Look Up! In a fractured and chaotic world, we need leaders with hope. (2025)

The world today feels fractured, chaotic, and tense. In times like these, we yearn for leaders who can mend what’s broken and unite us. But this sort of leadership requires seemingly superhuman ability. Perhaps that’s why, as the leader of a college that’s committed to educating students for lives of leadership and service, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a fictional icon: Superman. Maybe you’ve heard of him? It turns out, I’m not the only one with him on my mind.

This summer, DC Studios will release a new Superman movie. It will tell the same story, with the same characters, that has been told many times before — so many times, it can no longer be called a "re-make." Once the same film has been made repeatedly, in the span of only a few decades, it starts to feel more like a recurring cultural dream.

Critics may dismiss these comic-book narratives — and the massive movie franchises they’ve inspired — as nothing more than low-brow entertainment. Yet if that were true, why do we keep coming back to them? What compels us to retell the same tale over and over again? And why, when the world seems particularly bleak and hopeless, do we seem to cherish these stories all the more?

My journey toward exploring these questions began with an unexpected email from a professor at our college. The email’s subject line read "hope is not a soft emotion," and contained several links. One was to the trailer of the upcoming Superman movie, and another was to an article from IGN, the gaming and entertainment website, reviewing that trailer — not the movie, but the trailer itself. In the email, my colleague shared how the trailer had made him "gasp and cry with joy and wonder." I was surprised to hear this, and even more surprised to discover that in the article, a hardened movie critic says basically the same thing.

So I watched the trailer. It depicts a world gone mad, dominated by greed and violence — a world in which those with power will crush anyone who stands in their way. It shows the desperation of those on the losing end of this arrangement — a little boy in a refugee camp, crying out for help in the only way he knows how, by invoking the name of a man he has heard of but never seen. Then, it shows that same man coming down out of the sky, right on schedule. The film's tagline is just two words: "Look Up."

In the last paragraph of my colleague's email, he said this: "It's worth noting that the S symbol Superman wears on his chest has evolved in the comics over the years, and in 2004 it was established that on Krypton, where Superman is from, it isn't an S. It's a symbol that means 'hope.'"

That’s what Superman gives us. Hope.

Last month, Gallup released the preliminary findings of one of the largest global leadership studies ever conducted — 30,000 participants across 52 countries were instructed to identify the leader who has had the most positive influence on their daily life, and then asked to list three reasons why. This yielded roughly 90,000 discrete data points — three from each participant — which were each translated into English and then categorized by theme.

Lest anyone was still assuming that leadership needs vary by culture or context, this survey has debunked that assumption once and for all. When all the responses had been categorized, it turned out that more than half of them were in some way related to hope.

In other words, Gallup asked the entire planet to define leadership, and the world spoke as one: "A leader is someone who gives us hope."

The only trouble is that for would-be leaders, there is a tremendous temptation to exploit this need — to offer any hope at all, even if it’s false. The way Napoleon put it is, "a leader is a dealer in hope." The irony of that statement is its implicit cynicism — the word “dealer” suggests someone who is concerned first and foremost with making a sale. In order to be seen as a leader, all you need is some hope you can sell, regardless of whether that hope has any real substance. Even if it’s false hope, people will still buy it, especially if there's no genuine hope on the market.

Such is the nature of the human heart's insatiable thirst for hope: we are so desperate for a better tomorrow that we are tempted to follow anyone who confidently claims to know the way.

The question is whether there is any such thing as a leader who doesn’t "deal" transactionally in hope, but is rather possessed by it. For such a leader, the vision of a better future would not be a gimmick used to gain followers, but a destination toward which they will keep marching, regardless of whether anyone follows them or not.

The only type of vision with that much power is one that is radically inclusive. It would include all people, and all living things. It would mean not just the salvation of one country, or one species, but of the whole planet. And for this true hope, a true leader would work tirelessly -- getting dirty, sweaty, and bloody along the way, until the vision had been accomplished.

Described in these terms, such a leader seems to be the stuff of fantasy. We believe that such people can exist on a smaller scale; we’ve all known stories of people who take this type of initiative, risking their own lives to try to make the world better in some way. We even have a word for leaders like this — we call them "heroes."

But what we seem unable to believe in is a person who could enact this same type of heroism on a larger scale — not just a hero, but a superhero. That’s not to say that we are unfamiliar with the concept. To the contrary, we seem somewhat obsessed with it. So on the one hand, we go on saying that we don’t believe that such a superhero actually exists. On the other hand, we spend so much of our free time reading and watching "fictional" stories about such a person. In one story, he may be known as Kal-El from Krypton who is raised as Clark Kent. In another, he is pictured as "the boy who lived," kept safely hidden in the room under the stairs until his moment arrives. But in all of the stories, he is the one who comes to save us.

If these stories were particular to our time and place, that would be one thing. But they emphatically are not. After all, this is Easter week - the time when Christians around the world celebrate the resurrected Jesus who promises to return to earth someday and set everything right. Many people mistakenly think that the anticipation of a coming Messiah is exclusive to Judeo-Christian thought. Yet as Joseph Campbell so beautifully pointed out in his 1949 book, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” it's difficult to find any traditional mythology or religion that doesn't revolve around a messianic motif. Hindus speak of Kalki, Muslims await the Mahdi, and Buddhists look forward to the coming Maitreya. It is on this point, perhaps more than any other, that the world religions speak as one.

Which is why, for me, the Superman tagline of "Look Up" has started to sound more like a mantra, or even a game plan. Actually, it’s the game plan that most of the world has already been following for a few thousand years, so perhaps it’s time for us post-enlightenment westerners to rejoin the party. Perhaps it's time for us to start looking up again, to start watching and waiting, to start believing again that somebody is coming who can fix this.

That's not to say that we sit and do nothing. While we wait, we work.

The greatest misconception about this messianic hope is that it somehow leads to passivity. But what we have witnessed recently is exactly the opposite — it is the lack of hope that leads to passivity. If the outcome is up to us, then it’s only worth fighting if we think we can win. When things seem hopeless, we throw up our hands in despair. But if we believe that someone is coming to settle the score, then we become primarily concerned with being on his side before he gets here.

In other words, believing in a coming Messiah doesn’t absolve us of responsibility or make us shrink back in fear. Rather, it becomes the only way we find the courage to stand up to Lex Luthor in the meantime. Of course, the best we can ever be is a hero of the common sort. But by our acts of heroism, we might keep the spark of hope alive until somebody more super shows up.