Why Does the World Need Superman?

My first article on this site was about Superman.  I wrote an article about Man of Steel, released in 2013. Today, we have a new Superman, 2025.  Superman has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, so I have feelings about this heroic character that has oscillated over the years.  Idealism, morality, right and wrong, and what stuck with me is that he didn't change; the world around him changed, and then forced him into that world.  He arrived here from a destroyed planet circa 1938, Action Comics.  An orphan from a distant world was left to grow and adapt to 'our' ways, no different from any other child, yet he was different; he was powerful, strong, and alien.

Superman would later discover how to control his strength and where he gains his power from the sun.  He would learn loneliness, being bullied, and kindness, but he understood solitude, which helped him focus on the big fights.  Superman became a symbol of how we all ought to be as humans and how we should ideally treat humanity.  He became the outside observer that we should all look up to.

There has been, for many years, this problem with Superman, that he is/was too idealistic, he wants kindness and goodwill.  Most of us have become too cynical for kindness and goodwill, so we criticize Superman for being what we can't.  We stopped believing in him and the way he looks at the world.  He became something, an idea, that we have given up on, for the most part.  His biggest and strongest superpower is that he doesn't want anything from us.  Nothing.  That's the only thing about him that frightens us because we live in a world where people only want something from us, sometimes it feels damn near parasitic.  

Superman, at his core, wants to solve problems, moral problems mostly, but also must face structural problems.  What is good?  What is right?  Superman is human; he suffers from the same moral dilemmas that most of us do.  He suffers and loses, he wins, and he is celebrated, not that he is into affirmation.  He aspires to ask the question, 'what is more?', what more can he be, inspires us to think about, 'what more can we be?'.  That's what Nietzsche, Einstein, Freud and Homer, and so many others wrote about: We are beyond our own lack of imagination.

Reality is the stain we try to avoid, yet it marinates into our consciousness like a villain trying to destroy the (our) world.  Language helps to fight it off, but reality is beyond our own ability to manipulate it; it is here, even if we are not.  Reality doesn't care about us because it's not about us.  Understand, we are travellers, we are guests, we are visitors, yet here we are, perspective is an option, but yet - here we are.

Superman is our ideal, a muscled-up, superpowered version of what 'we' want.  We are not going to get it.  Now we know that, but then Superman helps us believe, he helps us reach up and be 'more than we can be', but it didn't turn out that way.  We now suffer from all his downsides, we are alone, we are feeling like we are in a foreign land, we are feeling like orphans in many cases.  Superman, originally, appeared to do the opposite: you are not alone, you are feeling patriotic, you feel like you belong.

Why does the world need Superman?

Superman first appeared on the cusp of World War 2, being born out of World War 1.  He started in between the World Wars and fought his way through comic books, trying to inspire people to fight, for good and against what was morally wrong.  A hero at that time, none of us could imagine.  Superman has lived on through the decades, a name just as recognizable as Jesus around the world.

Here we are, Superman is in his late 80s, and yet we still need him.  These movies and comic books bounce around what he is and what he could or should mean, but we know, deep down, what Superman is........ It's so simple in psychology, especially Jungian psychology, Superman is what we want to be, and yet we are the - shadow. 

Dante, Sisyphus, and the Übermensch fought through darkness to get to some form of light.  Life is climbing this hill, no matter what happens, the headlights move forward.  Willingly entering the Inferno, pushing endless boulders up the hill, or crossing that bridge and peering into that abyss to see what might be looking back is why we need Superman.

Superman whittles the world down to its basic components. Why be good?  We chose to not be good?  Why be confused about what 'good' you think 'good' is?  Superman shows us through actions what good is.  People should never tell other people that they are 'good'.  Actions collapse words into politics; actions are the only fight against words.  Superman, symbolically, is active in his morality; he shows it.  That is why he will live in our dreams and minds as a force that asks nothing from us, only to look up.