The Second Foundation Could Have Warned Him

There's been a bit of discussion in the last week about how Tony Stark, a man who apparently has a shutdown phrase in his own armor, forgot to add such a thing to the nifty outfit he gave Peter Parker. Or maybe he did put a shutdown in there, and that's why a suit made of nanites was tearing like it was made of cloth.

Sorry. I told myself I wasn't going to pick on Civil War #5, so let's move on. I suppose the question is how Tony Stark, a self-proclaimed futurist, who could foresee the New Warriors getting blown up by Nitro (along with a school full of kids, but really, who cares about children?), and could see the benefit in someday being able to make a clone of the Norse God of Thunder, would fail to see the wisdom in putting an "off" switch in the armor he gave his protege.

Well, it all comes down to Issac Asimov. In his "Foundation" series of sci-fi novels, he talked about an idea dubbed psychohistory. This basically proposed that large groups of people have an almost hive mentality, and so their actions can be predicted (actually, this was first brought up in his "Robots" series, which took place centuries earlier, but it hadn't been named then, and I read those later, so there you go). And thus, it was possible to predict the course of future events. This was realized through a character named Hari Seldon, who predicted the current Galactic Empire would fall, and the galaxy would be thrown into 35 millenia of chaos. Seldon used what he knew to build two Foundations, a public First, and a unknown of Second, to ensure the period of chaos would be cut to 1 millenia, before the Foundation would become the new Empire. What was going to happen after that, I don't recall. Probably years of peace and prosperity.

Anyway, the people of the First Foundation settled on the tiny world they world told to, and followed Hari Seldon's plans and predictions, and for the first 200 years or so, things went as expected. Then a telepath named the Mule appeared, and leading his own space army, conquered the Foundation. The Second Foundation finally emerged, and revealed themselves telepaths as well (though of a lesser caliber), and eventually outflanked him, but no one had seen him coming. He hadn't been predicted, because individual humans are inherently unpredictable. It's only in those large groups - like an entire planetary population - that they become more predictable.

And that's the problem for the so-called "futurists". The number of superhumans, and superhuman-related conflicts, had risen to a point where it was possible to predict the outcome you got in Stamford was going to occur. Honestly, it probably should have happened sooner, but writers and editors at Marvel had enough sense not to go with a story about lots of small children dying. Sorry, editorializing again. Either way, it was a large enough sample size to predict not only this, but the resistance that certain heroes would have to the registration. The formulas didn't say exactly who would resist, that probably boiled down more to what Tony and Reed knew of each person, but it was easily predicted that some were going to say "No way".

But Spider-Man's turning on Stark is about one person, already in the fold, changing his mind, and going in a different direction. In all likelihood the formulas said that once someone was in, and had seen what fate awaited those who opposed the Act, there's no way they'd risk Negative Zone Prison to switch allegiances. But it's like I said a while back, it's part of who Peter is to be unpredictable. He gets frustrated with Jonah, and rather than lash out violently, or quit this "costumed hero" crap, he puts webbing on Jameson's chair as a prank. He screws around with the Human Torch, then asks and gives help to the Matchstick, teases and humiliates his enemies, and in general does all sorts weird stuff that doesn't necessarily make sense. If you want to chalk that up to part of the whole "Spider-Totem of a chaotic Trickster God", go for it. I'm sure JMS will. Or we could simply call it human nature. Is that still more editorializing? Who cares.

The point is, we shouldn't be too harsh on Tony Stark. His "futurist sense" was simply insufficient to perceive the tortured inner workings of Peter Parker's over-responsible soul.