SUPERMAN and Ideology
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between November 5, 2021 and November 17, 2021. It was composed of 1,169 words across 24 tweets.
Lex Luthor could be seen as a social aberration. That said, his actions flow from a worldview that is comfortably in line with mainstream society. He sees himself as empowered by individualism, by his ability to function without dependence on his community.
This is one of the many reasons why Luthor, non-powered though he may be, makes an effective foil for Superman. In this way, as in many others, he and Superman are opposites. Superman sees all of humanity, including himself, as an interdependent community. Luthor rejects this.
This is ideology: a belief system propagated by a ruling class in order to sustain itself. In the case of the U.S., we are all encouraged to see ourselves as individuals, rather than interdependent cogs in a great mechanism. We believe we are responsible only for ourselves.
Furthermore, if we're all individuals--if we're all ultimately out for ourselves--this engenders suspicion towards those who offer us a helping hand without asking anything in return. It also engenders suspicion towards those who expect us to feel responsible for other people.
In the cult of the individual--our core ideology--we ascribe our own successes and the failures of our political rivals to individual choices, but rarely the other way around. We do this to a degree that can only be described as magical thinking. A self-justifying assumption.
The chief benefit of ideology, aside from the handful of people who use it to maintain power, is that it apes the feeling of having done something good without having to do anything at all. There's a satisfaction to ascribing people's struggles to the "wrong" ways that they live.
That feeling, cruel and base and easily stoked, builds our tolerance for the mistreatment of others. It dulls our empathy, our sense of community, our ability to see that the vast majority of us are not so different from one another. It's a drug we get to feel right for taking.
Luthor may be an exceptionally capable human being, but he's just a human being. For his entire life, he's been put at odds with his fellow human beings by his malignant belief system.
(How fortunate he is that Superman sees himself as part of humanity, rather than above it.)
The justifying myth--the part that allows us, or encourages us, to feel good about this--is that anybody can do well in a system that promotes being out for yourself. Anyone can "climb the ladder." Crucially, "anybody can do well" is not the same as "everyone can do well."
If everyone's on a ladder, there must be someone at the bottom. Climbing up just means someone else gets to take your position below. Luthor sees life as a ladder, with his natural destiny at the top. (Everyone else is a nincompoop.) Obviously, Superman doesn't see it that way.
What do we gain by "doing well?" What's on offer? It isn't just money, or everyone would stop as soon as they had as much as they'd ever need. Luthor stands to make a fortune off his new west coast, but if that's all that matters, why not just get involved in a pump 'n dump scam?
Here's the real point of Luthor's scheme: it's a game of Monopoly. You don't quit when you're ahead. It's over when you have everything and everyone else has nothing. As Gore Vidal allegedly said, "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." Having enough is never enough.
What's on offer is a position in the ruling class, and dominance over the underclass. For Luthor, that means owning the west coast--something that nobody else has. (One of the benefits of being in the ruling class is that you get to have lots of big stuff with your name on it.)
Luthor, a creature of ideology, who can't bring himself to say "you couldn't resist the chance to sort of pitch in" without an audible sneer, whose father taught him, among other things, that "people are no damn good." What he can't see is that ideology is a lure, a trap.
The point of ideology isn't be consistent with facts; it's to supersede facts. Evidence is embraced or rejected depending on how well it conforms to the core assumptions of ideology. In this way, ideology is like a conspiracy theory. It skates around the inconvenience of facts.
Luthor pursues his plan, confident that neither the incompetent Otis nor the fairweather Miss Teschmacher can possibly ruin something he's staked so much of his ego on. It's a sunk cost fallacy. It's his life's work; therefore it cannot fail. Ideology has blinded him.
Miss Teschmacher betrays him by acting in a way that his worldview has conditioned him to believe she would never do. If she's out for herself--if she wants to keep that Park Avenue address ("200 feet below"), she would never help a stranger or stick her neck out for her family.
Though he fails, his actions and his beliefs put millions of innocent people in mortal peril. And why should he care? They're only out for themselves; so must he be. Those are the stakes of ideology: we put others at hazard, in a world where we cannot make it by ourselves.
Every hitch in his plan, everything he fails to predict, is because people act in ways that his narrow, cynical worldview cannot account for. This tracks with reality, where times of crisis reaffirm our need for community--our pooling of resources, our tendency to organize.
That's our real human behavior, and it's the Superman in all of us. There are plenty of examples of just how much the stability of our lives depends on the activities of other people, no matter how much our times of comfort nurture the illusion that we can make it on our own.
Ironically, Luthor's failure is the intended outcome of ideology. "Anybody can do well" is not the same as "everyone can do well," and ideology naturally assumes that most of us won't. The ruling class, by design, is small--fewer people to divide the spoils of conquest.
Luthor made his grab for the top rung of the ladder and he missed. He did not join the exclusive club, the realm of people so powerful as to be untouchable. No matter how much of his life and his resources he devoted to his plan. No matter his certainty that he was right.
Most of us will never join the club, though ideology promises us the chance. (It blinds us to the astronomical odds, of course. An inconvenient fact.) The vast majority of us, the underclass, are far more alike than we are different, much closer to disaster than dominance.
By convincing the rest of us that we're all individuals, all out for ourselves, all inherently at odds with one another, all alienated from one another, the ruling class makes us think we need their rule to keep us going--when all we really need is each other.
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Published 3/9/2024
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