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Illuminati and psychohistory - primer
So I've been avoiding ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
scans_daily. Apparently it's been declared Irondickery Week.
Yeah. So many winners in that comm.
Anywho. I’ve been reading mainstream comics again for about a year now. I gave them up yeeears ago because they just weren’t doing anything that interested me, but some of Marvel’s recent crossover events really grabbed my attention. In particular, Civil War, and everything it’s done to change the landscape of the shared Marvel universe, drew me in. One of the interesting things to come out of the Civil War arc has been a new social science developed by Reed Richards. These scans are from Fantastic Four #542. The story takes place during Civil War.
For those of you familiar with Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four films, a quick run-down. Reed is, according to Marvel editorial, the most intelligent and widely scientifically knowledgeable character in the Marvel Universe. He's a brilliant physicist, biologist, mathematician, engineer and surgeon. He's like Batman. But with more science and fewer bones. In Fantastic Four #542 however, Reed does something he's never done before: invents a whole new branch of science.
Psychohistory, according to Reed Richards, combines statistics, Marvel!mathematics, social science and history, in order to predict social trends an the scale of whole populations or countries. So he could have used psychohistory to predict declining birth rates in the first world, but not that Jane Doe decided to go childfree.
In the context of the story, psychohistory was introduced in part because the writers wanted a greater justification for his position during Marvel's Civil War event but more importantly, I think they wanted to take the character in a direction more in line with the Illuminati mini. With, I suppose, the idea of the Illuminati, who are sort of the lynchpins in Marvel's current drive to do something different with the genre.
Marvel’s Civil War was a fight between various heroes over the Superhuman Registration Act, which as the name suggests requires superhumans to register with the government. Reed took the position that the act was in the greater good and was in fact the best choice out of a million or so other options that he considered. It would, he argued, lead to the best possible outcome (in the heated circumstances which lead up to and continued during the war), for the largest number of people. How did he know this? Psychohistory of course.
Psychohistory isn't just another kooky Richards invention, like !Unstable!Molecules!, it's his greatest achievement. He created the field, is the only practitioner, and the only one capable of understanding its full implications. It gives him a new power to get what he's always wanted: a better world through science. And not only that, it gives him authority over people, over society - Reed Richards, notoriously out of touch with the people side of things, has reduced humanity to a series of extremely complicated equations. Of course, he's the only one who understands the numbers, but the point is that Reed has made an algorithm out of human history, and made the future calculable and accessible in a way it previously hasn't been. He can now literally build the future of human society.
The Illuminati mini and the Civil War show that he's absolutely ready, even eager to build the future, and that he has a definite vision for it. A supremely logical future, calculated to be the best of all possible worlds that he and his colleagues will build. At the end of CW Tony Stark, another member of the Illuminati, says that right after the precipitating incident of the war, he, Reed and Hank Pym (creator of myriad cracky inventions) got together and brainstormed like, fifty steps they could immediately take in order to make that glorious future a reality. And once Tony had the political and legal power, they went for it. Some of their strategies for a better future were downright terrifying - they played around with cloning and illegal extra-dimensional prisons - but we're told that it's ok, the numbers back them up. Everything they do, no matter how despicable, is for that glorious future.
(Of course there are many instances within the books of characters questioning this, but since they're not relevant I'm going to ignore them for now. *g*)
It's a supremely technocratic and oligarchic argument we're being treated to. Psychohistory is by nature a technocratic science - with it, Reed is explicitly seeking to design the future. He's using the technology of psychohistory to shape human interaction, not simply learn about or describe it. And because Reed is the only one capable of using that technology, he maintains an immense advantage, an immense level of power over others that he shares with a trusted few, who have strengths that he doesn't. He's willing to share his new power, but only with those worthy of it.
Reed's development of psychohistory is inextricable from the Illuminati, because in many ways, it's the entire point of the group. Its existence is predicated on the notion that powerful men can and should work to consciously affect the direction of society. That they have the right to decide what that direction will be because they are the best and most qualified judges, by dint of their power and intellect.
The Illuminati was formed after Earth was caught in the middle of an intergalactic war. Tony Stark (AKA Iron Man and essentially the human embodiment of the military-industrial complex.) brought together Reed, Charles Xavier (the strongest telepath in the world and leader of the most powerful faction of mutants), Dr. Strange (the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth), Namor (the ruler of Atlantis and basically of the oceans in general), and Blackbolt (whose sonic power can rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime, and who rules a moon kingdom of superpowered beings) to form the Illuminati. These men, who wield tremendous power (politically and well, physically) decided to form a secret society which would take care of ‘problems’ that governments and ordinary heroes could not.
Psychohistory is Reed’s contribution to the larger Illuminati project of engineering a better future. Tony has his directorship of SHIELD. Xavier has, really everything he's developed in his career - (his students, Cerebro/Cerebra and his his recent bent towards Machiavellian social manipulation. (The more that I think about it, the more clever I think are the choices for the Illuminati group. Tony, Reed and Xavier are the most Illuminati of the Illuminati and the others are there in order to bolster their power, or even to keep an eye on them.)
Tangentially interesting is that there is an actual discipline called psychohistory which is concerned with the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. This field of study is considered by some to have significant differences from the mainstream fields of history and psychology. Reading the Wiki - it's all very Freudian.
And for more on Asimov's psycohistory: The basis of psychohistory is the idea that, while the actions of a particular individual could not be foreseen, the laws of statistics could be applied to large groups of people and used to predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy - known in physics as the Kinetic Theory. Asimov applied this concept to the population of the fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered in the quadrillions. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two postulates:
* That the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large
* They should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.
Knowing that psychohistory in the Fantastic Four is based on Asimov's, the second point is particularly interesting - Reed maintains the ignorance of those around him throughout the war. I wonder if his use of psychohistory will become common knowledge now that the the general public has become aware of the Illuminati.
And I think I've about exhausted that train of thought for tonight.
scans_daily. Apparently it's been declared Irondickery Week.Yeah. So many winners in that comm.
Anywho. I’ve been reading mainstream comics again for about a year now. I gave them up yeeears ago because they just weren’t doing anything that interested me, but some of Marvel’s recent crossover events really grabbed my attention. In particular, Civil War, and everything it’s done to change the landscape of the shared Marvel universe, drew me in. One of the interesting things to come out of the Civil War arc has been a new social science developed by Reed Richards. These scans are from Fantastic Four #542. The story takes place during Civil War.
For those of you familiar with Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four films, a quick run-down. Reed is, according to Marvel editorial, the most intelligent and widely scientifically knowledgeable character in the Marvel Universe. He's a brilliant physicist, biologist, mathematician, engineer and surgeon. He's like Batman. But with more science and fewer bones. In Fantastic Four #542 however, Reed does something he's never done before: invents a whole new branch of science.
Psychohistory, according to Reed Richards, combines statistics, Marvel!mathematics, social science and history, in order to predict social trends an the scale of whole populations or countries. So he could have used psychohistory to predict declining birth rates in the first world, but not that Jane Doe decided to go childfree.
In the context of the story, psychohistory was introduced in part because the writers wanted a greater justification for his position during Marvel's Civil War event but more importantly, I think they wanted to take the character in a direction more in line with the Illuminati mini. With, I suppose, the idea of the Illuminati, who are sort of the lynchpins in Marvel's current drive to do something different with the genre.
Marvel’s Civil War was a fight between various heroes over the Superhuman Registration Act, which as the name suggests requires superhumans to register with the government. Reed took the position that the act was in the greater good and was in fact the best choice out of a million or so other options that he considered. It would, he argued, lead to the best possible outcome (in the heated circumstances which lead up to and continued during the war), for the largest number of people. How did he know this? Psychohistory of course.
Psychohistory isn't just another kooky Richards invention, like !Unstable!Molecules!, it's his greatest achievement. He created the field, is the only practitioner, and the only one capable of understanding its full implications. It gives him a new power to get what he's always wanted: a better world through science. And not only that, it gives him authority over people, over society - Reed Richards, notoriously out of touch with the people side of things, has reduced humanity to a series of extremely complicated equations. Of course, he's the only one who understands the numbers, but the point is that Reed has made an algorithm out of human history, and made the future calculable and accessible in a way it previously hasn't been. He can now literally build the future of human society.
The Illuminati mini and the Civil War show that he's absolutely ready, even eager to build the future, and that he has a definite vision for it. A supremely logical future, calculated to be the best of all possible worlds that he and his colleagues will build. At the end of CW Tony Stark, another member of the Illuminati, says that right after the precipitating incident of the war, he, Reed and Hank Pym (creator of myriad cracky inventions) got together and brainstormed like, fifty steps they could immediately take in order to make that glorious future a reality. And once Tony had the political and legal power, they went for it. Some of their strategies for a better future were downright terrifying - they played around with cloning and illegal extra-dimensional prisons - but we're told that it's ok, the numbers back them up. Everything they do, no matter how despicable, is for that glorious future.
(Of course there are many instances within the books of characters questioning this, but since they're not relevant I'm going to ignore them for now. *g*)
It's a supremely technocratic and oligarchic argument we're being treated to. Psychohistory is by nature a technocratic science - with it, Reed is explicitly seeking to design the future. He's using the technology of psychohistory to shape human interaction, not simply learn about or describe it. And because Reed is the only one capable of using that technology, he maintains an immense advantage, an immense level of power over others that he shares with a trusted few, who have strengths that he doesn't. He's willing to share his new power, but only with those worthy of it.
Reed's development of psychohistory is inextricable from the Illuminati, because in many ways, it's the entire point of the group. Its existence is predicated on the notion that powerful men can and should work to consciously affect the direction of society. That they have the right to decide what that direction will be because they are the best and most qualified judges, by dint of their power and intellect.
The Illuminati was formed after Earth was caught in the middle of an intergalactic war. Tony Stark (AKA Iron Man and essentially the human embodiment of the military-industrial complex.) brought together Reed, Charles Xavier (the strongest telepath in the world and leader of the most powerful faction of mutants), Dr. Strange (the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth), Namor (the ruler of Atlantis and basically of the oceans in general), and Blackbolt (whose sonic power can rip a hole in the fabric of spacetime, and who rules a moon kingdom of superpowered beings) to form the Illuminati. These men, who wield tremendous power (politically and well, physically) decided to form a secret society which would take care of ‘problems’ that governments and ordinary heroes could not.
Psychohistory is Reed’s contribution to the larger Illuminati project of engineering a better future. Tony has his directorship of SHIELD. Xavier has, really everything he's developed in his career - (his students, Cerebro/Cerebra and his his recent bent towards Machiavellian social manipulation. (The more that I think about it, the more clever I think are the choices for the Illuminati group. Tony, Reed and Xavier are the most Illuminati of the Illuminati and the others are there in order to bolster their power, or even to keep an eye on them.)
Tangentially interesting is that there is an actual discipline called psychohistory which is concerned with the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. This field of study is considered by some to have significant differences from the mainstream fields of history and psychology. Reading the Wiki - it's all very Freudian.
And for more on Asimov's psycohistory: The basis of psychohistory is the idea that, while the actions of a particular individual could not be foreseen, the laws of statistics could be applied to large groups of people and used to predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy - known in physics as the Kinetic Theory. Asimov applied this concept to the population of the fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered in the quadrillions. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two postulates:
* That the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large
* They should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.
Knowing that psychohistory in the Fantastic Four is based on Asimov's, the second point is particularly interesting - Reed maintains the ignorance of those around him throughout the war. I wonder if his use of psychohistory will become common knowledge now that the the general public has become aware of the Illuminati.
And I think I've about exhausted that train of thought for tonight.
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God, I love Marvel.
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Did you hear that F4 is getting a new creative team?
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Also--I completely forgot to ask. Did you get the bumper stickers I sent you?
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I DID get the bumper stickers! I forgot to thank you. *THANKSWITHHUGS*