Why the world doesn’t need Superman

There’s a phrase that echoes like a postmodern gospel through the corridors of those who observe pop culture with a critical and disenchanted eye: “The world doesn’t need a savior.” Lois Lane says it in the film Superman Returns, but beyond the narrative context, that sentence holds the force of heresy. Because in the heart of the West – whether Christian, secular, agnostic, or spiritually confused, the idea of a Savior remains the preferred sedative for human anguish. Whether it’s called God, Superman, or Elon Musk, modern man continues to search for someone to whom he can delegate the unbearable burden of freedom.

It’s no coincidence that Superman, since his first appearance in 1938, has been read by many as a messianic figure. He comes from a destroyed world, is sent to Earth by his father Jor-El, a name more biblical than many Old Testament prophets, and grows up among men, hidden, until he reveals his true nature to save them. He flies, performs miracles, is invincible, and never lies. He’s a god with a lowercase “g,” born in an America in economic crisis, but ultimately the child of the same longing for meaning that has given birth to religions for millennia.

The myth of the savior: why humanity must grow up

But today, right now, in this hyperconnected century, infected with information and poor in wisdom, we must ask ourselves an urgent question: what if the myth of the Savior is our curse? What if it’s the perfect excuse to remain eternal adolescents, unable to bear the weight of our own choices, our own mistakes, our own future? The world doesn’t need Superman. It needs humanity to finally grow up.

Believing in Superman, or in God, or in any of their contemporary surrogates – namely Science, the Market, or Artificial Intelligence, is an act of abdication. It’s not faith; it’s convenience dressed up as hope. It means saying: “It won’t be up to me to solve the climate crisis, the wars, the inequalities. Someone, something, will come – eventually.” It’s the illusion of someone watching a disaster and waiting for a red cape to fix everything. It’s the new opium for a people who consider themselves rational, but remain tied to mysticism at heart.

And yet history teaches us that no hero, no redeemer, has ever truly changed the course of the world without millions of people, without powers, without glory, choosing to change themselves. There was no Superman who stopped Hitler: there were soldiers, mothers, workers, intellectuals, and yes, heroes too, but human, fragile, mortal ones. There will be no god to save us from environmental extinction: there will be us, or nothing.

Only without Superman can we become truly human

The problem isn’t Superman himself. It’s the idea that simply wishing for him is enough to fix everything. It’s the eternal temptation of moral childhood: waiting for a cosmic parent to come and end our suffering. But the truth is: no one is coming. And that is wonderful news. Because only in the absence of gods can man finally walk upright. Only without Superman can we become super humans – not in the fascist, aberrant sense of the term, but in Nietzsche’s sense: beings capable of shaping their own destiny, without having to answer to any master, celestial or earthly.

The myth of Superman also speaks to a deep nostalgia for order. For a world where good and evil are clearly divided, where there is always someone who knows what the right thing to do is. But the real world is gray, complex, full of contradictions. And for that very reason, it needs critical thinking, not miracles. It needs citizens, not saints. It needs shared responsibility, not shining authorities.

True political, ethical, and even spiritual maturity lies in accepting that we are alone, and precisely for that reason, we must stand together. That no one will save us, and precisely for that reason, we must save ourselves. That salvation, if it has a face, is the face of human cooperation, of justice built day by day, of dignity not given, but earned.

Stop waiting for superman: choosing action over hope in a burning world

Whoever today invokes Superman is, in the end, like the man who prays to God when the house is on fire instead of grabbing the fire extinguisher. It’s a form of secular superstition that holds us back from becoming what we could be. And so, perhaps, the most revolutionary act we can commit is to stop waiting. Dismantle the altar, turn off the signal in the sky, look at ourselves in the mirror, and say, without fear: we don’t need Superman. We need ourselves. To accept risk, failure, the fall. To walk, finally, on our own feet.

Maybe, in the end, that is true evolution: not to earn the ability to fly, but to remain well planted on Earth and make it a better place to live into.