that this is morally wrong because its not true, and false beliefs like this have led to a lot of pain over the years. But if we lived in a fictional universe where having blue eyes meant that you'd be born as a comic book level supergenius, well, we'd need different morality, wouldn't we? But we're not in that universe, so imagining how we'd feel about blue eyed supergeniuses if they existed doesn't tell us a lot about how we should think about real life problems. [/QUOTE]
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