A movement would form. It is very nearly a historical law. Human beings confronted with apparently inexplicable power do not, in the main, respond with curiosity or with fear alone; a substantial minority respond with devotion, and they do so quickly, and they organise. There would be people who prayed to him, which is not the same as admiring him. There would be people who attributed to him events he had no part in, and who were unpersuaded when told. There would be a demand for relics — and I would put money on a market in strands of his hair existing within eighteen months, with authentication services and forgeries. There would be doctrine, and schism within the doctrine, and the schism would be about whether he was to be understood as an unusually capable man or as something else, and the arguments would be conducted by people he had never met, in his lifetime, in his name.
And here is the cruelty of it, which is why this belongs in a chapter about what power does to a mind: he cannot refuse. Refusal does not work. A man who says he is not divine is understood to be humble, and humility in a figure of this kind is not a rebuttal; it is a credential. Every disavowal is absorbed as evidence. There is no available speech act that stops it, and after a few attempts he would learn that the attempts make it worse and would stop making them, which would be read as acceptance.
I find this the most claustrophobic of all the psychological pressures on him, more than the fame or the loneliness or the impunity, because it removes even the possibility of correction. The parasocial fan at least has a model of him that could in principle be updated by information. The devotee has a model that is strengthened by disconfirmation, and there is nothing he can do about it except be careful, forever, about every sentence — knowing that a remark made in irritation on a bad Thursday may be quoted for three hundred years.
from How to Think Seriously About Superheroes (2026)
