Superheroes are Canadian Propaganda to Make Americans Want Healthcare, Education, and Urbanism
A Case Study in Reterritorialization and also Canada
10 fun facts about Superman’s Canadian ties | Globalnews.ca
It's been 75 years since Superman first appeared in Action Comics and today Canada Post launches six commemorative stamps of the superhero, in honour of his little known Canadian origins.
The Early Edition spoke with the Vancouver man who was in charge of designing the Superman stamps -- and discovered three things you probably didn't know about the Man of Steel:
Superman was co-created by a Canadian: Toronto-born artist Joe Shuster created the superhero with American writer Jerry Siegel while they were still at high school in Cleveland in 1933.
The Daily Planet was based on the Toronto Star: Before moving to the U.S. as a young child, Shuster had an afterschool job selling newspapers for what is now The Toronto Star. The newspaper was founded in 1892 as The Evening Star before being renamed The Toronto Daily Star in 1900. The original name for The Daily Planet was The Daily Star -- later changed by the New York editors. One can only speculate that the Planet's tough-talking, yet highly ethical editor-in-chief, Perry White, was inspired by the social conscience of Joseph "Holy Joe" Atkinson, the Toronto Daily Star's editor from 1899, until his death in 1948.
Metropolis was inspired by Toronto: Shuster had been greatly impressed by Toronto’s vitality and size as a young child -- Cleveland was simply not as big and metropolitan back in the 30s. In creating the Metropolis skyline, Shuster drew on his fond memories of Toronto, which he continued to consider more beautiful than Cleveland until his death in 1992.
I have determined that, contrary to the popular misconception that superhero comics are American propaganda, the archetypal superhero is Canadian, Superman himself is literally Canadian, many other superheroes such as Deadpool are also Canadian, the world of most superhero comics much more closely resembles Canada than the United States of America, and in fact most superhero comics and movies could never take place in America. The main reason most superhero comics and movies could never take place in America is simply that superheroes are overwhelmingly educated individuals who frequently receive and/or give healthcare services.
Every single superhero story chronologically starts with a lab accident, a medical procedure, a medical procedure gone wrong, a scientific investigation into why they have their powers, or the like. These events would never happen in the US, where the two things you can’t get are healthcare and education. Due to the fact that I largely have liked superheroes and pulp sci-fi and weird fiction even when that was mostly unfashionable and even got Ray Bradbury in my high school library when they didn’t have The Martian Chronicles, I grew up expecting a world where education and healthcare would be common. Not so! I can’t even afford to finish all the degrees I would need to publish papers on topics I already know about in the US, and while I’ve gotten healthcare even when I was uninsured due to being like “screw this, I need to do it,” I can’t just do it on a whim.
If you saw the stupid Super Bowl ad with the cowboy-hat-shaped-head guy and the wizard-hat-shaped-head guys, well, I like completely unfashionable pulpy sci-fi stuff, and you know that because my head isn’t shaped like a hat and they don’t wear a lot of hats in pulpy sci-fi stuff.
Tubi Super Bowl 2025 TV Spot, 'Cowboy Head' - iSpot.tv
During an ultrasound, a couple finds out that they will be having a western-lover as a baby, tipped off by the cowboy-hat-shaped head. This news leaves the parents concerned about future bullying. Many years later in school when fantasy was the hit, two kids with witch-hat-shaped heads boast about their heads, telling the kid he is a dork since Westerns aren't popular. As the years go by, the two kids always seem to find him, reminding him that he still isn't on trend. But one day, walking the streets he notices that crowds of people are wearing cowboy hats and everywhere he looks there is something western-themed. Walking into a bar the man sees the two bullies sporting their very own cowboy hats on top of their witch-hat heads. Instead of making fun of them, he says "this ain't you partner," and with a smile changes the movie on the TV to a fantasy show. Tubi says that it has something for everyone on its platform.
The world of superhero comics is completely antithetical to US society. In fact, a world where you do anything other than lie in bed as a cripple and go into debt to collect as much stuff as possible because there aren’t any jobs and unless you win the lottery or get an inheritance, you’re not going to have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around, is antithetical to US society. Luigi Mangione should’ve just moved somewhere where there was healthcare instead of shooting a health insurance CEO because that’s not going to fix anything even if I don’t have any sympathy for the CEO either, however, he still did that because he got in a surfing accident and couldn’t surf anymore. Silly Luigi, despite the Beach Boys’ hit classic “Surfin’ USA,” the USA is not for surfing in, the USA is for sitting on the couch watching ads for stuff and then going into debt to buy them. I think the lyrics say “If everybody had healthcare, and could go to a doctor-ay, then everybody’d be surfin’, surfin’ USA.” Clearly, Luigi Mangione simply absorbed too many un-American Pacific Islander values, such as the idea that surfing refers to anything besides in front of the TV with a remote or on the computer with your mouse, looking for stuffy stuff stuff to buy buy buy. Incidentally, Hawai’i probably has the best healthcare of any US state, probably due to the fact it used to be its own country and clearly doesn’t share American values since they don’t think surfing is something you do on the couch, so Luigi was probably more into the Hawai’ian healthcare system than the British after all, except all the Hawai’ian healthcare workers are also leaving now.
Luigi Mangione “Went Crazy” After Surf Injury, Reports Say
The national debt is also all from the PRC and other countries subsidizing for Americans to buy things they can’t afford since the US doesn’t have any resources to trade due to the fact the USA is almost all farmland and Americans would apparently rather die than farm it, so America has nothing to actually trade to other countries. The USA is crashing and burning right now because it’s not sustainable to go into debt indefinitely, that’s why we can’t afford healthcare and education, healthcare is paid for by the government due to health insurance middlemen, and education is paid for by the government due to most universities being officially public and there being student loans and aid, so to make up for the spiraling debt, those are the two things the government jacks up, hence the unaffordability of them to anyone. So silly you, you’re not supposed to do anything in the US except take out a bunch of loans and credit cards to buy things you see on TV, and watching TV is the only thing you’re going to be able to do since you’re going to be too crippled and fat due to the lack of healthcare, too formally unqualified due to the lack of formal education, and there being no jobs for people with no qualifications due to them all being taken since the last two things are true.
During last October, my local comic book store had a huge sale, so I ended up buying so many big graphic novels they gave me a box. The box was so heavy I ended up hurting my foot and walking around with a limp for nearly a month afterward. I almost regretted not buying the Superman Muscle Building Club pin (it is more appropriate to get that once my muscles actually head anyway,) and then joked I would need a Professor X Wheelchair Club pin because I can’t go get crutches despite the fact I’m visibly limping, people are asking me if I’m OK, and I have to stay in bed a lot. Except I also couldn’t get a wheelchair, because that’s also healthcare, so I would just have to bleed out and die. I guess I can join the Morbius Blood Transfusion Club and become an undead vampire… nope, that’s still healthcare. I can join the Doctor Strange Alternative Medicine Club and do some chakra yoga to magically restore my legs and not bleed to death… except organizations like Institute of Noetic Sciences are also horribly underfunded. I could join the Ghost Rider Just Selling Your Soul to Mephisto Club… which would be the biggest disappointment of all, because we all know that the roads are literally falling apart in America and there would barely be any other drivers to show your infernal motorcycle to since gas is expensive, insurance is expensive, and people prefer to just sit around the couch, same situation as surfing.
However, even though most superheroes are Canadian, Canada is even worse than America now, because Canada decided they can’t cut anything in particular, yet most Canadians want to consume a bunch of junk they don’t need just like most Americans, actually significantly more than most Americans, probably because it’s cold there and they don’t have food. If you don’t want to be in an infinitely-spiraling debt techno-feudalist serfdom trap you will have to move, and it has to be to somewhere with a producer economy which is also safe from nuclear bombs. The closest things that still exist and have general Anglosphere values are Australia and New Zealand, however, a lot of South and Central America may or may not be resistant to a nuclear winter and is politically and economically close enough to Europe there’s been talk of some of those countries possibly joining the EU. Places like Iceland, Greenland, and Bhutan are geographically safe. Even lots of places in Europe and Asia have plenty of nuke shelters that look like they’re well-designed and well-maintained and have enough of a producer economy instead of solely consumer economy that their HDIs have been steadily rising as the US’s has been crashing. Despite the talk of some academic types that Curtis Yarvin-style techno-feudalist serfdom won’t involve being tied to the land but rather to algorthms, yes it will, you’re just going to be propagandized into staying in the land, as if it were unpatriotic to leave despite the examples of Barack Obama (whom, despite being a Democrat, was voted for by many of the same people as Trump) and Boris Johnson (who is very much right-wing and literally responsible for Brexit, not some leftist cosmopolitan.)
Canada’s dirty secret | Canadian Geographic
“We tend to think that if other countries were more like Canada, the planet could be saved,” says Hird. “But if every country was like Canada in terms of all-out consumerism and waste, the planet would be even more messed up than it is.”
The 720 kilos per capita of waste produced annually by every Canadian is about twice what is produced per capita in Japan, and as much as 10 times what is produced by a half-dozen countries in Africa. More alarmingly, our production is seven per cent higher than per capita ouput of waste in the United States, which all but invented consumer excess.
…While the answer isn’t a Canschluss, and I think both the US and Canada should mostly copy New Zealand and Australia (volcanic and non-volcanic Anglophone countries respectively) and shift back to a production-driven economy, maybe we really should blame Canada to some degree. After all, the reason Canadians aren’t all moving to Australia, New Zealand, or even just the US or UK since Canada is clearly the worst economy now is because they’re the most consumerist society of all. This is clearly not an issue of so-called left and right politics aka culture wars either, countries which are doing well and not doing well fall all over the stereotypical culture wars spectrums because the issue is consumer economies inevitably collapsing while producer economies are growing.
One other philosopher who the media doesn’t seem to want to touch at all even though he’s the important one, Nick Land, is something called a Deleuzo-Guattarian which means he follows these French philosophers called Deleuze and Guattari, but he combines them with Lovecraft and the Terminator, and he rejects a core philosophical tenet of Deleuze and Guattari called reterritorialization. The stock market, value of cash, and value of goods and services (inflation) are all high now and I think will all be high for quite a while. The crash is coming, but it’ll be preceded by events that make it obvious. This is because the reason all three of those are high, yet you can’t find a job, is precisely because the governments of the US, Canada, most European countries, and many Asian countries are subsidizing consumption by going into debt, hence the value of everything being high and there being no jobs. The economy will only crash once these subsidies stop. So sell all the junk in your attic you don’t care about and move. Don’t procrastinate, but you still have time.
Originally in Deleuze and Guattari, reterritorialization doesn’t refer to literally moving people, things, or ideas, but that’s very much one interpretation, and I think that’s the most contextually-relevant interpretation of it, because no one place has all the natural resources, much less ideas or people. You can’t be too attached to the physical land or you’re objectively missing out. People have to stop being too scared to move in addition to stopping being a bunch of materialist consumers like Canada is now. Superheroes themselves are very much a case study in reterritorialization, because they were made in America, but they were based on the Canadian society of the time.
Do remember, superheroes actually represent truth, justice, and the Canadian way, except the couple who were deliberately created to show how jacked up the American economy was all along, such as Spider-Man and Batman.
The news has finally picked up Curtis Yarvin, but I still see very little discussion of Nick Land, or the long-dead philosopher Herman Hoppe who directly created the idea of having a bunch of neofeudalist states.
Yes, the whole reason we have Trump/Vance instead of Trump/Pence and things are going to hell in a handbasket is because a bunch of literal communists think that promoting both capitalism and fascism (which they think are the same, but I don’t, capitalism is OK but fascism isn’t) will cause communism to finally be brought into existence when they bring in some kind of Roko’s Basilisk retrocausal AI from the future, and they self-identify as terminators. Welcome to 2025. I don’t really blame Trump, and I certainly don’t blame the people who voted for Trump, because Kamala Harris was sponsored by Peter Thiel and the South Africans too, there’s no evidence she would’ve been any better. This is why we can’t be divided against each other. There are times where you should be divided against people, but contextually, this is not one of them. It’s us vs. these accelerationists who are literally Satanists in a Satanic death cult, not left wing culture wars vs. right wing culture wars, that’s just divide and conquer by these people. Remember, Nick Land even went to the PRC and is trying to bring that here, and Elon Musk is part of BRICS as a South African.
Want to know why I had Godzilla fight Cthulhu and said it had to do with Hegel and Schelling? That’s why. In this context, Cthulhu can represent Nick Land’s idea of hyperstition, while Godzilla can represent the Maximum Power Principle. This is itself a reterritorialization of Godzilla and Cthulhu. Notice that Nick Land literally self-identifies with Cthulhu as well and his marketing pictures, like the one above, always feature Cthulhu. So, when I wrote this, even though I didn’t want to have to explain it, that’s what inspired me. Nick Land identifies as a metaironic terminator and I identify as a metaironic mutant. Of course he and his side represent death and me and my side represent life, he’s a Satanist and I’m a Christian.
I learned all about Schelling after reconciling the ideas of Christianity and evolution, hint, Schelling both helped create what I consider the earliest modern form of evolutionary theory (Naturphilosophie) which directly inspired Darwin, Owen, etc. and he also created the mythopoetic idea that Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Coleridge, Jung, Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, etc. used. I like to metaironically half-joke that I converted to Christianity because of evolution because of that. When you look at the similarities between species, you get evolution, and when you look at the similarities between myths, you get Jesus. From German Idealism I learned about Whitehead, even though I’m not a process theologian for more or less the reasons
isn’t, I actually literally believe in a historical Jesus and the rest of the doxology and real miracles even if the Bible itself doesn’t say every last part of it is literal.
The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead - Pando Populus
In Europe, interest in Whitehead developed largely independently of what we had done in the United States. Isabelle Stengers, in her work with the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine, became interested in Whitehead’s contribution to science, and she was joined in this regard by Bruno Latour. Stengers’ Thinking with Whitehead is one of the most important studies of his philosophy. The opening of European universities to Whitehead, however, resulted chiefly from his importance being recognized by Gilles Deleuze.
From there I learned about Deleuze and Guattari, even though the first place I heard Deleuze referenced was incidentally someone saying they thought Arthur Fleck from the first Joker movie was meant to look like him, but I didn’t know who that was yet. If you self-identify as a right-wing evangelical or non-right-wing evangelical, you really shouldn’t be afraid of this stuff, Schelling is the inspiration for Tolkien and C. S. Lewis as well as Deleuze and Guattari, just bring your brain and don’t blindly accept everything you read or hear. Reterritorialization can be thought of as “the eagles are coming” anyway, and that’s precisely what actual Crowley Satanists like Nick Land decided they wanted to remove from Deleuze and Guattari. You can’t destroy the Ring without going to Mount Doom and you can’t make everything better without reterritorializing, especially though not only in the sense of actually relocating. Even Boris Johnson the Brexit guy wasn’t from Britain, so you don’t have to be afraid of what people will think of you, just put the culture wars stuff behind.
So yes, the American self-image has been largely based on a lot of things that don’t reflect America in any way, and I think this has been partly driving me to want to move in the first place. Though, this is good, most people should be moving now, not everyone, people who know where near them to go in a nuclear war for example are fine, but if you don’t, you should be moving somewhere where you’ll be safe. The relocation of people, ideas, and resources is highly important for the future development of the world, as well as mass relocations now making future relocations even easier. Almost everyone I know is either being sent somewhere by their employers, or choosing to go somewhere, and I think that’s a good thing, because no one place has everything that’s needed for future advancement and flourishing of people. Some people, who just look like old-school Marxists who also believe in endless industrialization and I’m sure hate religion too, are panicking about technofeudalism, and while I think the things they’re saying are mostly true, I also think they’re missing the bigger picture. The answer to technofeudalism is reterritorialization, which is why I thought it was important to consider that superheroes are not actually from America, they’re from Canada, and that this is an example of reterritorialization. Technofeudalists will try to convince you really hard that you should be afraid of moving, or you shouldn’t want to move, or you can’t, despite the looming immanence of literal nuclear war since the Russians tried in 2022, the PRC stopped them, and when the PRC falls I’m sure they’ll just do it. Be afraid of that, and be afraid of the cost of living crisis, not Elon Musk, or other people’s opinions of you.
Also, speaking of Superman, read Richard Rorty’s interpretations of Nietzsche. Richard Rorty does a good idea reconciling Nietzsche’s thought with both liberal democracy and Christianity, which is something Yanis Varoufakis touches on above when he says the point of leftism didn’t used to be making everyone forcibly equal Harrison Bergeron style. Isaac Asimov says all societies regress toward feudalism and I think that’s what we’re seeing now, except now the feudalism is so transparently psychological. The value of the dollar, stock market, and goods (inflation) are all high so all you need to do now is go to your attic full of junk you don’t want and sell it. Like I said, Canadians are only not in Australia or New Zealand (or some other place, but those two have a near-identical culture other than the lack of consumerism) because they’re even more addicted to consumerism than Americans are. Americans are also brainwashed by the idea you have to stay in America even though right-wing Brits clearly aren’t. Just get over your psychological hurdles and you can move.
Fleenor_FriedrichNietzsche.pdf
COPING WITH NIETZSCHE'S LEGACY: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer | International Focusing Institute
The superhero Superman was literally based on the idea of the Übermensch, but the creators of Superman decided that Superman should help people. So if you’re sympathetic to Richard Rorty and some similar interpretations of Nietzsche, yes, translating Übermensch as superman has exactly the right connotations.
Since
found my Super Bowl post (among other people) and then he made a new post, I noticed that ties in to everything I’ve been looking at. One of the whole reasons people act like NPCs is consumerism, which is the society of the spectacle. People don’t want to do new things because that’s antithetical to consuming certain images, and doing new things is, well, production. So people will just act like NPCs. I’ve heard the whole reason the Holocaust and most of WWII happened is because even though it was obvious things were getting really bad, people didn’t want to acknowledge it. Complacency might largely just be so-called human nature, but also, this was the 1930s, the Roaring Twenties had already started and I’ve heard repeatedly that’s when consumerism started as well.
Of course, I don’t think capitalism is evil like Guy DeBord did and I’ve already talked about that, but I think this is generally a correct assessment. People will just keep doing the same thing in this particular political context as a variety of consumerism, and the answer to not do that is reterritorialization. The idea of the spectacle seems to be closely related to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of faciality, and they don’t think capitalism is evil. The idea is essentially that people want to put themselves into easily-digestible molds. I found that video right before the Super Bowl and I wasn’t even thinking about the Super Bowl.
This video discusses the history of the trade agreements between the US and Canada. Notice all the junk in his background and you’ll see what I mean about the problem with Canada being the consumerism, which is significantly higher than in the US despite the fact the US did basically invent that ideology. The US invented that ideology as a backlash against the rabidly anti-consumption ideology that existed before where people tried to live on bread alone and just went too far in the opposite direction, Canada on the other hand doesn’t seem to have ever needed that, so Canada is worse now. He also mentions the Anglo-Irish Trade Pact and ANZCERTA between Australia and New Zealand, while implying that the Anglo-Irish Trade Pact no longer exists but ANZCERTA still does. Of course the Anglo-Irish Trade Pact fell apart, England and Ireland are consumer economies while Australia and New Zealand are producer economies. Consumer economies are competing with each other to consume, so they end up engaging in weird nationalism like what Canada used to, while producer economies help each other out.
As people can tell I’ve become fascinated with analyzing the economies and politics of Australia and New Zealand because they’re producer economies but otherwise culturally similar to North America, Europe, etc. Australia looks like it used to be the best place to go to university and will be recovering that status, and New Zealand is apparently the best place to start a business, so my plans have been to try to register the business I want to start in New Zealand so Elon Musk can’t get it since he seized the Treasury, and go to school in Australia, though maybe I have to go to school in New Zealand first since it looks like Australia has mostly been shutting down, however, if I go on the Australia working holiday visa maybe I wouldn’t count as an international student so I could get in that way anyway, so it’s still somewhat indeterminate to me where I should move right now despite my metaironic satire about how I’m being sent to Australia for being in debt (no one is sent to Australia for being in debt anymore even if that’s how the country was founded, I just wish it was because America is getting in my opinion quite uninhabitable and Australia is pretty much the top of the list of where I’d like to go, rather than, say, somewhere in Europe or Costa Rica, just because of the university thing and it being a producer economy and relatively nuke-proof, all of which I think are the most important things.)
Sshh, it’s because of Elon, not because of Trump. People who voted for Trump are also leaving because of Elon, and people who didn’t vote for Trump didn’t bother leaving the US en masse the first time because Elon wasn’t screwing everything up.
So, if Superman isn’t even American (never mind that his fictional backstory is he’s an alien whose planet got destroyed,) you can be anyone (nearly) anywhere, too.
Wow, that's a lot to digest.
I knew Joe Shuster was Canadian. In 1997, we launched a set of superhero stamps, including the Golden Age Superman. I was there. Two of my friends were honored for their creation. I met the sole living Golden Age creator (until five years later, RIP) and met others.
(Side note: I never knew all those Toronto links.)
Although I don't know if it's the same here in Montréal, building houses here, as you say, is expensive. We have far fewer towns as well. Our medical system isn't as advanced, but it isn't for pay.
That's something Canadian for superheroes. You never see them go broke from a hospital stay.