The Secret Behind the Secret Identity

Why do all superheros have secret identities.

Superman is Clark Kent
Batman is Bruce Wayne
Spiderman is Peter Parker
Iron Man is Tony Stark (the identity is no secret here, but the personality behind it is)

Why don't superheros live like normal people with normal names. It is not because that will put their loved ones at risk. A supervillian could potentially pick threaten anyone off the street and use them as bait against the superheros. Then what is it that compels them to hide their true identity.

It is the fact that human beings are more afraid as well as believing of the unknown, than they are of the known. Few examples -

"If you tell people that there is a person sitting high up in the sky who runs their fate and guides all their actions they will believe you, but if you tell them that the paint on the wall is wet, they have to touch it to verify for themselves"

"If you write in front of your house, 'This is my home. Please do not throw garbage in front of it', people will deliberately throw garbage there. However, if you write, 'This is God's house. Please do not throw garbage in front of it', people will do everything possible to keep your doorstep clean"

So if a superhero (or a boss at office or the Central Intelligence Agency, in a more realistic context) were to live like a normal man, people will be able to judge his strength, and will therefore not be in perpetual fear or respect of him. He will loose the element of unknown which is most feared by human beings.

That in my view compels and justifies the deliberate lack of visibility into the life of some people or organizations who have the responsibility of upholding the law or terrorizing the people. In this respect, the superheros and supervillans are the same.

They all have secret identities.

Education Vs Misjudgement

Education does not make us better by making us more knowledgeable. It makes us better by changing the way we process our day to day life. When uneducated, we answer our questions and then think up a reason that leads to them. As we become more educated, we know that we have to establish the reasons before we can reach our answer. That is all that education does....

Psychological Effect of Technology

Just finished reading this article on the effects of internet on the modern day society, especially child psychology. Somehow I feel that the point of discussion here is non-existent. As pointless as saying "Books will make you dumber. All information should be retained in memory and books are just working against that requirement." Technology has nothing to do with human intellect. Sure there are people who goof around all day on the internet looking at cute kittens, but such people in the Victorian era would still have sat down under a tree by the river and slept all day.Watching cute kittens, by the way, can be constructive in its own way.


Here is how innovation worked 70 years back:


1. Newton sat under a tree and a apple fell on his head.
2. He asked himself the fateful question - "Why didn't the apple just fly away?"
3. He went home and did some (old fashioned) research by asking physicists, reading books and collecting as much knowledge as he could, about the strange phenomenon.
4. When he didn't find his answer he sat down and theorized his own.
5. Then he ran that by the great minds of that time and verified his findings by being able to explain a lot of other things (like Earth's rotation around Sun etc.) based on his theory.
6. He published a paper with his findings
7. Rest is history.


And now, what part of this whole process was something that Newton did, and  others before him did not?? Some will say it is Step 2, asking the question. But I beg to differ. The fact is we all ask ourselves a lot of questions, and I am sure people at that time also did. But very few persist in their quest to find the answer. So in my view, the steps 3 and 4 are what made Newton a great man.


Now, here is how the innovation would have worked if Newton was born today, and the Laws of Gravitation were still unknown:


1. Newton sat under a tree and a apple fell on his head.
2. He asked himself the fateful question - "Why didn't the apple just fly away?"
3. He went home and did some Googling, and posted the question on various forums.
4. When he didn't find his answer he sat down and theorized his own.
5. Then he ran that by the great minds of today at the Consortium of Physics, IEEE etc.
6. He published a paper with his findings (which was also available on the Internet for the world to read)
7. Rest is history.

Now, the point here is that Internet is just a tool of doing things differently than they were done before. The basic process is still the same. Also, some people blame the apparent dumbness of today's kids to the social scenario, educational system etc etc. But they forget that, except for the advent of technology in the modern world, little else has changed. Otherwise Socrates would not have had to say this hundreds of years back:

"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

(The credit to the above quote goes to Charolastra)

So the bottom-line is that Internet and Technology in general defines our way of living today, but that is what it has been doing ever since cavemen created fire. To blame the lack of intellect on anything including technology is wrong, because there is no lack of intellect. Today, there are just more parents and teachers who (quite unreasonably) want their children to be Einsteins. But every child is not Einstein, and never was.