#i assumed they were like me. catholic leftists who believed in actually helping people. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dicecast · 5 years

Text

The Problem with Thanos Part 2

So the first video is basically about what is actually wrong with Thanos and by extension, Malthusian theory. Today I want to pivot to something a bit more complicated, Thanos as a character and why he is a less good character because he isn’t a racist.

I’ve said before that Thanos is a good character and I think that is basically true but I want to clarify. Thanos is a good character for you know…Superhero movies, where most of the characters at best are a list of consistent traits with a consistent voice and maybe one or two issues that define them . Thanos’s motivations make sense (they are morally and intellectually wrong but it makes sense), he has a general personality template, and he has more complexity than most marvel villains. But there is a larger issue with his attatchment to Malthusian economics, namely that it doesn’t make any sense he’d be so attracted to it.

Let me jump back for a moment here. See, in real life, the Malthusian notions of population control and necessary brutality for the sake of preserving the world’s resources is an ideology that comes with a lot of baggage attached. From the start, Malthusians aren’t just saying we need mass purges to keep population in check, it always comes with a larger ideological view point about which people should be purged. Malthusianism in real life was directed at the Irish, Catholics, and the poor, and theories influenced by Malthus would be directed at African Americans, Slavs, and Jews, and today it tends to be used in the context of India, China, and Africans. While it would be a simplification to say that the Nazi concept of “Useless Mouths” is purely Malthusian, the ideas are linked. Eugenics, Social Darwinism, Imperialism, and Scrooge esc classicism have always been associated with Malthusian though, and that is why this doctrine is still around despite being debunked in the 19th century. Its less a factual ideology as much as a world view, one obsessed with “us vs. them” mentalities and beliefs in “Nature is a warzone” despite the fact that this is not how society works.

Now in theory you could have a debate about Malthusian population control without dipping into the ideologies always associated with it, but in real life…yeah good luck with that. Malthusian economics are like IQ, or Social Darwinism its some people get into to justify their existing racist prejudice, not an ideology that leads them to racism. That is why it always falls apart so easily when you apply real science to it, because it isn’t just a false scientific theory, its using scientific jargon to justify the same old prejudice.

But Thanos is that, he is a Malthusian without any of the baggage, he isn’t racist, classist, religiously intolerant, or a warmonger. Thanks to the power of the plot, his population control method is actually unbiased, unlike real life Malthusians he doesn’t target a specific group as deserving extermination. When Thomas Malthus spoke of necessary population control he wasn’t referring to his own group of middle class Englishmen, he meant the poor, the Irish, and the Catholic. Thanos is truly “Unbias” in this view of extermination, which is equally stupid but lacks the bigotry that comes with Malthusian theory.

Now let’s pretend Marvel actually understood the themes of their own movie and they genuinely wanted to talk about this world view, it is understandable they would want to desperate the idea from the baggage surrounding it, otherwise it is too easy to dismiss it. So while in real life Malthusianism is linked to a bunch of other horrific ideologies, for the purpose of fiction it might be worth debating it on its own merits rather than as part of something else. It’s not much of a debate because its objectively wrong, but I get the idea. Try to argue with the theory on its own terms rather than what it is associated with.

Here is the problem, I’m not sure if it is actually a good thing to separate these ideologies. Cause Malthusianism literally doesn’t make sense if it isn’t linked to a larger world view, and more importantly Thanos doesn’t make sense. What I meant by this is that Malthusianism is basically a rational that bigots come to in order to justify their existing bigots. You embrace Malthus if you already regard the Irish as subhuman, and you need a justification killing 1.5 million of them. Or if you already don’t want to pay taxes for social programs that help the poor, or if you already don’t want to send aid overseas or sell weapons to war zones. It’s not a true ideology so much as it’s a way to make standard selfish bigotry seem more reasonable and palatable. You don’t become a Malthusian because of the strengths of its argument, you become a Malthusian because you already wanted to dehumanize large groups of people and this is a method lets you not come to terms with your own actions. And this is why Malthusians aren’t convinced by evidence, cause its less a scientific theory so much has a psychological defense mechanism.

And that is the problem, Thanos isn’t a bigot, so his attachment to Malthus doesn’t make any sense. There is no reason why Thanos wouldn’t listen to anybody who suggests to him that “Hey this isn’t how like…anything works” or do some damn research on the subject. Which means that Marvel is either

Positing Malthusian theory is correct in the universe of Marvel which is basically saying “In this world, Eugenics is real, but we should do the right thing anyways

Thanos is actually a really dumb guy who fell for the pseudo science and never checked his assumptions. Which you know...isn’t impossible, but that isn’t how he is presented in the film, instead he is shown as a thoughtful if cruel man. If his main flaw is not his indifference but instead his stupidity, then the movie did a very bad job of conveying that

Now this entire time I’ve been giving Marvel the benefit of the doubt and assuming they were doing this on purpose in order to fight back against Malthusian economics, but lets be honest, they don’t deserve that much credit. Which goes back to the earlier post, which is that they keep mistaking Malthusian for Utilitarianism. So it is again presenting killing half the population as “Practical but evil’ vs. the protagonists “Moral but inefficient” but as I mentioned before, this simply isn’t the case. Malthusian theory of population isn’t just immoral, its actively incorrect. But that isn’t how the conflict is framed, when Thanos and Dr. Strange argue, Strange is like “This is wrong because Trillions will die” while what he, a scientist, should be saying is “This is wrong because....that would not fix the problem like...at all”. Because again, Thomas Malthus ideas were debunked in the mid 19th century, the only reason why they continue to be relevant today is that they provide a handy justification for racist practices, and as Thanos is not a racist, it doesn’t make sense that he would believe this.

This also leads to another uncomfortable bit, in his discussion with Dr. Strange, Thanos says ‘Titan was like most planets, too many mouths, not enough to go around. When we faced extinction I offered a solution” That is actually quite similar to the “Useless Mouths” rhetoric used in post WWI Germany. Historical context. During WWI, Britain placed German under a blockade which basically put the whole country under siege. Since Germany’s best chance of winning the war was a defensive conflict, slowly giving ground as the allies lost millions and hoping that the ally states would collapse, the steady lack of resources due to this blockade was devestating to the German War effort. While France and Britain could endlessly resupply thanks to their colonies and the Americas, Germany steadily ran out of oil, iron, lead, and food, and the civilian population of Germany, largely unexposed directly to the war, slowly starved, particularly in the “Turnip Winter” of 1916. While there was still food, most of it went to the army, leaving the civilians with nothing. About 763,000 German civilians*, the vast majority of German Civilian deaths during WWI, were due to the famine rather than Allied Weapons. This is not counting those who died of the Spanish Flue epidemic, and an additional 100,000 civilians who died during the negotiation period. This blockade would eventually lead to the fall of the Kaiserreich, as the civilian government eventually overthrew the Kaiser and negotiated the surrender of Germany.

Hitler, a soldier in the trenches and thus not starving, was among many of the German army who felt the civilians had betrayed them, leading to the “Stabbed in the Back” myth. One of the big right wing talking points after WWI was that “we could have won the war, if only we had killed all useless mouths, or “useless eaters”, Lebensunweertes Leben. Specifically the disabled, though this theory would also be applied to a lesser extent to Jews, Roma, Homosexuals, Slavs, and leftists. The term used was basically “Life unworthy of life” and the idea was that the weak Kaiser government should have killed all the ‘worthless” people so that Germany could have won the war, and Hitler’s government used this to justify their own extermination of the mentally ill, the idea was faced with starvation, Germany should have made the “difficult choice” to kill the weak for the strong to survive.

(I hate this fucking story.)

Now obviously this world view is immoral but its also....wrong. The fact is, even if Germany had killed all of the disabled, they would have lost the war anyways, its not like the disabled were using up oil and bullets that would have otherwise gone to the front, nor would it have fixed Germany’s manpower shortage or prevented the US from entering the war. The conspiracy, like most conspiracy theories, came about because German soldiers didn’t want to face an uncomfortable truth. That they had suffered, sacrificed, and fought heroically in a war they never had much chance of winning and all of their pain was in vain. The Useless Eater’s theory was just wrong, it was actively incorrect.

Now how does that relate to Thanos? See I am not calling Thanos a Nazi, unlike Hitler or Malthus, Thanos isn’t targeting any one group, he isn’t saying “We need to kill the Irish, Catholics, Jews or disabled to survive” he is applying that same sort of Life Boat morality in a way real life advocates of it never do, because he is including his own empire and family within the category of “those who can be disposed of” Thanos is looking at a whole vein of right wing thinking which has always existed as a cover for their real policies and taking it at face value and applying it to its own logical extreme, and there could be value in a character like that but...why is Thanos like this? Why is he mindlessly accepting stupid theories he really should be smart enough to just dismiss this nonsense.

And that lead to my larger issue with Infinity Wars, that I don’t think Disney realizes that Malthus was just morally wrong, but was factually wrong. The conflict is presented as if Thanos’ ideas have merit, and so Thanos is presented as a smart guy who lacks empathy, while the actual problem is that he is incorrect. And it fits the sort of “Status Que” feel of the MCU, where the Super Heroes are mostly preventing a worse future rather than building their own (Black Panther is the exception to this)

(cough)

*That number is actually really disputed, there are some that put the number as low as 300,000 so don’t take that as the final word. I tend to assume higher numbers because I don’t want to underscore the death of civilians, but this is not uncontested.

1 note · View note