[https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html]

TED CHIANG: I understand the appeal of superhero stories, but I think they are problematic on a couple of levels. One is that they are fundamentally anti-egalitarian because they are always about this class of people who stand above everyone else. They have special powers. And even if they have special responsibilities, they are special. They are different. So that anti-egalitarianism, I think, yeah, that is definitely an issue.

But another aspect in which they can be problematic is, how is it that these special individuals are using their power? Because one of the things that I’m always interested in, when thinking about stories, is, is a story about reinforcing the status quo, or is it about overturning the status quo? And most of the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo. Superheroes, they supposedly stand for justice. They further the cause of justice. But they always stick to your very limited idea of what constitutes a crime, basically the government idea of what constitutes a crime.

Superheroes pretty much never do anything about injustices perpetrated by the state. And in the developed world, certainly, you can, I think, make a good case that injustices committed by the state are far more serious than those caused by crime, by conventional criminality. The existing status quo involves things like vast wealth inequality and systemic racism and police brutality. And if you are really committed to justice, those are probably not things that you want to reinforce. Those are not things you want to preserve.

But that’s what superheroes always do. They’re always trying to keep things the way they are. And superheroes stories, they like to sort of present the world as being under a constant threat of attack. If they weren’t there, the world would fall into chaos. And this is actually kind of the same tactic used by TV shows like “24.” It’s a way to sort of implicitly justify the use of violence against anyone that we label a threat to the existing order. And it makes people defer to authority.

This is not like, I think, intrinsic to the idea of superheroes in and of itself. Anti-egalitarianism, that probably is intrinsic to the idea of superheroes. But the idea of reinforcing the status quo, that is not. You could tell superhero stories where superheroes are constantly fighting the power. They’re constantly tearing down the status quo. But we very rarely see that.