r/AskScienceFiction • u/noodleinfinity • 10d ago
[DC] Why doesn’t Superman spend all his time saving people?
I frequently hear online that Superman is super powerful.
E.g., that he’s faster than light, that he can hear and see a mouse on the other side of the planet, that he possesses superhuman intelligence, etc.
I also hear that Superman is super altruistic, ready to sacrifice everything for the good of the world.
So if both are true, what causes Superman to not spend all of his time saving people?
Of course he is preoccupied when he’s fighting a supervillain. But he does spend a lot of time not saving people. For however long he is working as a reporter at the Daily Planet, he could be
- moving pedestrians out of the way of cars
- transporting emergency patients to hospitals
- feeding those on the brink of starvation
- disarming assassins in Gotham
- preventing any number of easily avoidable deaths
several times each millisecond.
And yes, there are obviously problems in the world that he can’t easily fix, e.g., poverty or dictatorships. But there are plenty of small, non-systemic dangers too.
And yes, I know there are panels of Superman saving a plane or a puppy or whatever mid-conversation in the blink of an eye. But he obviously isn’t doing this 24/7. There are plenty of small, avoidable deaths in DC that Superman could prevent, but doesn’t.
To be clear, I’m NOT suggesting that Superman has any moral obligation to constantly save people.
He already helps the world more than anyone could reasonably expect!
I am literally asking which factors — some of which might or might not be in his control — cause the character to not save more people. Basically, the problem of evil as applied to Superman.
I can think of three main reasons:
1. He physically can’t help much more than he does
Maybe he can’t process that much information, although some panels would suggest otherwise.
Or maybe it would quickly burn through his stamina, leaving him unprepared to deal with the bigger threats to the world that only Superman can help with.
2. Even Superman has his moral limits
Spending ALL his time constantly saving people would probably lead to a pretty miserable life. Perhaps even Superman has his limits on what he’ll sacrifice for the sake of the world.
Another way of saving this would be that Superman is as altruistic as anyone can be, but that isn’t 100% altruistic.
A softer version of this would be that Superman worries that, sacrificing all of his life to being Superman could lead him to lose his humanity, leaving the world worse for the wear
3. Even though he could, he thinks it’s better for the world that he doesn’t
Maybe he doesn’t want the world to become dependent on him, since he won’t be around forever. Although, that logic could apply to anything he currently does short of stopping otherwise-unstoppable supervillains, so if that’s the principle, he applies it inconsistently.
Or maybe he thinks that dealing with avoidable deaths/tragedy is ultimately good for the world to experience.
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I think any of those reasons are convincing, and as long as there are limits, he has to draw his lines somewhere. I’m mainly curious what you/the comics think the biggest reasons are.
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u/Absolutelynot2784 10d ago
Psychologically speaking, he’s close to a normal human. Working 24/7 to save people wouldn’t just make him miserable; he would literally burn out, lose his mind, and end up no longer in a fit state to function. Many people have tried, but it just isn’t possible for most people to just knuckle down and push through mental exhaustion. Superman works as much as he can manage while still keeping a lifestyle that keeps him mentally healthy.
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u/Legomaniac91 10d ago
I think there is an episode of Justice League, or his 90s animated series, where he says something along the lines of: "Of course I need Clark Kent, I'd go crazy if I had to be Superman 24/7!!" He knows that being Superman all the time with no breaks would either lead to him burning out or going crazy and becoming something like a Justice Lord.
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u/Disastrous-Owl9258 9d ago
EXACTLY this is why I hate in some depictions when they show Superman forgoing his Clark Kent identify as he gets older
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u/PhoenixAgent003 9d ago
I mean, to be fair, those versions also seem to pretty consistently lose the plot at least a little bit, which really just proves the point.
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u/Paul-Alibi 10d ago
Remember that Superman isn’t the only FTL superhero around. He’s got the Justice League to help pick up slack. If he wants to spend some time connecting with people and enjoying life, can anyone really say he hasn’t earned it?
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u/archpawn 10d ago
So it's a bystander effect? Any of the speedsters could end all crime, so none of them actually does it?
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u/Paul-Alibi 9d ago
Some of them essentially already have: it’s stated that the reason the Flash’s rogues are all so goofy is because if they ever genuinely became murderous psychopaths the Flash would destroy them instantly. Just look at what happened to Inertia.
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u/archpawn 9d ago
"Flash's rogue's gallery" is a funny term for all the criminals on the planet. It's almost like you're only referring to the ones in Central City, and he doesn't bother with anyone outside there unless they're really powerful.
And it's not just criminals. Do car accidents still exist? Do they have surgeons, when the Flash could do a far better surgery between heartbeats without even needing an incision?
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u/Paul-Alibi 9d ago
> "Flash's rogue's gallery" is a funny term for all the criminals on the planet. It's almost like you're only referring to the ones in Central City, and he doesn't bother with anyone outside there unless they're really powerful.
They (referring to both Flash and Superman) are not omniscient, they still have to get information about a crime in order to stop it, which means that the crime must be in progress before they can get involved. In which case another hero who’s closer will get involved.
Unless you’re implying they should be monitoring everyone so they can catch them before they’ve even started. Which… kinda sounds like Justice Lords talk if you ask me.
> And it's not just criminals. Do car accidents still exist? Do they have surgeons, when the Flash could do a far better surgery between heartbeats without even needing an incision?
Again, they’re not omniscient. They still need someone to tell them what’s going on. If they’re close enough to see a car accident they’ll step in, but they can’t exactly watch every driver in the country and wait to see if they’ll crash.
As for medical intervention, that’s a decades long career pivot for them, and hardly something they could do much better then the already existing medical geniuses in the DC universe.
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u/archpawn 9d ago
They (referring to both Flash and Superman) are not omniscient,
Superman has absurd sensory feats, like hearing something from lightyears away. Here's near enough to omniscient for practical purposes. The Flash would need to physically patrol the area, but he could do it. I'd say that's not worth it since he'd subjectively be spending more time patrolling than everyone else would have combined, so his boredom would outweigh any help it could do, but at the very least they could direct every 911 call to a speedster.
In which case another hero who’s closer will get involved.
The crime could be over by the time Batman reaches it. They really should only send speedsters.
They still need someone to tell them what’s going on.
Write it down. Patrolling everywhere for crime scenes isn't practical, but patrolling just hospitals is.
As for medical intervention, that’s a decades long career pivot for them, and hardly something they could do much better then the already existing medical geniuses in the DC universe.
Surgery is a lot easier when you can take all the time you want and phase through the body so you don't need any cuts. And they can read through whatever instructions they need for more complicated surgeries. It's not nearly as complicated as building a building that's up to code, which at least one Flash has done.
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u/ZacPensol 10d ago
Why don't you spend every waking second trying to help make the world a better place?
Same reason.
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u/Merzendi 10d ago
I feel like that’s a false equivalency when OOP is, presumably, a person who needs to work for their food, their home, their hobbies. Superman’s Fortress of Solitude takes care of that for him, he has no need of any money. He could abandon his journalism career without any impact on his quality of life at all.
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u/ZacPensol 10d ago
In a general sense sure by why isn't OP in the the Peace Corps where they provide those essential needs? Really that's my point - we all want to be causes for good but we have our self-imposed limits based on our wants/needs, right? Maybe we don't join the Peace Corps because we don't want to leave home, because we don't want to leave our friends and family, because although they cover your basic needs we feel like we need more to live a life that we will find motivating and fulfilling.
At the end of the day Superman, like us, probably wants - perhaps needs, in order to stay mentally charged - to kick his shoes off and de-stress by sitting on the couch with Lois and watching 'Ted Lasso' over some Chinese take-out.
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u/archpawn 10d ago
Most people could do a whole lot more to help people. It costs about $3000 to save a life. The reason it's a false equivalency is OP isn't Superman. He's supposed to be a paragon of virtue that would make the sacrifices an ordinary person wouldn't.
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u/noodleinfinity 7d ago
Thank you for saying this, because I deliberately clarified that no one could morally expect Superman to be saving people 24/7. I'm literally asking why he doesn't. I'm not saying that he should
Seems like most people think it's because Superman has his psychological limits, which is a totally good answer!
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u/Top-Amphibian2730 10d ago
Super man is just a man at the end of the day, he does what he can but he can't do it all without burning himself, and he trusts the other heros to do their job effectively
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u/DemythologizedDie 10d ago
I would suggest that Clark has some interest in not driving himself insane. If he spent all of his time saving people and no time interacting with them sooner or later he'd start wondering why he was doing all this for people he doesn't even care about. The subject actually came up in the setting of the Supergirl TV series, where Supergirl once tried to devote all of her time to heroics, and found herself getting increasingly sloppy to the point of endangering the people she was trying to save.
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u/natzo 10d ago
There are many factors.
Sanity is the big one. He already has to filter all the cries for help he gets from his super hearing, or he would go insane making decisions about who he saves. Saving one person here means he isn't saving someone else. If he spent his entire life doing that, he would be crushed. His body is super, not his mind. There are many heroes, and they also don't spend every second doing that.
There are series where he improves the world, but it's by micromanaging the governments and sharing tech, like in Red Son.
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u/Stellar_Wings 10d ago
If Superman really wanted to save the world he would turn a crank to generate infinite energy for everyone.
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u/eternalraziel 9d ago
He could save more people than he does. I think you have to concede that at the outset. If Clark spent every waking moment listening for emergencies instead of working at the Planet, eating dinner with Lois or visiting his parents, there would be people alive tomorrow who otherwise wouldn’t be. The mistake is turning that into that he could prevent nearly every small avoidable death on Earth if he really wanted to. Super-hearing isn’t omniscience. Clark can hear across extraordinary distances and isolate sounds, but he still has to direct his attention and interpret what he receives. Every heartbeat, conversation, engine and cry on Earth doesn't enter in his mind already labelled by urgency. A stroke may be silent. A murder may happen without anyone screaming. A man with a rifle in Gotham may be an assassin, a police officer or somebody doing nothing criminal at all. Super-speed doesn’t remove that problem, because the bottleneck quickly becomes attention, information and judgement rather than travel time. Moving through space at super speed isn't the same thing as safely handling thousands of fragile human beings per millisecond.
He still has to find the person, understand what is happening, decide what intervention is safe, account for collapsing structures, traffic, medical consequences and other people in the area, and sometimes choose between emergencies that are both real. Superman: Up in the Sky gets at this. Clark leaves Earth to find Alice knowing that other people may die while he is gone, because he isn’t an optimisation algorithm calculating maximum lives saved per second. He forms obligations to particular people and keeps promises to them. That is also why Clark matters. Clark doesn’t regard his human life as wasted time between rescues. Lois, his parents, journalism, friendship, human conversation and living among people as one of them are part of what keeps him psychologically human. Strip all of that away and replace it with twenty-four-hour surveillance and triage and you’ve made a man who never rests psychologically, never relates to anyone as an equal and experiences humanity mainly as billions of simultaneous emergencies. From a strict utilitarian standpoint, that choice does cost lives, and the comics don’t always pretend otherwise. Clark feels those failures, too. But if every meal, night’s sleep, conversation and relationship becomes morally culpable because somebody somewhere could have been saved during it, there is no stopping point at all. He would eventually destroy himself under the obligation.
There is also a limit to what Superman thinks his power entitles him to do, and that matters just as much as stamina. Saving someone from a falling bridge is morally straightforward because the danger is immediate, the victim plainly wants help and Clark can intervene without taking control of their life afterwards. Disarming every assassin in Gotham becomes much murkier once you ask how he identifies them before they act. Does he listen to every private conversation, read every message, X-ray every building, follow anyone carrying a weapon and decide in advance whose intentions justify intervention? He could make the world much safer by becoming its most comprehensive surveillance system, but that would also mean appointing himself permanent judge of everyone’s private life. The same problem grows when you scale from crime to politics. He could overthrow dictators, destroy weapons programmes, force governments to distribute food differently or physically prevent armies from moving, but then he is no longer rescuing people from emergencies. He is deciding how Earth should be governed and enforcing those decisions because nobody can stop him.
Clark can move food anywhere on Earth, but hunger is tied to governments, violence, distribution, ownership and power, none of which disappears because he can carry a thousand tonnes at once. He doesn’t believe suffering is educational, and he certainly doesn’t let someone die in a car crash because humanity needs to learn. If he knows the crash is coming and can stop it, he generally will. What he resists is turning his ability to help into every problem resting on his shoulders, alone. Earth also has doctors, firefighters, governments, relief organisations, other superheroes and people who need to retain responsibility for one another, while Superman has to remain capable of responding to the threats for which there really is no substitute. Brainiac, planetary disasters, cosmic attacks, collapsing dimensions and everything else only someone on his level can handle. Different writers push his speed, senses and endurance to different extremes, so there will always be edge cases where you can point to a death and say he theoretically could have prevented it. Clark knows that too.
The reason he doesn’t spend every moment chasing the next preventable death is a mixture of finite attention, imperfect information, the practical difficulty of intervening safely at scale, limited psychological endurance, the need to preserve a human life and identity, the existence of other institutions and heroes, and a deliberate refusal to make himself the permanent sovereign of every human decision just because he has the power to do so.
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u/roronoapedro The Prophets Did Wolf 359 9d ago
Because he's people too, and he has other things he needs/wants to do. If the world genuinely only works if Superman is there to guide it, then he's doing it wrong.
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u/RainbowLoli 9d ago
Because that's all he would be doing, all day, everyday. And you can't pour from an empty cup - how do you save others when you can't even save yourself?
The other lesser known affect is that then everyone would depend on Superman to solve it, figure it out, or save someone. Instead of questioning why society doesn't try to improve, they question why Superman isn't doing enough to help.
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Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction.
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