People will fight to put a name on things.

Sometimes it will be to put their own name on things.

This is not direct political commentary.

I am, still, talking indirectly about politicians who want to self-brand places.

But I am also talking indirectly about the guy at work who takes credit for something you did.

It’s all rooted in the same place.

Only second to the observation that AI is a discovery and not an invention, Jonathan Hickman’s stickiest point from my reading of House of X / Powers of X is this one from Magneto:

Nobody wants to be forgotten.

Nobody wants their efforts to be meaningless.

Some people can’t cope with entropy. They struggle with it all goes away. We all do, in some way.

But some of those people need to feel a larger, more lasting, more substantial weight to themselves.

So they put their name on things.

Death and being forgotten are temporal and permanent at the same time.

Dying is in time.

Being forgotten is over time.

And once you’re forgotten, that’s death, multiplied by memory, somehow.

You can easily scale these stakes up to the superhero and supervillain levels.

But it’s just ego.

It’s all ego.

Ego and entropy, all the way down.

Your sense of self and fear of death and being forgotten, extended across every individual that’s alive now, was alive in the past, and will live in the future.

So, for the rest of us who aren’t obsessed with immortality, all we can try to add is a little empathy to the equation.

Empathy is the counterweight to ego and entropy.

You can’t get rid of any one of these, but you can balance them out - via character and characters, in comic books AND real life.

Take care of your people.

Except, know it’s all fleeting.

You can’t forget it.

Accept it’s all fleeting.

Death and forgetting isn’t the worst thing.

And be very careful around anyone and everything who wants to never, ever let us forget what they did or who they are, at any cost, for exactly those reasons.

The forgetting comes no matter what.

Founding a nation just extends the impositions.

Caring for your people is the best solution for now.

Moira X knew it too. You need her story (all of them, ahem) to understand Xavier and Magneto’s mutual position on that statement.

It keeps coming back to this - read more Hickman.

ps. my other note on Hickman’s X-Men run is here, and my discussion of why the same band wrote my favorite birthday and funeral song (they’re separate songs, I’m not that weird) is here.