"...Not Many Super Anythings Anymore"

This is a little on the fly, but I thought the recent continuation of a conversation on the deeper side of superheroes between myself and Sir J. Austin McKnight had the beginnings of some good thoughts and was appropriate (and fun) to post here.

I will likely follow this up with a more in-depth blog on the subject at a later date...

Austin McKnight wrote There would be real Jokers and Lex Luthors in the world, but most of them suffer from the sin of laziness. No Hitlers recently because people are lazy. I count it a good thing... as long as the heroes aren't suffering from laziness as well. There just aren't many super anything anymore.

Jared Musgrove wrote
I agree with you, but would like to believe if an evil like that ever came about, we'd oppose it. Preferably with capes on, but that's just me 

Seriously though:"There just aren't many super anything anymore."
That's sadly true. No one holds standards of excellence anymore. In anything.

Austin McKnight wrote
Somedays I feel I have excellent standards, but really, no. These guys in movies and the fictional people in books and comic books are not just in our imagination. According to Platonic thought, we can only conceive of what is possible. That means that the heroes and the villains are both possible.

Jared Musgrove wrote
Oh, totally. We've seen them before. Of course, not a Superman or Batman, or Joker or Lex Luthor, but we've seen Hitler and Sadaam. The real world sadly knows little of some of its greatest men, the real heroes.
We latch onto Superman because he's a snapshot of what we'd like to think we'd do if we had the abilities (in the form of powers). We would like to think we'd make a choice to help and protect people from evil...to fight it and vanquish it. It's a very primal instinct and we've been displaying in through story since the beginning of time (Hercules, Odysseus, etc. Superheroes are just our modern mythology) When, in reality, believers have these abilities not in flight or heat vision, but in Christ and by the power of the Spirit. If only more of us really worked on refining our God-given abilities to be more Spirit-driven to the point of being epic.

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Adding to this and keeping with the theme, I read this phrase from the novel, The Last Days of Krypton by Kevin J. Anderson, which focuses on all that led to the planet's destruction:

"Everyone had been forced to be 'average' for too many generations. One cannot constrain an ever-growing thing without consequences. If society inhibited the bell curve too long, radical spikes would appear at either end. Some anomalies took the form of unorthodox geniuses like Jor-El (Superman's Kryptonian father) and Zor-El (Jor-El's brother), while others were heinous criminals who demonstrated their 'genius' through violence and destruction rather than creation. Like the Butcher of Kandor. Like Zod."