 Keeping with Hollywood's grand quest to adapt every possible comic book property into a film or television show, Netflix recently released a new series based on a comic by writer Mark Millar and artist Frank Whitely called Jupiter's Legacy. You might know Millar from his other film adaptations like Wanted or Kingsman the Secret Service. Notably, Millar also wrote Marvel's Civil War event comic and Old Man Logan, both of which were the basis for massively successful films. Even so, unless you're a huge fan of the medium, I'm betting you've never heard of Jupiter's Legacy. To be honest, when I first started watching the series, I wasn't all that impressed. And since Netflix already canceled it, apparently neither was anyone else. But as I got a few episodes in, I realized that I was absolutely going to have to talk about it. Against all odds, Jupiter's Legacy features the most relevant and important set of themes and ideas of any new show I've seen in years. In a world filled with anti-heroes and stories about superheroes who don't understand the difference between being powerful and doing good, this show makes a clear case for upholding values that set its core characters apart from everybody else. And when those values are challenged, it tackles some complex moral issues head on without simply abandoning its principles to the kind of nihilism we so often find in this genre. There's just so much that's worth talking about here, from the truth about whether or not the world is getting worse and more dangerous, to the morality of markets and capitalism, to the best ways of keeping power in check and what happens when people stop supporting good ideas. We're about to get into all that and more, but before we do, as some of you know, YouTube has been throttling a lot of our content lately. So in order to make sure we stay in touch, we've set up an email newsletter that will hopefully mean you never miss an episode, even if it doesn't make it into your recommendations. Check the link in the description to find out how to get on the list, but in the meantime, stick around and smash that like button for this hopefully enlightening episode of Out of Frame. For those who haven't seen the show, I'm going to do my best not to spoil anything super important, but here's what you need to know. In 1929, just after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, destroyed his family's previously successful steel business, and ultimately cost him the life of his father, a man named Sheldon Sampson has a vision of a mysterious island that would eventually lead him and a small group of his friends to gain incredible superpowers. There's a bit of a mystery about how that works, so I'm not going to get into all that, but Sampson himself gains the powers of flight, invulnerability, speed, accelerated healing, heat vision, and telepathic immunity. So, you know, he's Superman. The other members of his crew, Lady Liberty, Brainwave, The Flare, Blue Bolt, and Skyfox gain similar powers with a few variations, and when they return to the world, they all become the first generation of superheroes. Sheldon Sampson adopts the moniker, the Utopian, and founds the Union of Justice, at which point they begin using their powers to try to make the world a better place, all built around a simple but effective code that is designed to ensure that the team actually does what they set out to do without allowing their power to turn them into tyrants. We are going to get into this in more depth a bit later, but for now, you just need to know that the code is really important. We don't govern, and we don't kill. That's the code. That's not just our values, that's our system of checks and balances, so that nobody here can even think about ruling the world. Now, flash forward to the present, about 90 years later, and the Utopian is getting old, but he's still around, saving the world one rogue meteor at a time. And his code did what it was supposed to do. Even with all of his power and desire to do good, he didn't become an evil despot controlling the world by force. And as a result, most everyone in the general public seems to trust and respect him. Meanwhile, he's now married to Lady Liberty, Grace, and they have two kids, Chloe and Brandon, who each have comparable superpowers. In fact, most of the original Union of Justice members now have superhuman children and grandchildren, and most of those kids are members of the Union. So the world's population of heroes has expanded a lot since the 1930s. But the younger generation is also starting to question the Utopian's code. They see it as a quaint product of an older, simpler time. This tension comes to a head when the Union battles a particularly strong and violent supervillain named Blackstar. During the fight, Blackstar kills a couple of the younger heroes and appears to be close to defeating the Utopian when the Utopian's son, Paragon, punches Blackstar hard enough to kill him first. This sparks a debate that continues throughout the series about whether or not Paragon's actions were morally right, and if they are, what value the Utopian's code could have for all the superheroes of today? It's an important question about the proper limits of power and the line between self-defense and excessive force, and one that regular people actually face in real life. The Utopian's code, in my opinion, is one of the best statements of principle I've ever seen in a series about superheroes, and it's restated and clarified multiple times. These rules are essential, in part because they ensure that the superpowered people in this world don't become judged, jury, and executioner whenever they go on patrol, or worse, that they turn into gods and kings, but also because they're explicitly designed to respect the individual rights and humanity of everyone they are trying to serve, including suspected criminals. The Utopian's code is the antithesis of the kind of might-makes-right thinking that you see among the worst villains in both literary and real-world history. It's also exactly what I was talking about in my recent Out of Frame episode on Zack Snyder's Justice League. The Utopian actually values individual liberty and is committing to upholding and protecting people's rights. As many people in the show point out, it's not always the easiest way to go about his job. Well, no kidding. But this is literally what separates him from the rest of humanity, and it's what makes him not only super, but also a hero. Unfortunately, he has a really hard time conveying the importance of these values to everyone else. The Utopian is trying to set an example for everyone to follow, regardless of whether or not they have his same abilities. Avoiding the temptation to lose our temper and try to hurt, dominate, or control other people when they don't do exactly what we want is a problem every one of us has to grapple with, regardless of whether or not we have any fantastic special abilities. But these values are even more important to uphold for those among us who actually have significant power, physical or otherwise. That's why there's been a ton of philosophical debate about individual rights and the role of government for millennia, eventually becoming a major focus of the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment era and for modern libertarians today. For those who are unfamiliar or who have only heard these terms described by critics, classical liberalism and libertarianism in particular are political philosophies primarily concerned with protecting human freedom and empowering individuals to have the greatest possible control over their own lives. The less exciting, but maybe more useful way to say this is that it's about defining the appropriate role of coercive force in society. They believe that human beings are self-determined individuals who each have moral rights to life, liberty and property. They emphasize the universality of these rights, meaning that everyone should be bound by the same ethical rules, regardless of popularity, socioeconomic status or political power. This has a profound effect on their understanding of the role of government. Whatever is unethical for private citizens to do, theft, assault, murder, kidnapping, and so on remains unethical when that individual has put on a government uniform. Or, you know, tights in a cape. This separates classical liberalism from other political philosophies that usually treat ethics as conditional on a person's role in society and inconsistently grants special authorities and privileges to certain people over others. This kind of inconsistency takes many forms, but most of the justifications for it ultimately come from the collectivist idea that moral authority is a matter of what group you belong to. Collectivist morality is how we end up with dangerous forms of nationalism, colonialism, racial and ethnic genocides, religious theocracies, and even populist revolutions that pit men against women, rich against poor, capitalist against workers, and assigns more rights based on group identity. It all comes back to believing that different rules apply to different people depending on their collective label. But if you accept the core premise of classical liberals like Adam Smith, John Locke, David Hume, Baron de Montesquieu, Friedrich Bastiat, Voltaire, James Madison, and others that rights are a product of our humanity and self-ownership as individuals, then you'll understand why they actually must be unconditional and universal. In other words, no matter who you are, you don't get to hurt people or take their stuff, and you have the right to expect others not to do that to you. And also, even if you're frustrated and struggling to solve a problem that you really, really want to solve, that doesn't mean you get to escalate the use of force in your interactions with anyone else. And by the way, passing laws that get people arrested or killed for not obeying your preferences is just farming out that kind of coercion to someone else. All that said, I think that most people can definitely understand that there is a difference between aggressive force being used coercively and violence being used in self-defense. And that's why the utopian's code is ultimately the subject of significant discussion. While all the principles I just talked about should lead us to be extremely thoughtful about when it's okay to use force in our interactions with other people, it probably shouldn't mean that there are zero circumstances where force is necessary. The situation in Jupiter's legacy seems like a pretty good example. In a context where Black Star had already killed other members of the team and had the upper hand in a deadly fight, Paragon's choice to use lethal force undeniably saved innocent lives. This is why a large majority of the public supports Paragon's actions. The utopian isn't happy about this. Even though Paragon saved his life, for people as powerful as the Union of Justice, approving the use of lethal force can set a deeply dangerous precedent. No matter what. Of course, on this point the utopian is absolutely right. It's not justice, it's just a tragedy. The utopian also believes that there is always a way to solve even the worst problems without killing, which for someone with his powers, there probably is. Even so, I wouldn't say Paragon did the wrong thing in that critical moment with Black Star, but that's only because it was a legitimate case of defensive violence and because Black Star's strength and power were comparable to or even exceeding Paragon's. Had those conditions been different, his actions would probably not be justified. In the same way that we should understand it as murder for a police officer to kill someone already restrained and encustered. And none of this means that the utopian's code is wrong or outdated. Even if it's hard to uphold and there are a few very rare exceptions that might need to be made. What good is setting an example if no one ever follows it? Because it's the right thing. In the show, Brandon does eventually come around to his parents' way of thinking. You have to make a choice, otherwise you're standing by letting the world go. In Jupiter's legacy, the utopian's code has two essential principles and a lot of people seem to want to abandon them both. The first is about the use of force and maintaining a higher standard of ethics than the bad guys his team is trying to stop. Killing is never the answer. Many of the younger generation of heroes believe that the world is getting worse and that their enemies are growing more and more dangerous, and the code is too restrictive to apply to the modern world. So they argue that they should be allowed to escalate their use of force and kill bad people as they see fit. After all, if the bad guys don't have any moral restrictions, why should they? The other part of the code is about avoiding entanglements with politics in order to prevent the union of justice from becoming monstrous dictators. We have the chance to end the war a lot sooner. And then what? Get involved with Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East. Start dictating social and economic policy. And where does that end? And more importantly, who is going to stop us? The utopian wants the team to serve humanity and respect individual rights, not control everyone. But the new members of the union assume that their heightened intellect, psychic powers, and physical skills will make them capable of planning economies, manipulating human behavior, and controlling the culture in helpful ways, and start pushing for more involvement with the state. Incidentally, the consequences of some members of the union seeing themselves as superior to humanity and justifying their supposedly benevolent desire to rule the world is a major plotline in the comics, and the result is pretty bad. In the end, a big part of the younger generation's objection to the code really just seems to be the utopian's reputation as an old guy. The show even sort of goes out of its way to make him seem out of touch. Amusingly, one of the ways they do that is by allowing him to voice a full-throated defense of capitalism in the face of journalists who challenged its validity after Black Tuesday. You rotten little Marxists! Capitalism made this building! It made your homes, and it made your cars, and my father made the steal that built everything that makes this country the greatest in the world! Facts. I think the real point of a lot of these kinds of scenes is to highlight how old and lame the utopian's ideals are. Like, we should all be laughing at the boomer who thinks capitalism is a good thing in 2021. But I mean, yeah, it is a good thing. Because it is the reason for the massive explosion of wealth and prosperity that has driven our standards of living to the peak of what it's ever been in human history. Countries that have failed to adopt the basic ideas of strong property rights, open trade, and low barriers to entrepreneurship are still mired in absolute poverty. Even the Great Depression was caused and significantly prolonged by government intervention into the economy. Economic freedom is a great idea that should be defended. It's also connected to the code and the overall defense of individual rights. People's right to use their minds, bodies, and physical resources to create value and freely trade the stuff they create with other people in exchange for the things they produce should be defended every bit as seriously as their right to speak freely, choose their religious beliefs, marry who they want, or engage in any other kind of voluntary behavior. But that's not how a lot of people feel about capitalism now. So that scene was just another way to make the utopian seem like an old man. The utopian is standing in the way of other people's grand dreams of, ironically, an impossible utopia. But they're wrong on pretty much all counts. Let me explain. Firstly, let's accept for the sake of argument that in the show the world is a worse and more dangerous place than it was in the 1930s. But even if that's true, abandoning the things that make you a good person, such as upholding standards of due process and protecting individual rights, reigning in excessive force and avoiding unnecessary killing in order to fight bad people on their terms just turns you into a bad person. That's not good, but also the real world isn't getting worse or more dangerous, nor is it getting poorer in the countries that maintain relatively free economies. So it's a flawed premise to begin with. Quite to the contrary, as people around the world have gotten more free, we've seen a massive decline in global poverty. People are less likely to die violent deaths than at any previous time in history. Violent crime has been going down for decades. Kings and lords no longer have the power to take your land or your stuff or conscript you into their armies to die for causes you don't care about. You can trade with people on the other side of the world and reap the awesome benefits of interacting with other people's art, culture, ideas, and technology. When you look at how much time people need to work at average salaries to achieve their standards of living, people have access to more and vastly better quality stuff than ever before in exchange for far fewer hours of work. To put these advancements into context, in 1800 it would take the average person 50 hours of work to earn enough income to power the equivalent of a 100 watt light bulb for one hour. Today you'd work for less than a second and where once our jobs were mostly manual labor done under brutal conditions, we now enjoy considerably shorter, easier work days usually done indoors with air conditioning. We often look at our cost of living and get frustrated because the prices we see keep going up as a consequence of inflation. And sure we should be upset about that, but that shouldn't cause us to lose sight of the immense progress we've made, especially over the last 200 years after the serious development and adoption of classical liberal ideas. So the new superhumans in Jupiter's legacy and tons of people in real life who are looking for a great reset to blow up Western society are playing with a whole lot of fire and they're gonna get us all burned. Even in the context of the story, it's patently absurd to think that the utopian's code isn't equipped to withstand modern problems. It weathered prohibition and violent gangs, the Great Depression, the Nazis in World War II, the USSR and the rise of communism, the Cold War, the civil rights era, Vietnam, the explosion of gang violence associated with the war on drugs, terrorism and 9-11, as well as economic downturns in the late 1970s, 1980s, early 2000s, and late 2000s. As a set of principles, it's rock solid. Abandoning the code in the face of new threats will not only fail to improve the situation's new generations of superheroes are facing, it will make them worse, and in many ways it will also turn them into villains. The real value of the code is that as long as it remains in practice, it limits the power of people who could easily decide to conquer instead of serve. If the new generation is going to become judge, jury and executioner whenever they decide someone does something wrong, how are they any different from the bad guys? And if they're going to get involved in politics and assert their power over government, what's to stop them from becoming tyrants dictating to people all over the world how they're allowed to live? Nothing. The code built around the principles of a free society is the only thing standing in the way of dystopia in the show and in real life. Good principles are worth upholding in the worst of times, most of all. And in a world where everyone's behaving badly, the best and in fact most radical thing you can do is be better. And that's why far from being outdated, these ideas matter more than ever. The massive expansion of government and rejection of limits on state power in 2020 rolled back many of the incredible wins for humanity I talked about earlier. And if we end up with even more power concentrated in political systems around the world, these losses will only get worse. We need to remember that it was upholding the principles of individual freedom and gradually expanding those ideas to include more people that created our modern prosperous society. When we lose sight of that, we lose the very thing that genuinely improved the lives of billions around the world. I'm generally an optimist, so I think that in the long run we will get our lives back and one way or another humanity will eventually come around to the idea that individualism is good and that inconsistent collectivist morality and concentrated power are a disaster. But there's no guarantee when that will happen. And it's actually up to us to decide how long it's going to take. It all depends on how many of us make the choice to embrace better ideas, a better code, today. Instead of waiting until the world gives us no other option. The code wasn't meant to make our lives easier. That's not easy to deal with sometimes, but what we do, it's never about the easy way out. That's what separates us from everyone else. Audio is available all over the place, but if you prefer a video version, we've set up a YouTube channel just for that. It comes out every Friday, but our Patreon and Subscribe Star supporters get early access, swag, special bonus content, and a private channel on Discord. And speaking of our supporters, I especially want to thank our associate producers. To Connor McGowan, Richard Lawrence, Matt Tabor, and Vega Starlight, thank you. Find the links to support the show and everything else I talked about in today's episode in the description below. And as always, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel, ring that bell icon, join our email list, and look for out of frame accounts on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. See you next time.