BloodHenge wrote:It's still important to set down solid criteria regarding who "deserves" help, in his opinion. Would he intervene only in violent crimes, or also physical and intellectual property crimes? What kinds of imprisonment, if any, would he consider wrongful? What are his views on taxation? Health care?
Violent crime is the thing I was thinking of first and foremost. Physical [private] property could conceivably go either way, but since this is my idea I'll declare that yes, he recognizes some kind of rights to physical property. (These may not flesh out to exactly the bundle of legal rights we attach to the notion of "property", but at least on the simple level of "that things is yours, this thing is mine, it's wrong if you take something that's mine or vice versa", I'd say yes).
"Intellectual property" and taxes are both unintelligible without the concept of government to build them on, so since he doesn't have that concept, he wouldn't recognize anything about such issues. Of course that doesn't become a problem until someone refuses to {pay taxes|refrain from copying something} and exhausts all of their legal warnings to do so and eventually has a warrant put out for their arrest and men with guns show up at their door to abduct them (as he would see it), at which point he might show up to protect them and ask the armed men "Who did he harm that he deserves the punishment you seek to mete out?"
I'm not sure what health care has to do with anything other than just being one of many services which can be tax-funded. It's not like he's going to smash into a doctor's office and say "Stop! You can't perform that operation, you're being paid with money which via a long indirect route stems ultimately from an act of theft!" (as he would see it). He would just focus on the theft. He's not going to accost road workers paving highways who get paid with tax money either.
I still think it's pretty much inevitable that he will come into conflict with some governments frequently, and likely that he will come into conflict with every government occasionally. Even if he doesn't intervene in every conflict, he may still intervene in enough conflicts of certain types that certain laws become functionally unenforceable, once the risk that he might intervene becomes unacceptable.
Well yeah, that's the whole appeal of the idea -- the fact that someone who would otherwise be called a hero without qualification, could suddenly become extremely controversial if he saves someone from an aggressor that many other people think has a right to aggress at their whim. The only thing I was arguing about was that that doesn't have to be portrayed as an "alien conquest". Not recognizing another's authority is not the same thing as setting yourself up as another authority. Just because I won't be your slave -- or let you make anyone else your slave -- doesn't mean I fancy myself your master.
I will admit that the reason I personally find this idea so appealing is that I am a philosophical anarchist myself, which means I see things as this hypothetical character would: "states" are fictions, there are just masses of normatively equal people interacting, none of them with any right to rule or duty to obey each other. It seems like most people in most societies have the idea so thoroughly ingrained into them that
someone is in charge and different rules apply to them that they just can't imagine actually treating everybody as complete equals and ignoring any rationalizations about "it's ok, he's a cop" or whatever. So I would love to see a story told through the eyes of a character for whom those kinds of distinctions are completely alien -- maybe even set it in some kind of future setting where clothes are different enough that we the audience can't identify supposed authority figures on sight either -- so when organized groups of people start acting like they can command people to do things and punish them if they disobey, they just look to him like a street gang or a mafia, and get treated accordingly.
Actually, maybe this would be a story better told in a purely textual medium. That way, what we "see" are the hero's descriptions of things through alien eyes. We don't see a cop arresting somebody from their house for tax evasion; we see, through his eyes, an armed abduction of someone from their home, and then hear through his ears the abductor justifying his actions by saying this guy owes them money, not because he stole it or something, but because it's their turf and everybody who lives there has to pay up, and so on. Literal descriptions of things as seen by someone who doesn't have our comfortable euphemisms (as he would call them) like "police" and "taxes", so the audience has to slowly piece together from these descriptions of other people's reactions to the hero that the apparent bad guys he's fighting are the people we would usually give a free pass under such terms. And then bam, the readers have to go back and reinterpret the whole story in that light, and the whole world in the light of the story's perspective on it.
Maybe even begin with him crash-landing in his alien-pod and seeing ordinary Earth things through alien eyes before taking on human form. He wanders about, having weird awkward interactions with the locals for a while, trying to get the hang of passing as a human, trying to mimic our language. Then maybe he stumbles across an obvious crime -- a woman is about to be raped in an alleyway or something -- and steps in to help. She sees his awkwardness and mutism and thinks that maybe he's retarded or something, but he seems harmless, and he did just save her, so she takes him home -- let's say she has a husband or boyfriend or something and avoid awkward unnecessary romantic implications here. They let him crash there for a bit while they try to figure out who he is and where he's supposed to go, while he slowly starts getting the hang of acting and speaking like a human, and maybe picks up tiny bits of English. There turns out to be some kind of gang problem in their neighborhood, real obvious violence, and he recognizes it as such and steps in to protect his newfound friends and their neighbors.
He becomes the local hero. Everybody loves him, but they still have no idea who he is or where he's supposed to be. (Let's say, since this is a bad neighborhood, that these aren't the kind of people who are going to go to the police for help -- maybe they're harmless drug users or something like that, non-violent criminals). Then one day he witnesses armed men trying to abduct one of the neighbors from out of their house -- the aforementioned tax-evasion arrest -- and that's when shit starts to get weird. By now he understands English enough to talk about these kinds of things, but when people try to explain things like police and taxes to him, he has no concepts that correspond to those words -- he just sees an armed gang shaking people down for money. Lots of debate can ensue, and action, and so on, as nobody can present a solid justification for state authority from the ground up for someone who has never heard of anything like this idea before, and the supposed authorities violently insist that he submit whether or not any solid justification has been presented.
Maybe people try different approaches -- ala Hobbes, Locke, Roussea, etc, an outline of a political philosophy course's different theories of political legitimacy, though probably not under those names for the sake of audience approachability. Though I'm not sure
how to work in time for people trying to talk to him, because I think realistically, as soon as he tried to stop two cops from making an arrest, he'd be under increasingly escalated levels of attack until the whole U.S. military had shot its wad trying to take him down while he's just wondering what the hell he did to piss so many people off. Police and military don't explain to you why they're attacking until you're subdued and they're back in control -- and since he can't be subdued, nobody would ever talk to him. Maybe the talking happens afterward, after American civilization has imploded itself in a shit fit over one guy trying to save someone. The U.S. is just one country after all, there's plenty of story that can still happen after that. Maybe the collapsed state of America is what leads him to become a conventional superhero, since now there's nobody else fighting crime -- and probably a lot of local warlords looking to step up their own
gangsstates around the country. And a lot of other countries too, probably wondering what the hell just happened to the U.S. and who is responsible.
Is there any way to influence his actions? Debate? Peaceful protest? What, if anything, does he do about recidivism?
I would want him to be an open-minded, reasonable character who can be talked to. He doesn't just drop in, declare "you're the bad guy!" and start beating people up. He sees a conflict, asks what the problem here is, talks to people, figures out who did what, and whether that was wrong or not -- and the "was that wrong or not" is just as open to new information as "did he do it or not". (This is actually how I wish courts were run, with the law on trial as much as the facts).
For example, in the idea about him stopping two cops from arresting someone for tax evasion, I don't see him coming in swinging. I picture him jumping in to the arrestee's defense, and asking the cops to back off of justify themselves. Of course they won't be able to, but that doesn't mean he starts beating them up -- he just keeps questioning their authority and standing between them and the neighbor. These being just beat cops, the conversation is not likely to get very deep or philosophical, and before long it will probably just be "stand aside sir or you'll be under arrest as well" (if not immediately "you are under arrest for interfering in police business"), and then there's "no", and then the handcuffs come out, and then he's resisting arrest, and then there's guns, and then there's broken guns, and then there's calling for backup, and then there's SWAT and the National Guard and before you know it we've got air strikes and maybe even nukes because the military has found something it can't subdue and that just can't be allowed to continue existing.
Protests should definitely get his attention, get him listening, but I wouldn't want them to actually sway his opinions just by the fact of their existence -- large numbers of people can be simultaneously wrong about things easily.
