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Villains and heroes often present themselves as saviors of the people making it sometimes difficult to know which is which.
In the first X-Men movies, Magneto, a survivor of the holocaust perceiving a new reign of mass murder of his people, this time those with mutant abilities rather than Jewish heredity, embarks on a scheme to save his people. At a gathering of world leaders, he will deploy a device powered by his own nutant talents to transform those world leaders into mutants. The device exacts a terrible price and using it would cost Magento his life. Instead, he kidnaps a young girl and will transfer his abilities, temporarily, to her and use her to power the device, sacrificing her life for his goal. And as the character Wolverine spits out at him, “You’re so fulla shit. If you were really so righteous, it’d be you in that thing.”
There’s one way to differentiate the villains from the heroes, the willingness to pay a price versus compelling others to sacrifice.
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign Trump ally Elon Musk said in a telephone town hall that in order to get the nation’s economic house in order “We have to reduce spending to live within our means. And that necessarily involves some temporary hardship…”
It is notable that none of the proposals from the incoming administration or put forth by Musk have the slightest pain that would be inflicted upon himself or his class of billionaires. Quite the opposite. Their tax cuts would be extended and expanded and their businesses freed from damaging the environments or responsibilities to their work force. All of the pain, the actual sacrifices, would be born by others at the command of those not only paying no price but profiting from the process.
I leave it to you to determine who is being villainous here.