I’ve always been fascinated with heroic stories – especially superheroic ones. When the trend towards superhero TV shows and films started, I saw them all – well all the ones that were inspiring and not downers. And I’ve wondered what superpower I would pick if I could have one, and come up with a lot of answers, although ironically not the one I actually wound up with.
I guess I’ve always felt a desire for power. Not mere political power, or financial power – true power, with which one could never be unjustly punished, and with which one could punish those who escaped their just deserts. To protect the innocent and the righteous from the wicked and the predatory.
But not just that. All through my life I’ve seen time and time again people making idiotic decisions, or barely even trying at all. These people cause themselves and everyone around them to suffer from their poor decision making, especially en masse, when the sad truth is both they and their accidental victims deserve to find happiness and well-being too – if only someone could and would make them do things right.
That’s what true power is – the ability to make sure that things are done right, no matter who doesn’t want to.
Not having true power, and being forced to endure witnessing those with power fail to use it properly for the benefit of all, that was one of my greatest torments. Watching humanity’s seemingly unstoppable march of stupidity, all the while knowing precisely what ought to be done. It was unbearable, like watching a 50 vehicle pile-up in slomo, body parts flying, and knowing that it could have been prevented if only people weren’t such knobs. And every day brought a new disaster, with a new toll in human suffering and death.
It was torture, to have the answers, but no way to put those answers into action. So instead I had a front row seat to the endless cycle of human self-sabotage and misery.
So I coped by inventing fictional powers that could help me fix it, and imagining how I would go about doing that. Go about addressing climate change, regardless of climate deniers. Go about bringing fairness back into economics, forcing the 1% to give much more back to the hard-working needy. Go about decriminalizing (though still regulating) all behavior between consenting adults – LGBT, drugs, sex-work, polyamory and more. Go about putting corporations and conglomerates on a short leash, so that their profits would always come second to the well-being of humans. And so much more.
I think at the center of my torment lay my empathy. After all, at the heart of most misanthropes you will find someone let down by humanity one too many times, someone that needed humanity to be better. Reality was brutal enough without adding humanity’s boundless capacity for thoughtless choices and casual cruelty. Knowing what humanity could be, the choices it actually made tortured me.
I’ve always been a realist, a rationalist, and a pragmatist – but I wasn’t born that way. I was born with moderately high intelligence and too much compassion for my own good. What catalyzed my intellect was the crucible of my parents’ abuse.
Growing up, my family was always poor and financially struggling. Not food-stamp poor, but not far from it either. My dad was always under a lot of pressure, and he didn’t start out a fan of mine to begin with. And as I said, I was smart, smart enough to know when things weren’t fair – and I was neither OK nor quiet about it.
So I got beaten down. And next time, I would stand up again – and get beaten down again. I couldn’t just pretend that two plus two was five, pretend that everything was fine – so I kept standing up, and kept getting beaten down.
People deal with such things in different ways. I dealt with it by becoming mentally independent at a young age, cultivating and owning my defiance as my own victory – for so long as I would not be broken, I could not be defeated, only bludgeoned.
But being all alone like that, relying on no one else for one’s sense of right and wrong and truth – that’s a lot of responsibility to take on as a child to get things right – and getting things right was always important to me – compassion and empathy demanded that if I was going to stick to my guns, I had to be right about what I was standing for.
So I had to figure out for myself the best way to be right the most often. And I did.
Which only left me lacking a way to do something about all the people who were far from right.
And so I fantasized about superpowers. Until I actually got one.