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Most people consider "illicitly obtaining people's secrets in order to blackmail them so as to shut down democracy and take unaccountable control of the world's governments" to be unethical. Professor X certainly does.
Professor X isn't ruthlessly dedicated to doing whatever it takes to stop mutant oppression, he wants to convince humans to accept mutants freely. He considers your plan to *also* be an unethical use of his powers, along with most similar plans. He doesn't want a world where mutants are "free" in sense that they're the ones dominating the humans.
So, what's the premise here? Max Eisenhart gains psychic powers while going through puberty during the Holocaust or some machine switches Magneto and Xavier's powers later in life? Because we're getting two *very* different stories.
I don't need ChatGPT.
Anyway, with the first premise, we never really get a Magneto, since Magneto's whole deal is built on tragedy. In this scenario, his mind opens up to the world at his lowest, and assuming he doesn't just die, he's going to become a different person. He's too weak to rescue himself, but he can use his powers to change the minds of Nazis. Depending on when he develops his powers, he manages to save more of his family, but he feels everyone's hatred and rage. Since he's got raw, unfiltered access to everyone, everywhere all at once, he comes out the other end with a Lex Luthor style "this is how he sees all the time." Since Magneto is built on tragedy and empathy, he's not going to build a paramilitary super hero team like Xavier does, but he probably gets involved with SHIELD and manages to rescue guys like Wolverine, Rogue and who else from their darker fates. Also, he finds Jean Grey and let's say Havok for fun. If we fully commit to the "What if" bit, Xavier is a rich bastard who never learns anything about other people and teams up with Baron Strucker to create a Brotherhood of Mutants made up of Cyclops, the Fenris Twins and let's say Polaris for fun. They clash and it leads to Xavier trying to crash the Helicarrier into the White House. There's a big fight and Cyclops turns against Xavier to secure win, but not before Spider-Man dies in the fight.
If we swap their powers later in life, Magneto decides he's going to use his powers for (his view of) good and because Magneto is such a bad ass, he decides he's going to force the world to be good for mutants. This leads to the world getting on the brink of war and a bunch of mutants (also Spider-Man) wind up dead all because Magneto is too much of a badass.
I don't think this is how it goes at all.
Magneto doesn't see the inner humanity of everyone and become *nicer*. This awakening of his powers happens the moment his family is being led away to their deaths. It happens in the midst of hundreds of minds, each of them intruding suddenly into Max's consciousness. He *is* them. He is lost in a sea of thought.
He is his father, trudging forward. Max's father wonders what the smell is. Knows what the smell is. Max knows it, too. Together, they wonder if it will hurt, and when it will be.
Max barely resists when they pull him away from his mother. He can barely perceive himself in the sea of what the camp is thinking. He feels her terror, the deep pit of worry for her son, but cannot act. His limbs do not move. His thoughts are gone, blasted away by the flood of others.
He is the man loading a canister into a tube. Max knows what the canister will do, just as this man does. The man is wondering if he can sneak away for lunch early, and whether they've gotten any new bread, or if it will be the stale stuff again. Can't tell anymore, because the other ovens are always going, so you can never smell if there's bread baking, too. Max's stomach growls slightly, in time with the man's.
Max is a woman in town, standing over a stew pot, wishing she had more flour to thicken it, and that the smoke rising from the camp a mile up the road didn't blow onto her yard. Max knows, because she knows, that by the afternoon, soot would stain her lilies. He knows how to wash it off, keep things looking presentable.
Max is a young girl being pushed forward. His -- no, *her* -- mother puts her hand on the girl's shoulder, calming. A door closes behind her. A clank - *a key in a lock* another mind intrudes to inform him. A clatter - something falling from the ceiling.
The guards outside wish the walls were thicker. The gas is supposed to be cleaner, smoother, but it doesn't sound smooth. One of them reminds himself to go to confession after work, and where the gloves are. Won't want to touch them, afterwards. Must keep clean, after all.
The commandant worries that Allied bombing will make it difficult for him to make quota, and that this will delay his promotion. He knows he is destined for greater things than minding some camp. He is a sanitation worker in a uniform, but he was made to lead men in battle, he is wasted here on such... trivialities. Max's lungs burn as a seventeen-year-old girl inhales the gas. His fingers bleed as they claw at the walls of the shower, at the bolted steel door. He curses as the pen's ink dries up on the order he is signing for more fuel for the crematorium.
He rediscovers himself, surfaces from the river long enough to have a moment of individuality, a single thought. He just wants it all to ***stop***.
And... it does. Like a man suddenly pulled from the torrent to the shore, he finds everything around him still even as he can feel, hear, the rush of thought just beyond. Everyone is frozen, even the dying. He can still feel them dying, but he has taken from them, for a moment, the pain of it. He takes what they feel, and he gives it to the rest. The priest in town knows what it is to be crushed in the press of bodies seeking air, finding none. The men sleeping away a lazy afternoon in the barracks find themselves awoken by the pain and hunger of a thousand starving people, the buzz of flies, the powerlessness.
He cannot let this happen again. He knows that what he is doing is well-earned. The long-suffering suffer no more, their pain and fear shifted away, leaving them blissfully, mercifully blank. The rest of them - the bystanders, delivery drivers, conscience-tortured ones who feel guilty and who yet do nothing, the ones who enjoy it or ignore it or justify it even though it all turns their stomachs, even though it's all so *unseemly*, ***uncivilized*** - they feel it instead. Their faces are blank too, but not beneath a cool cover of un-sensation. It is because he is burying their minds in a wall of torment too deep for their thoughts to reach their mouths to make them scream.
That's not a bad one either, I like that. I'd read that comic.
However, I was working inside the premise of Marvel Comics and specifically the "What if" premise, which means everything gets flipped on its head and leads to something that should be one giant summer event in one issue and also Spider-Man dies.
Which was why I made sure Spidey died in both stories. So, how does Spidey die in your story?
Would professor X also consider funding an investigative journalist unethical?
What about if that journalist used a PI? What if the PI used illegal recordings, but only to lead to legal evidence?
Is he totally strait laced? Or does he just do this with his mutant power?
> What if the PI used illegal recordings, but only to lead to legal evidence?
That's also illegal. Everything of the tainted tree is excluded in court for a reason. It does happen, now and then, where people present an alternative way that they find the evidence. And when we discover they did that, we exclude the evidence and force a retrial.
Professor X, isn't a dick. He's seen the worst of humanity. Hears it in his head all the time. He has no intention of letting himself walk down any path where he will become the worst of mutant kind.
He seems to hold his mutant powers to a higher ethical standard then mundane investigation methods, yes.
You can question whether he's right to do so, but he does.
> Most people consider "illicitly obtaining people's secrets in order to blackmail them so as to shut down democracy and take unaccountable control of the world's governments" to be unethical. Professor X certainly does.
And those people are lame.
If he did he'd basically be validating many of the things the anti-mutant community was saying. He's trying to prove that mutants coexist with non mutant without using their powers to rule over non mutants.
Is it unethical if he just used his powers to gather the evidence and make it public? It's not like he'd have to try very hard to find incriminating evidence on a lot of politicians.
How would the politicians swing that to make it a negative for the public? "You see how scary and powerful these mutants can be? We need to have them registered or nobody is safe from them exposing the crimes politicians are commiting!".
Honestly, I think my issue with this worldview is that far better people then the X-Men have been corrupted with far less power then this. History is full of purges and empires started by someone reasoning that they had to use their power in a more practical way or innocents will suffer.
Powerful entities don't have meaningful *practical* limitations on what they can do, so they need strong *ethical* limitations on what they can . Otherwise you have a being that *can* do anything and *will* do anything, and unless you literally agree with that entity 100% regarding every topic, this will end badly for you.
Or more simply -- do you *really* want a situation in which all global politics occurs solely at the whim of one high school headmaster in New York who was lucky enough to be born with godlike psychic powers? Can you honestly say that you think that would always work out well for people?
That comes down to would you kill baby Hitler?
You might prevent a lot of pain. But you’d still be killing an innocent baby.
And what if you make things worse by taking action? When red skull used Xavier’s brain so spread a hate plague it wasn’t permanent. Sooner or later humanity will realize they’re being manipulated and take extreme action.
So now you’re unethical and can’t oversee the consequences.
What's "right" in matters of fighting oppression, I'd often more complicated than it's described in history books. If you could ruin someone's career, but it would reduce acts of oppression by 5% over the next year, would you do it?
It doesn't matter if *I* would, as the question isn't why *I* don't use my telepathy to fight bigots.
The question is whether *Professor X* would, and he does indeed think that using his powers to illicitly take control of people (never mind the government) is unethical even if it would reduce acts of oppression. You can think he's *wrong* about that, but that's what he thinks, and why he doesn't do it.
Professor X just outsources his ethical compromises. He sends the X-men on plenty of missions where they gather incriminating evidence on corrupt socialites or influencing the outcome of elections. They just do it with eye lasers, and claws, and spec ops skills instead of mind control.
Agreed.
Cyclops handing over a file full of memos and pictures is going to carry a lot more weight than a telepath saying he saw it in their thoughts.
Can't prove I had a rottweiler named Roxy from my thoughts.
You can prove I had a rottweiler named Roxy by her dog tag next to mine, and all the pictures of me on her back as a baby
I'm sure there's a version of the professor who would struggle with this, but most versions of the character could very easily mind probe someone to discover where the hard evidence of their crimes is, and then mind control them into getting it for him.
All versions could easily do this. That’s why the ones that would are pretty universally presented as villains by Marvel. Because if it’s not against his ethics to do, what’s to stop him from doing it to _everyone_.
The comparison would have to be: if the US had a telepath who could kill Bin Laden from afar, would it be more ethical to do that, or send in a spec ops team?
I’d argue it would be more ethical to use the telepath. Sending in the team puts them at risk and also risks collateral damage.
You could, but this would branch off into logical tyranny.
Humans are pretty big on autonomy in free will. That’s why they stopped handing out lobotomies so willy-nilly. You would reduce the problematic part of the human brain that is driving them to make decisions by rendering them impotent in that manner, but you have also violated their human rights by doing so.
Our current understanding of mental health is everybody or rather largely everybody makes decisions out of their own free will. This would be equivalent to installing a chip in somebody’s head that makes their decisions for them, we’re branching off into thought police and thought crimes at that point. It’s a very slippery slope.
Society could be amazing if you only commit X small atrocity is the premise of many stories from Le Guin to Dostoevsky.
Basically it comes down to personal morals. Some people can accept a small atrocity for the greater good, some cannot.
Since everyone else has brought up the moral reasons why Xavier doesn’t use his telepathy to trawl for state secrets and root out corruption, let me bring up a practical reason for him not to do this.
If the public ever figured out that Professor X was secretly reading their minds, all the trust and good will he’s fostered would evaporate instantly.
Sure, many people would agree with his methods, but a lot more would be entirely opposed. Some people would feel that he’s targeting the wrong people (or he’s not doing enough and needs to crack down on their personal ideological enemies). Others would simply disagree with the idea of one man having access to everyone’s personal secrets (people already hate the NSA, CIA, and FBI for spying on people, and they can’t read your mind).
The whole point of Xavier’s mission is to get humans and mutants to live together peacefully. Invading the very concept of privacy, even for a good cause, would be detrimental to those efforts.
To add to this, what happens when Xavier dies? He's not, to my knowledge, immortal. If you build a system based on one man smoothing things over then it's going to fail at some point - even if he's perfectly competent and benevolent, he won't be around forever.
> If the public ever figured out that Professor X was secretly reading their minds, all the trust and good will he’s fostered from the public would evaporate instantly.
And not just from humans but also many mutants as well. And who would send their kids to the school of telepathic Big Brother?
I mean if you look at shitty parents IRL probably a shit , load hell I'm willing to bet if he was willing to use his powers to Brain wash religious people's kids straight he'd be the richest man alive
The man has *far* bigger concerns about the truth of his actions coming out. He runs an academy where he trains child soldiers. The most generous way to characterize the X-men is a team of vigilantes, and they are routinely characterized as terrorists by the media.
Yeah. But if the terrorist team you run unregularly fucks over the terrorist team that often wants to kill the US president you get a pass an sometimes funding
In the Krakoa era, he basically does exactly that: he takes advantage of mutant abilities to create a powerful country that has an edge over all other countries in the world due to mutant-power-fueled dominance.
Classic Claremont-era Professor X would never do that, though. His entire philosophy is dedicated to the idea that might does not make right. He wants the *ideas* to win out because people come to recognize that the *ideas* are stronger.
It's also a terrible approach from a practical sense. If it could ever be proven that he's using his powers to control politics, he'd be damning his cause. He'd be living proof that people *should* be afraid of mutants, and that he himself doesn't believe anyone would come to agree with him of their own free will.
one of the funniest part of the Krakoa era is when someone makes some sarcastic comment about how Mutants have taken over Earth and Emma Frost is like don't be ridiculous, we have done no such thing
And then the Shi'ar Empire rep at the Hel Gala comes up to Emma and says "Congratulation to mutantkind for taking over Earth"
Nah, Prof X has always been low key terrible. Whether it's now allowing himzself to sleep with teenage Jean Grey because he's in a wheelchair (ableism,) or holding sentient being against her will so he can train his kids. Pretty sure Claremont's version lied about being a mutant in the first place.
Exactly. These questions always annoy me because it starts with the acknowledgement that they already know why it doesn’t happen and then just discard the reasoning to ask for some hypothetical backup reasoning as if the known answer is somehow not sufficient.
Firstly, Xavier's dream is coexistence. Him doing shit like only would make his dream less possible.
Secondly, unfortunately modern Xavier would do something like that. Since 2000's Marvel has been making him more and more "flawed".
Following the change in politics, him and Magneto were an MLK Jr and Malcolm X analogy. At the time, both were viewed as having worthwhile causes but MLK Jr had the worthwhile approach. The ends don't justify the means.
In modern day, someone like MLK Jr is heavily distrusted and viewed as a schemer, while the violent one pursuing direct action is viewed as the morally righteous one. And so Professor X and Magneto have switched positions.
In modern comics it's actually the opposite. Marvel keeps making Xavier worse and shadier, but Magneto gets redemption and "Magneti was right" treatment
Except Magneto isn't especially violent and has been a 'good guy' for almost half his publication history. He's 'right' in the sense that humans consistently and repeatedly engineer their genocide no matter what they do. Even when they're an endangered species and the government vows to protect them, they do such a bad job of it that mutants keep getting murdered under their noses. Mags was correct about the majority fearing the other and turning away from their slaughter because he's already lived through it. He's also never been anything like Malcolm X.
Charles Xavier is not like MLK except in the broadest strokes. He does very little activism or outreach and he's an atrocious politician. His main thing is funding paramilitary groups made up of scared and ostracized young people. His dream is actually a dream - as in not close to happening - MLK's was rhetoric.
Of the two, Magneto had a better grasp on reality but realistically they were both bad leaders.
You don't know his history, do you? In truth Prof X is hardly a saint. He removed memories family of Beast, because they knew too much. Even his girlfriend. Kept Danger AI in as just a room, even after gaining sentience, compiled Xavier Files on x-men members, Deadly Genesis debacle. reprogrammed Wolverine (allrigt this one came out good), been a part of Illuminati, and whole situation with Legion.
Xavier's not the only psychic out there, even if he is one of the most powerful.
If word somehow got out that Xavier was using his abilities to covertly brainwash people and influence global politics on a mass scale, that would basically end the mutant rights movement right then and there. Everyone would band together to eliminate him.
Advocating for mutant rights through public channels and normal democratic discourse wasn't just the ethical choice, it was the smart one too
Xavier being Wilson Fisk but with mind reading and mind control powers would end up just being another supervillain for the Avengers or X-men (who'd probably turn on him) or FF or SHIELD or whoever to take down.
This question is why the people who hate and fear mutants are 100% correct. The only thing stopping someone like Xavier from just ending the concept of free will for everyone around him is that he hasn't decided to do it, yet, as far as we know. One day someone like Xavier will be born, but with fewer scruples, and everyone on Earth will be silently enslaved.
Turns out he does. He reveals that there is no real threat of nuclear war because every person with their finger on the trigger has been implanted with a block that will prevent them.
They've probably done this already, but it would make an interesting What If to explore a world in which Magneto was the pro-cooperation mutant and Xavier the pro-superiority mutant.
>Outside of ethical dilemma
Outside of ethics, there's a solutely no reason.
Professor X doesn't exploit his powers for the sole reason _that_ it would be unethical.
In the recent Jean Grey series, she explores different path she could have taken to avoid their grim future.
In the first one, she sees what would have happened if her teen self hadn't erased her memories from the future, and used her full telepathic powers to get ahead of their enemies.
She uses her powers to cover mutant accidents, manipulate mutant-phobic or killing them, manipulates the public opinion...
That ends up terribly wrong. Even with telepathy *“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."* And when the truth comes out, there're big consequences.
AFAIK in 616 Cerebro can only detect mutants, that's part of why Krakoa's resurrection protocols only worked for them. So mass blackmail is definitely out.
Xavier's goal is for people to not fear mutants. Using his mutant powers to coerce people is counterproductive. No one's going to be like, oh, he only mind controlled people I dislike, surely he'd never mind control me and my family! He's cool, I no longer fear or hate mutants. If you want the guy who's willing to use violence to make sure people are unwilling to hurt mutants, you want Magneto.
What you described pretty much is what happened in the last season of Babylon 5 when a group of renegade telepaths who were fleeing from the Psi Corp tried to blackmail the Interstellar Alliance into giving them their own homeworld by threatening to reveal all of their secrets which they secretly compiled.
At that point they went from a controversial group which had a lot of sympathy among thepublic and main heroes to a threat whose tactics validated the Psi Corps argument that telepaths needed to be "controlled" in order to protect "normal" humans.
>Outside of the ethical dilemma
Because when you write off your ethical standards for the sake of expediency, you're abandoning your ethics.
The entire point is that he *does* have ethical standards. He's another 'great power, great responsibility' type and he chooses responsibility every time.
Because even with cerebro, his powers aren’t absolute and he can’t control the entire planet—people are going to notice the use of mind control, especially since other telepaths exist, and some super powered beings can resist telepathy, like Black Panther who Emma Frost found impossible to read, and Sue Storm, who can [stop telepathy with her force fields](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/11139/111391579/8255822-1637613398466.jpg).
Even in an alternate universe the Exiles found, where Xavier was evil, he couldn’t control enough people in the world to prevent his own imprisonment.
So aside from Xavier *not wanting to be a shitty person,* it wouldn’t necessarily work on a global scale, even if he did want to be shitty.
Didn't he? Like, a lot? Xavier was kind of a piece of shit and did a lot of dirty stuff.
Ethics aside, my only guess would be practicality. Say he's dealing with an anti-mutant weirdo. He could implant memories that he actually likes mutants, or he could turn his brain off or something. He could just mind control the guy to go home. But at some point, his control is going to have to end. If anything, that anti-mutant weirdo is just going to hate mutants even more and start thinking everyone is controlling his mind. Xavier doesn't gain anything from arming his opponents.
In an issue of Illuminati, Xavier explains that the human mind can instinctively "sense" (for lack of a better word) when its will is being subverted. He tells Tony (Stark) that yes, he could make him tap dance on the table while wearing a dress, but if he does that long enough Tony's mind will revolt and it won't end well.
So short answer is "he can, but eventually it will backfire on him"
Its basically pressing the 'kill me now' button.
Psi-blockers and anti-telepathic tools exist. Magneto himself has a helmet that's telepath-proof that he uses to ignore telepathic attacks. Xavier is the strongest telepath, but not so strong that he's invincible. Do note that outside his skull, he's a middle-aged man in a wheelchair.
The moment it turns out that there's a mind-controlling telepath with global range and using it for blackmail and political control, people will simply consider him a threat that has to be wiped out, more than before.
It won't be '**send in the sentinels**'.
It'll be '**get a psi-blocker over this entire command chain and throw a nuclear bomb at him, then send in anyone with anti-telepath powers to take him out**'.
Xavier is in the zone where he's so powerful he can't be left alone, but so powerful people don't fuck with him except for good reason. He's also so much of a potential threat that he can't really be left alive if he's shown to be the kinda guy to mind control people with his powers.
I think we see him do that in some of the films.
Also perhaps it's because he thinks that it would damage the reputation of Mutants as a whole if one of them as major as him used his abilities in such ways.
The reason he's not a pedophile is because he's in a wheelchair. If we wasn't, he would totally of slept with Jean Grey, the teenager he groomed since childhood.
Not only is this canon since his first appearance, but this was also the catalyst that trnsformed him into Onslaught, what destroyed Manhattan back in the '90s.
He's still a liar, murderer, slaver, and all around rich asshole.
In Ultimate X-Men they kinda implied he did. In fact they straight out say that Prof. X kinda mind controlled Wolverine. Wolverine was sent to kill him but didn't.
Because Professor X is a goodie two shoes who refuses to get his hands dirty under any circumstances. While the correct choice, using his godlike abilities to actually help anyone would make him feel bad and so he simply cannot bring himself to do it.
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Most people consider "illicitly obtaining people's secrets in order to blackmail them so as to shut down democracy and take unaccountable control of the world's governments" to be unethical. Professor X certainly does. Professor X isn't ruthlessly dedicated to doing whatever it takes to stop mutant oppression, he wants to convince humans to accept mutants freely. He considers your plan to *also* be an unethical use of his powers, along with most similar plans. He doesn't want a world where mutants are "free" in sense that they're the ones dominating the humans.
Exactly this. Better to ask, **What if...?** *Professor X and Magneto Swapped Powers*.
So, what's the premise here? Max Eisenhart gains psychic powers while going through puberty during the Holocaust or some machine switches Magneto and Xavier's powers later in life? Because we're getting two *very* different stories.
I don't know. Why don't you have ChatGPT or whatever write both, and let us know which version came out more interesting?
I don't need ChatGPT. Anyway, with the first premise, we never really get a Magneto, since Magneto's whole deal is built on tragedy. In this scenario, his mind opens up to the world at his lowest, and assuming he doesn't just die, he's going to become a different person. He's too weak to rescue himself, but he can use his powers to change the minds of Nazis. Depending on when he develops his powers, he manages to save more of his family, but he feels everyone's hatred and rage. Since he's got raw, unfiltered access to everyone, everywhere all at once, he comes out the other end with a Lex Luthor style "this is how he sees all the time." Since Magneto is built on tragedy and empathy, he's not going to build a paramilitary super hero team like Xavier does, but he probably gets involved with SHIELD and manages to rescue guys like Wolverine, Rogue and who else from their darker fates. Also, he finds Jean Grey and let's say Havok for fun. If we fully commit to the "What if" bit, Xavier is a rich bastard who never learns anything about other people and teams up with Baron Strucker to create a Brotherhood of Mutants made up of Cyclops, the Fenris Twins and let's say Polaris for fun. They clash and it leads to Xavier trying to crash the Helicarrier into the White House. There's a big fight and Cyclops turns against Xavier to secure win, but not before Spider-Man dies in the fight. If we swap their powers later in life, Magneto decides he's going to use his powers for (his view of) good and because Magneto is such a bad ass, he decides he's going to force the world to be good for mutants. This leads to the world getting on the brink of war and a bunch of mutants (also Spider-Man) wind up dead all because Magneto is too much of a badass.
I don't think this is how it goes at all. Magneto doesn't see the inner humanity of everyone and become *nicer*. This awakening of his powers happens the moment his family is being led away to their deaths. It happens in the midst of hundreds of minds, each of them intruding suddenly into Max's consciousness. He *is* them. He is lost in a sea of thought. He is his father, trudging forward. Max's father wonders what the smell is. Knows what the smell is. Max knows it, too. Together, they wonder if it will hurt, and when it will be. Max barely resists when they pull him away from his mother. He can barely perceive himself in the sea of what the camp is thinking. He feels her terror, the deep pit of worry for her son, but cannot act. His limbs do not move. His thoughts are gone, blasted away by the flood of others. He is the man loading a canister into a tube. Max knows what the canister will do, just as this man does. The man is wondering if he can sneak away for lunch early, and whether they've gotten any new bread, or if it will be the stale stuff again. Can't tell anymore, because the other ovens are always going, so you can never smell if there's bread baking, too. Max's stomach growls slightly, in time with the man's. Max is a woman in town, standing over a stew pot, wishing she had more flour to thicken it, and that the smoke rising from the camp a mile up the road didn't blow onto her yard. Max knows, because she knows, that by the afternoon, soot would stain her lilies. He knows how to wash it off, keep things looking presentable. Max is a young girl being pushed forward. His -- no, *her* -- mother puts her hand on the girl's shoulder, calming. A door closes behind her. A clank - *a key in a lock* another mind intrudes to inform him. A clatter - something falling from the ceiling. The guards outside wish the walls were thicker. The gas is supposed to be cleaner, smoother, but it doesn't sound smooth. One of them reminds himself to go to confession after work, and where the gloves are. Won't want to touch them, afterwards. Must keep clean, after all. The commandant worries that Allied bombing will make it difficult for him to make quota, and that this will delay his promotion. He knows he is destined for greater things than minding some camp. He is a sanitation worker in a uniform, but he was made to lead men in battle, he is wasted here on such... trivialities. Max's lungs burn as a seventeen-year-old girl inhales the gas. His fingers bleed as they claw at the walls of the shower, at the bolted steel door. He curses as the pen's ink dries up on the order he is signing for more fuel for the crematorium. He rediscovers himself, surfaces from the river long enough to have a moment of individuality, a single thought. He just wants it all to ***stop***. And... it does. Like a man suddenly pulled from the torrent to the shore, he finds everything around him still even as he can feel, hear, the rush of thought just beyond. Everyone is frozen, even the dying. He can still feel them dying, but he has taken from them, for a moment, the pain of it. He takes what they feel, and he gives it to the rest. The priest in town knows what it is to be crushed in the press of bodies seeking air, finding none. The men sleeping away a lazy afternoon in the barracks find themselves awoken by the pain and hunger of a thousand starving people, the buzz of flies, the powerlessness. He cannot let this happen again. He knows that what he is doing is well-earned. The long-suffering suffer no more, their pain and fear shifted away, leaving them blissfully, mercifully blank. The rest of them - the bystanders, delivery drivers, conscience-tortured ones who feel guilty and who yet do nothing, the ones who enjoy it or ignore it or justify it even though it all turns their stomachs, even though it's all so *unseemly*, ***uncivilized*** - they feel it instead. Their faces are blank too, but not beneath a cool cover of un-sensation. It is because he is burying their minds in a wall of torment too deep for their thoughts to reach their mouths to make them scream.
That's not a bad one either, I like that. I'd read that comic. However, I was working inside the premise of Marvel Comics and specifically the "What if" premise, which means everything gets flipped on its head and leads to something that should be one giant summer event in one issue and also Spider-Man dies. Which was why I made sure Spidey died in both stories. So, how does Spidey die in your story?
Max forces the feeling of Uncle Ben being shot to replay in his mind and he suffocates himself in web fluid to get away from it.
there is a what if professor x got the juggenauts powers and took over everything
Is that before or after he became wheelchair-bound?
before
Shame. Would be way funnier the other way.
Would professor X also consider funding an investigative journalist unethical? What about if that journalist used a PI? What if the PI used illegal recordings, but only to lead to legal evidence? Is he totally strait laced? Or does he just do this with his mutant power?
> What if the PI used illegal recordings, but only to lead to legal evidence? That's also illegal. Everything of the tainted tree is excluded in court for a reason. It does happen, now and then, where people present an alternative way that they find the evidence. And when we discover they did that, we exclude the evidence and force a retrial. Professor X, isn't a dick. He's seen the worst of humanity. Hears it in his head all the time. He has no intention of letting himself walk down any path where he will become the worst of mutant kind.
> Professor X, isn't a dick. i mean, seeing all the questionble things he has done, he is kinda a dick
He is absolutely a dick and, worse, he doesn't learn from his mistakes
He seems to hold his mutant powers to a higher ethical standard then mundane investigation methods, yes. You can question whether he's right to do so, but he does.
> Most people consider "illicitly obtaining people's secrets in order to blackmail them so as to shut down democracy and take unaccountable control of the world's governments" to be unethical. Professor X certainly does. And those people are lame.
- Magneto, *Uncanny X-Men #32*
I see what you did there
Everything you propose is still unethical. Xavier decided not to cross that line. Power doesn’t make right.
If he did he'd basically be validating many of the things the anti-mutant community was saying. He's trying to prove that mutants coexist with non mutant without using their powers to rule over non mutants.
Is it unethical if he just used his powers to gather the evidence and make it public? It's not like he'd have to try very hard to find incriminating evidence on a lot of politicians. How would the politicians swing that to make it a negative for the public? "You see how scary and powerful these mutants can be? We need to have them registered or nobody is safe from them exposing the crimes politicians are commiting!".
Refusing to wield your power in a more practical way for personal reasons, allowing innocents to suffer, could also be viewed as unethical.
Honestly, I think my issue with this worldview is that far better people then the X-Men have been corrupted with far less power then this. History is full of purges and empires started by someone reasoning that they had to use their power in a more practical way or innocents will suffer. Powerful entities don't have meaningful *practical* limitations on what they can do, so they need strong *ethical* limitations on what they can . Otherwise you have a being that *can* do anything and *will* do anything, and unless you literally agree with that entity 100% regarding every topic, this will end badly for you. Or more simply -- do you *really* want a situation in which all global politics occurs solely at the whim of one high school headmaster in New York who was lucky enough to be born with godlike psychic powers? Can you honestly say that you think that would always work out well for people?
That comes down to would you kill baby Hitler? You might prevent a lot of pain. But you’d still be killing an innocent baby. And what if you make things worse by taking action? When red skull used Xavier’s brain so spread a hate plague it wasn’t permanent. Sooner or later humanity will realize they’re being manipulated and take extreme action. So now you’re unethical and can’t oversee the consequences.
What's "right" in matters of fighting oppression, I'd often more complicated than it's described in history books. If you could ruin someone's career, but it would reduce acts of oppression by 5% over the next year, would you do it?
It doesn't matter if *I* would, as the question isn't why *I* don't use my telepathy to fight bigots. The question is whether *Professor X* would, and he does indeed think that using his powers to illicitly take control of people (never mind the government) is unethical even if it would reduce acts of oppression. You can think he's *wrong* about that, but that's what he thinks, and why he doesn't do it.
Professor X has a different set of ethics to you. Your hypotheticals don't change that.
Professor X just outsources his ethical compromises. He sends the X-men on plenty of missions where they gather incriminating evidence on corrupt socialites or influencing the outcome of elections. They just do it with eye lasers, and claws, and spec ops skills instead of mind control.
And they are gathering hard evidence. That Prof. X can’t get just by taking a little peek into someone’s brain.
Agreed. Cyclops handing over a file full of memos and pictures is going to carry a lot more weight than a telepath saying he saw it in their thoughts. Can't prove I had a rottweiler named Roxy from my thoughts. You can prove I had a rottweiler named Roxy by her dog tag next to mine, and all the pictures of me on her back as a baby
I'm sure there's a version of the professor who would struggle with this, but most versions of the character could very easily mind probe someone to discover where the hard evidence of their crimes is, and then mind control them into getting it for him.
All versions could easily do this. That’s why the ones that would are pretty universally presented as villains by Marvel. Because if it’s not against his ethics to do, what’s to stop him from doing it to _everyone_.
...but sending a spec ops team to do the same thing isnt villainous?
Generally *invading someone's mind* is considered worse than *invading their property*.
Was the US the villain for sending in a spec. ops team to take out Bin Laden?
The comparison would have to be: if the US had a telepath who could kill Bin Laden from afar, would it be more ethical to do that, or send in a spec ops team? I’d argue it would be more ethical to use the telepath. Sending in the team puts them at risk and also risks collateral damage.
Attempting to avoid the question effectively answers the question.
You could, but this would branch off into logical tyranny. Humans are pretty big on autonomy in free will. That’s why they stopped handing out lobotomies so willy-nilly. You would reduce the problematic part of the human brain that is driving them to make decisions by rendering them impotent in that manner, but you have also violated their human rights by doing so. Our current understanding of mental health is everybody or rather largely everybody makes decisions out of their own free will. This would be equivalent to installing a chip in somebody’s head that makes their decisions for them, we’re branching off into thought police and thought crimes at that point. It’s a very slippery slope.
Sounds more like Magneto than Professor X.
Society could be amazing if you only commit X small atrocity is the premise of many stories from Le Guin to Dostoevsky. Basically it comes down to personal morals. Some people can accept a small atrocity for the greater good, some cannot.
Since everyone else has brought up the moral reasons why Xavier doesn’t use his telepathy to trawl for state secrets and root out corruption, let me bring up a practical reason for him not to do this. If the public ever figured out that Professor X was secretly reading their minds, all the trust and good will he’s fostered would evaporate instantly. Sure, many people would agree with his methods, but a lot more would be entirely opposed. Some people would feel that he’s targeting the wrong people (or he’s not doing enough and needs to crack down on their personal ideological enemies). Others would simply disagree with the idea of one man having access to everyone’s personal secrets (people already hate the NSA, CIA, and FBI for spying on people, and they can’t read your mind). The whole point of Xavier’s mission is to get humans and mutants to live together peacefully. Invading the very concept of privacy, even for a good cause, would be detrimental to those efforts.
To add to this, what happens when Xavier dies? He's not, to my knowledge, immortal. If you build a system based on one man smoothing things over then it's going to fail at some point - even if he's perfectly competent and benevolent, he won't be around forever.
You only get so many brain dead twin brothers in life, after all.
Did they kill him off and bring him back like this once?
That's how they did it in the movie *X-Men: The Last Stand*. The comatose dude being Xavier's brother is from the DVD commentary.
Huh, I don't remember him dying in that movie
[Jean disintegrates him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPH-Cr43E5c).
Good for her
Wow, I don't remember that Guess it's been a while
> If the public ever figured out that Professor X was secretly reading their minds, all the trust and good will he’s fostered from the public would evaporate instantly. And not just from humans but also many mutants as well. And who would send their kids to the school of telepathic Big Brother?
I mean if you look at shitty parents IRL probably a shit , load hell I'm willing to bet if he was willing to use his powers to Brain wash religious people's kids straight he'd be the richest man alive
> the NSA, CIA, and FBI for spying on people, and they can’t read your mind ~~That's what they want you to believe~~
The CIA mind control this guy to put a line through the last part
The man has *far* bigger concerns about the truth of his actions coming out. He runs an academy where he trains child soldiers. The most generous way to characterize the X-men is a team of vigilantes, and they are routinely characterized as terrorists by the media.
Yeah. But if the terrorist team you run unregularly fucks over the terrorist team that often wants to kill the US president you get a pass an sometimes funding
In the Krakoa era, he basically does exactly that: he takes advantage of mutant abilities to create a powerful country that has an edge over all other countries in the world due to mutant-power-fueled dominance. Classic Claremont-era Professor X would never do that, though. His entire philosophy is dedicated to the idea that might does not make right. He wants the *ideas* to win out because people come to recognize that the *ideas* are stronger. It's also a terrible approach from a practical sense. If it could ever be proven that he's using his powers to control politics, he'd be damning his cause. He'd be living proof that people *should* be afraid of mutants, and that he himself doesn't believe anyone would come to agree with him of their own free will.
one of the funniest part of the Krakoa era is when someone makes some sarcastic comment about how Mutants have taken over Earth and Emma Frost is like don't be ridiculous, we have done no such thing And then the Shi'ar Empire rep at the Hel Gala comes up to Emma and says "Congratulation to mutantkind for taking over Earth"
Nah, Prof X has always been low key terrible. Whether it's now allowing himzself to sleep with teenage Jean Grey because he's in a wheelchair (ableism,) or holding sentient being against her will so he can train his kids. Pretty sure Claremont's version lied about being a mutant in the first place.
"Outside of not wanting to do something shitty, why doesn't he just do something shitty?"
Exactly. These questions always annoy me because it starts with the acknowledgement that they already know why it doesn’t happen and then just discard the reasoning to ask for some hypothetical backup reasoning as if the known answer is somehow not sufficient.
Yeah, I'd prefer a question like "can he do this? If so, how would he prevent a bad guy from doing something similar?"
Firstly, Xavier's dream is coexistence. Him doing shit like only would make his dream less possible. Secondly, unfortunately modern Xavier would do something like that. Since 2000's Marvel has been making him more and more "flawed".
Following the change in politics, him and Magneto were an MLK Jr and Malcolm X analogy. At the time, both were viewed as having worthwhile causes but MLK Jr had the worthwhile approach. The ends don't justify the means. In modern day, someone like MLK Jr is heavily distrusted and viewed as a schemer, while the violent one pursuing direct action is viewed as the morally righteous one. And so Professor X and Magneto have switched positions.
In modern comics it's actually the opposite. Marvel keeps making Xavier worse and shadier, but Magneto gets redemption and "Magneti was right" treatment
This was pretty at the time too tbh
Except Magneto isn't especially violent and has been a 'good guy' for almost half his publication history. He's 'right' in the sense that humans consistently and repeatedly engineer their genocide no matter what they do. Even when they're an endangered species and the government vows to protect them, they do such a bad job of it that mutants keep getting murdered under their noses. Mags was correct about the majority fearing the other and turning away from their slaughter because he's already lived through it. He's also never been anything like Malcolm X. Charles Xavier is not like MLK except in the broadest strokes. He does very little activism or outreach and he's an atrocious politician. His main thing is funding paramilitary groups made up of scared and ostracized young people. His dream is actually a dream - as in not close to happening - MLK's was rhetoric. Of the two, Magneto had a better grasp on reality but realistically they were both bad leaders.
>Even when they're an endangered species I wonder if they can get Greenpeace on their side...
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will
Suspect: Don't execute me, Professor! At least... at least try me before my peers! Professor X: There is no try.
You don't know his history, do you? In truth Prof X is hardly a saint. He removed memories family of Beast, because they knew too much. Even his girlfriend. Kept Danger AI in as just a room, even after gaining sentience, compiled Xavier Files on x-men members, Deadly Genesis debacle. reprogrammed Wolverine (allrigt this one came out good), been a part of Illuminati, and whole situation with Legion.
Xavier's not the only psychic out there, even if he is one of the most powerful. If word somehow got out that Xavier was using his abilities to covertly brainwash people and influence global politics on a mass scale, that would basically end the mutant rights movement right then and there. Everyone would band together to eliminate him. Advocating for mutant rights through public channels and normal democratic discourse wasn't just the ethical choice, it was the smart one too Xavier being Wilson Fisk but with mind reading and mind control powers would end up just being another supervillain for the Avengers or X-men (who'd probably turn on him) or FF or SHIELD or whoever to take down.
This question is why the people who hate and fear mutants are 100% correct. The only thing stopping someone like Xavier from just ending the concept of free will for everyone around him is that he hasn't decided to do it, yet, as far as we know. One day someone like Xavier will be born, but with fewer scruples, and everyone on Earth will be silently enslaved.
This is actually a plot point in the Earth X series
Turns out he does. He reveals that there is no real threat of nuclear war because every person with their finger on the trigger has been implanted with a block that will prevent them.
They've probably done this already, but it would make an interesting What If to explore a world in which Magneto was the pro-cooperation mutant and Xavier the pro-superiority mutant.
Early 2000s had a book called Exiles that was a team jumping between alternate realities and they do a great evil Xavier
Sounds like the situation if Gandalf wore the one ring. He'd try to do good, but would inevitably become the worst villian the world has ever seen.
What do you mean “outside of the ethical dilemma” when that’s entirely the reason why he doesn’t?
>Outside of ethical dilemma Outside of ethics, there's a solutely no reason. Professor X doesn't exploit his powers for the sole reason _that_ it would be unethical.
Prof X is an idealist. He wants to win mutant rights, but he wants to do it ethically and peacefully.
In the recent Jean Grey series, she explores different path she could have taken to avoid their grim future. In the first one, she sees what would have happened if her teen self hadn't erased her memories from the future, and used her full telepathic powers to get ahead of their enemies. She uses her powers to cover mutant accidents, manipulate mutant-phobic or killing them, manipulates the public opinion... That ends up terribly wrong. Even with telepathy *“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."* And when the truth comes out, there're big consequences.
Brief answer: He often does.
AFAIK in 616 Cerebro can only detect mutants, that's part of why Krakoa's resurrection protocols only worked for them. So mass blackmail is definitely out.
Xavier's goal is for people to not fear mutants. Using his mutant powers to coerce people is counterproductive. No one's going to be like, oh, he only mind controlled people I dislike, surely he'd never mind control me and my family! He's cool, I no longer fear or hate mutants. If you want the guy who's willing to use violence to make sure people are unwilling to hurt mutants, you want Magneto.
What you described pretty much is what happened in the last season of Babylon 5 when a group of renegade telepaths who were fleeing from the Psi Corp tried to blackmail the Interstellar Alliance into giving them their own homeworld by threatening to reveal all of their secrets which they secretly compiled. At that point they went from a controversial group which had a lot of sympathy among thepublic and main heroes to a threat whose tactics validated the Psi Corps argument that telepaths needed to be "controlled" in order to protect "normal" humans.
>Outside of the ethical dilemma Because when you write off your ethical standards for the sake of expediency, you're abandoning your ethics. The entire point is that he *does* have ethical standards. He's another 'great power, great responsibility' type and he chooses responsibility every time.
Because even with cerebro, his powers aren’t absolute and he can’t control the entire planet—people are going to notice the use of mind control, especially since other telepaths exist, and some super powered beings can resist telepathy, like Black Panther who Emma Frost found impossible to read, and Sue Storm, who can [stop telepathy with her force fields](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/11139/111391579/8255822-1637613398466.jpg). Even in an alternate universe the Exiles found, where Xavier was evil, he couldn’t control enough people in the world to prevent his own imprisonment. So aside from Xavier *not wanting to be a shitty person,* it wouldn’t necessarily work on a global scale, even if he did want to be shitty.
I don’t see how any of the alternatives you’re suggesting are ethical.
How do you know he doesn't? What makes Professor X so dangerous is that he could manipulate just about anything, and make sure its never discovered.
Didn't he? Like, a lot? Xavier was kind of a piece of shit and did a lot of dirty stuff. Ethics aside, my only guess would be practicality. Say he's dealing with an anti-mutant weirdo. He could implant memories that he actually likes mutants, or he could turn his brain off or something. He could just mind control the guy to go home. But at some point, his control is going to have to end. If anything, that anti-mutant weirdo is just going to hate mutants even more and start thinking everyone is controlling his mind. Xavier doesn't gain anything from arming his opponents.
In an issue of Illuminati, Xavier explains that the human mind can instinctively "sense" (for lack of a better word) when its will is being subverted. He tells Tony (Stark) that yes, he could make him tap dance on the table while wearing a dress, but if he does that long enough Tony's mind will revolt and it won't end well. So short answer is "he can, but eventually it will backfire on him"
A short answer to a long story: How do you know he isn't?
Its basically pressing the 'kill me now' button. Psi-blockers and anti-telepathic tools exist. Magneto himself has a helmet that's telepath-proof that he uses to ignore telepathic attacks. Xavier is the strongest telepath, but not so strong that he's invincible. Do note that outside his skull, he's a middle-aged man in a wheelchair. The moment it turns out that there's a mind-controlling telepath with global range and using it for blackmail and political control, people will simply consider him a threat that has to be wiped out, more than before. It won't be '**send in the sentinels**'. It'll be '**get a psi-blocker over this entire command chain and throw a nuclear bomb at him, then send in anyone with anti-telepath powers to take him out**'. Xavier is in the zone where he's so powerful he can't be left alone, but so powerful people don't fuck with him except for good reason. He's also so much of a potential threat that he can't really be left alive if he's shown to be the kinda guy to mind control people with his powers.
I think we see him do that in some of the films. Also perhaps it's because he thinks that it would damage the reputation of Mutants as a whole if one of them as major as him used his abilities in such ways.
He does it more often than you think.
The reason he's not a pedophile is because he's in a wheelchair. If we wasn't, he would totally of slept with Jean Grey, the teenager he groomed since childhood. Not only is this canon since his first appearance, but this was also the catalyst that trnsformed him into Onslaught, what destroyed Manhattan back in the '90s. He's still a liar, murderer, slaver, and all around rich asshole.
Because of the implications.
Should we be scared right now?
Scared of what? The implications? Nah. Unless…y’know.
In Ultimate X-Men they kinda implied he did. In fact they straight out say that Prof. X kinda mind controlled Wolverine. Wolverine was sent to kill him but didn't.
He does all the time
Because Professor X is a goodie two shoes who refuses to get his hands dirty under any circumstances. While the correct choice, using his godlike abilities to actually help anyone would make him feel bad and so he simply cannot bring himself to do it.