Captain America seems like the perfect man. He always stands for what’s right, he is always a hero and he always fights for the freedom of humanity, no matter the circumstances.
Well.. maybe that’s why he cannot lift Thor’s hammer. Maybe that’s why he is not worthy. That’s his biggest flaw. What am I babbling about you ask? Let me explain.
Captain America’s biggest flaw is his inability to stop fighting. He values war and finds purpose in fighting, but what happens when the war ends?
He fights for all the right causes, yes, but keeping the fight going will actually create more of the things you fight to stop. Sometimes you need to let the war end even if the world is not perfect.
Now let’s take Iron Man, or more accurately Ton Stark. While Cap honors old school values Tony focuses on technological advancement.
Unlike Cap, he is the voice of the future. His whole work intends to create a technology that will put a shield around the world, his purpose is to create peace once and for all. And that’s why he cannot be worthy of Thor’s hammer.
Iron Man’s biggest flaw is his desire to stop the fight, at any cost. He wants to create peace even if it means that humanity is supervised by robots 24/7. And yes, this is a story but the philosophy of their conflict is as real as the world you live in.
Society today is stretched between the old ways and the new, between waging wars and becoming slaves to technology.
So maybe the answer is somewhere between these 2 superheroes. Maybe instead of being conflicted they need to complete each other. Maybe that’s where the key of being worthy lies.
“Isn’t that the why we fight? So we can end the fight. So we get to go home!”
“Every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people die.”
Both of these arguments are correct. We fight to have peace but if we try to stop the war altogether innocent people will die. So how can we win? How can we have peace when we cannot stop fighting?
As you can see Tony is tired of fighting the never ending war, and Cap is afraid of living without a war to fight. They both see the world as imperfect and try to fix it. And that’s their ultimate flaw.
Every time someone tries to fix the world it ends up corrupting it a little bit more. The world does not need fixing. But we do. Individually.
The greatest act of heroism is teaching others how to stand for themselves, how to fight their own war, not fighting it for them.
Cap needs to calm his inner fight in order to find a purpose beyond war.
Tony needs to trust the world in order to create something that will change it positively.
And working together they will stop the war and make heroes of the innocent people.
Their biggest flaw is the thing they are running away from, either war or peace in an imperfect world. But at the end of the day it’s not about war or peace, or even perfection. It’s about living. And you start living the moment you stop running.
And sooner or later the wars will stop, once the people stop running away of their demons.
That’s how you become worthy! Or just a happy human being…
