So, I wasn't surprised to find something meaningful in the movie "X Men: First Class."
I don't want to pretend to be a really cool chick. I don't read comic books, and I only watched the animated series while Jeph and I were in college because it was another half hour that I got to spend with him every Saturday morning. I will, however, admit that I really liked the show. Xavier was always my favorite character, and because I wasn't cool enough to have read the comic books or to have seen every episode of the series, I didn't know the back-story behind Xavier and Magneto until I saw the movie yesterday (I'm so uncool, I'm assuming that every other X Men fan did know the back-story).
I still love Xavier, but in having the chance to look inside Erik Lensherr before he became Magneto, I have to say, I love him too. Understanding what drove him to the dark side actually almost brought me to tears in a moment when the rest of the audience was just sitting there.
It's human nature to selectively hate. I wish it wasn't. As a race, I think we try to justify hating through the guise of improving each other, and making the world better. Better for whom?
Obviously, there are many examples of selective hate and discrimination. The early Christians were discriminated against and fed to lions and other predators. Africans were relocated to the West in order to be enslaved and treated as nothing more than animals. The Jewish people were selected for annihilation by the Germans, resulting in the deaths of about six million. And there certainly have been a number of other ethnically based genocides along the way. It seems there's always a group of people somewhere being persecuted, shunned, neglected, and/or killed.
With the capacity to hate being such a dominant trait, it's not hard to understand why the concept of self-esteem is a difficult one to instill in our children and ourselves. To much lesser degrees, we engage in hate all the time without even thinking about it as hate. We find people selectively within our environments to shun and to pick on for one reason or another--or even no reason.
Our methodology doesn't have to come at the end of a gun barrel to produce similar effects. We may not be taking people's lives away, but we are assassinating a part of them all the time.
Raven, who would become Mystique, had obvious issues with self-image and her personal identity--and not just because she could morph into any appearance she chose. It had been made clear to her that her real body was undesirable and that she should hide who she was. Even Xavier reinforced the idea that she should try to appear like everyone else. Erik Lensherr was the only one who encouraged Raven to be her true self--blue skin and all. He encouraged her to believe that she was good enough.
Magneto had seen the hatred of the German people first hand, and their complete willingness to discard people without thought or care, simply because they were different. He knew that no matter how good Xavier's intentions were, humanity would turn on the mutants because it simply would not be able to look passed its own fear of the different. He was right.
Another science fiction based series that examined the natural desire for homogenized thought and action was "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Now, I am also not cool enough to be a Trekkie, but I was a faithful "Generation" watcher. The depiction of the Borg Collective is a fantastic representation of what humanity does, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. We really are more comfortable when we aren't being challenged with the thoughts and ideas of others, especially when those thoughts and ideas conflict with our own.
I find it all very disappointing, and it made me think of some literature I have been reviewing to start a professional development process. There are a set of competencies involved in the process, and in beginning the process you have to identify which ones you are skilled in and which ones you are not (you can also overuse certain competencies, but that's a whole other can of worms). The information presented to help you decide where you fall in your assessment explains why you might not be skilled in certain areas. Phrases like "Being true to yourself is an overriding concern," "May have a view that being true to oneself is all that matters" are listed as factors in skill level and possible causes.
Now, I get that being cooperative with others is important, but I question a process that assumes there's something wrong with who we are and that being true to oneself is automatically a flaw. If we were appropriately selected for a position, then wasn't it our "self" that was selected. Weren't we deemed the right person for the job, in part, because we would ensure that the job was done as well as it can be?
The assumption that someone is wrong in who they are can create self-doubt and make it difficult to make important decisions and observations in the workplace. What if the doubt we instill in someone because they don't always play well with others makes them question whether they should tell someone that a bolt is in the wrong position on a commercial airplane?
The need we all have for acceptance is incredibly strong. The need to be accepted in our workplace sometimes translates to worry about maintaining our financial stability. You'd hope that playing well with others and being well-liked and accepted by your co-workers wouldn't override the part of your self that knows it's right to tell someone to fix the bolt. Wouldn't you?
Another character in "X Men: First Class" demonstrated what I think is a valuable lesson. Hank, who would later become Beast, also saw his physical differences as flaws instead of embracing them. In his attempt to "fix" himself, he became more of what he did not wish to be.
http://youtu.be/HtNS1afUOnE
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