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The Superhero Handbook
A Do-Gooder's Guide to Saving the Planet A Book in Progress by Glenn Campbell Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Production Notes This is a DRAFT document, and everything here is subject to editing. Your feedback is encouraged! FamilyCourtGuy<at>gmail.com |
Think about your standard superheroes. Superman has extraordinary strength, the ability to fly through the air, x-ray vision, super hearing, etc. Spiderman can shoot threads from his wrists and swing through the city on them. Batman, while having an ordinary human body, owns a lot of nifty gadgets—funded by Bruce Wayne's substantial wealth—that extend his physical and intellectual range. The Incredible Hunk gets big and green whenever provoked; Wonder Woman flies an invisible jet, and The Shadow has the ability to cloud the minds of men (like some women I know).
Obviously, superpowers differ with the individual, but what do all of these abilities have in common? They are unusual assets, not possessed by the average citizen, that give the bearer extended control over the world.
Does a superpower have to be something exotic and supernatural? No, it can be any ordinary human asset, like money or an intellectual skill, that most people don't have. Do you have to wear a cape to be a superhero? No, most of us get by in street clothes and wouldn't be recognized as superheroes from our appearance. Does having a superpower naturally lead to an impulse to save the world? No, most people with superpowers hardly use them at all except for their own benefit.
A superpower is any ability or resource beyond that of the average member of ones community. In this book, we will focus on the most obvious super powers, like super strength, super speed, flying through the air without hardware, invisibility, super hearing and x-ray vision. Those aren't the only powers available, however. In fact, nearly everyone has a super power of some kind, if they choose to recognize it.
A superpower is relative to the society in which you live. Having the power to fly through the air is unremarkable if everyone else in your community can also do it. The power is only a "super" if it is rare and you are one of the few people to possess it. In this sense, a super power can be almost any asset or skill that you have and others don't.
Having a lot of money can be a super power, as can be fame, political power or any specialized technical ability. If you have access to information that other people don't have, that can be a superpower, too. By distributing information in a certain way, you can possibly save as many lives as any flying hero in a cape — or cause as much damage as a super villain.
For example, if your are a meteorologist and have some special knowledge of where a hurricane will hit, you have the power to save lives equivalent to any superhero's. They don't write comic books about super meteorologists, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. In a sense, all meteorologists are "super," because they are privy to special knowledge that the general public doesn't comprehend.
Meteorologists must deal with the same essential problem of superheroism that any comic book hero must face, namely: How do you distribute your limited resources so that the world is improved in the long run and not damaged?
To the rest of us, the skills of meteorology are mostly indecipherable. Practitioners of this craft seem to us like high priests of some mystical religion. They study wind patterns, pressure readings and satellite images and come back to us with a prediction: Tomorrow will be sunny. To most of us, it is no different than a shaman studying the entrails of dead animals. All we really understand is the prediction, not the manner it was arrived at.
From the meteorologist's point of view, however, he doesn't believe he has any super skills. To him, the prediction is perfectly obvious from the data in front of him. He doesn't see himself as a god or a shaman, even if that is the way the rest of the world perceives him.
The most difficult problems of superheroism come at the junction between the superhero's resource-rich world and the relatively resource-poor world of the average citizen. The meteorologist, for example, has access to plenty of data and can afford to see the weather as a complex and subtle phenomenon. He can't dump all this data on the general public, however, because they wouldn't be able to process it. All the people want to know is, "Will tomorrow be nice?" Answering this question requires an awkward translation process between the meteorologist and the public where a lot of subtleties can be lost and there is plenty of room for misunderstanding.
It is in the nature of superhero work that the hero and his clientele will never truly understand each other. The client will often overestimate the abilities of the hero, while the hero will misjudge his effect on the client. Both can lead to disastrous results.
If you are a meteorologist, and you have reasonable information that a hurricane is coming, you have to be very careful how you release this information. You know that your prediction is only a probability not a hard fact, but the public wants certainties. If you predict landfall in the vicinity of Miami but the hurricane actually comes ashore at Fort Lauderdale, the public is going to curse you, even if Fort Lauderdale was within the margin of error of your original prediction.
Interacting with the public is necessary—otherwise meteorology would have no purpose—but it is also fraught with danger, because the public will never grasp the subtleties of your field. You want people to take action, but you don't want them to panic, because the panic could cause more damage than the hurricane itself. You may try explain how the weather works, but the public will never get it, because they haven't made the same investment in the field that you have. Like it or not, you must assume the role of a reluctant and deliberately distant god. You can dispense critical information, but not too much. You can intervene, but as lightly as possible, so as not to interfere in the natural ecology of things.
A superpower can be as simple as having traveled down the same perilous road that someone else is now heading down. Through your own experience, you know where the dangers lie and how to deal with them, and by conveying your experience to the new traveller, you might possibly protect them from the same perils you faced. You may not be swooping down from the sky to rescue someone, but by providing the right information at the right time you could give them the means to rescue themselves.
But by telling someone what lies ahead you are not always doing them a favor. Let's say you give them explicit instructions on where to go and what to do, and they follow your advice. If the environment changes and becomes different from what you experienced, they may continue to follow your directions rather than relying on their own observations. This could lead them into worse trouble than if you never advised them at all.
We tend to think of superpowers as being caused by cosmic rays, atomic fallout or secret government experiments. In the classic superhero tradition, a mild-mannered citizen gains his powers almost instantly in a freak accident in a government lab. In reality, most superpowers are acquired in such an ordinary and gradual way that most people don't know that they have them — or a least choose not to see them as extraordinary. This is a convenient blindness, because it shields them from the difficult decisions and dilemmas of superheroism.
All superpowers, whether supernatural or not, involve the same problems of intervention. If you have the power to save someone, are you obligated do it? How do you avoid creating dependencies? If you try to save someone and fail, who is going to be held responsible? If two people need to be saved at the same time, how do you choose? If someone needs to be saved, how much of yourself should you give up to do it?
If you win $100 million in a lottery, then you have gained a superpower. That money, thoughtfully applied, could make a significant impact on the world. You could, figuratively speaking, swoop down from the sky and save the lives of hundreds of people who lack food, medical care or other things that money can buy. Having gained this special gift, you could become a superhero — but only if you recognize your special ability and make a conscious decision to use it for Good.
But what do most people do when they win the lottery? They shout, "Yipee!" and start spending the money on frivolous indulgences for themselves and their immediate acquaintances. With greater resources comes greater responsibility, but most lottery winners don't grasp this concept until they have already blown their winnings. They may give away money to friends, relatives and recognized charities, but they tend to do it indiscriminately, without any real analysis of the long-term consequences. These people are not superheroes in spite of their super power and apparent generosity, and the thrill of their prize is usually short-lived. In the end, the sudden asset doesn't usually make them any happier than they were before, and it certainly doesn't benefit mankind.
We all have superpowers, but few of us are willing to acknowledge and apply them. When we have more resources than we need, we tend to squander them on frivolous entertainment and superficial luxuries that don't help anyone else and don't really improve our own lives either. Gifted with super strength or x-ray vision or monetary wealth, we tend to use these skills only to benefit ourselves or to amass even greater resources without any meaningful purpose.
Being a true superhero involves not just having a superpower but recognizing it as a "trust," not a "possession." It may be common to have an unusual asset, but you elevate yourself to a higher level when you understand that it is not your superpower. A true superhero recognizes that he or she is merely a custodian of the power — a humble caretaker who is responsible for managing the gift and putting it to good use for the benefit of their community.
If your extraordinary talents and resources are directed only toward narcissistic goals, then your heroism is merely latent, not actual. Being a superhero requires not just special skills but a conscious willingness to use them for the benefit of others. To build any kind of heroic legacy, you have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone and into the difficult and uncertain world of intervention.
Continued in Chapter 5
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