That Guilty Look

I never last long in a game of Mafia regardless of my position.  I can be a detective or citizen and I will still be promptly accused of being a mafia member.  Why is this- because according to friends I just look guilty.  So I'm always dead, usually quite soon.  In a round of BS, I have the opposite situation.  I easily get away with playing a lie and am often called out when being completely honest.  A friend claimed this was because he "can't tell the difference between [my] lying face and [my] fake lying face."  Notice, neither of those are my not-lying-face, apparently I don't have one. Point being- I got thinking about what causes me to look guilty even when completely innocent.  I have come up with this (somewhat prideful) theory- it's because I'm smart... let me explain.

My roommates, along with much of America, are a little obsessed with today's surge of superhero movies. We learn to trust Mr. Incredible and distrust Syndrome.  Through comics and movies, we come to idealize Superman and fear Lex Luther.  Our list of heroes continues: Human-torch, Wolverine, Captain America, Hercules, Spider-man, and even Metro-man.  Individuals who are born with or have brilliant powers bestowed upon them.  Now, I do not believe that these individual are idiots, but they are not considered to be brilliant.  Their status as a superhero is linked only to their morality and their super-strength (or other such skills).

In contrast, let's look at our villains. Lex Luther is described as an evil genius.  Syndrome used his intelligence to make his own "superpowers" and machines to attack America.  Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin both have brilliant experiments go wrong, causing them to go mad and become evil.  The world is full of villains without extra-ordinary powers.  They are instead highly intelligent individuals who choose to use their knowledge for evil.  Is modern media teaching us to fear knowledge?  Are we being trained to rely on the strong and shy away from the creative genius? And ultimately, do those I associate with distrust me because of my intelligence?

To argue against my own theory- I recognize that our collection of villains is more heterogeneous than I portray above.  We have many villains such as Loki, Doctor Doom, and Venom who also have great powers and choose to fight against good instead of for it.  Not all villains are brilliant.

Our heroes aren't as well balanced.  Where villains are a fairly even mix of average-Joes and potential Einsteins, very few heroes are highly intelligent.  And how do we treat them? Batman is distrusted by law-enforcement and considered a villain by many.  Iron-man is also portrayed as a play-boy who might just go blow something up because he's bored.  Dr. Banner is a perfectly good individual as a human, but is hated as the Hulk because he is only against whomever is more entertaining to crush, be that the good guys or the bad guys.  Lastly, we must keep in mind our beloved Mega Mind began as a bad guy and only became the good guy when his attempt to make a good guy backfired on him (which I suppose could be an additional argument against his intelligence).

So basically- my fun, slightly prideful theory is that everyone thinks I'm guilty because I'm smart.  The world is trained to distrust genius and rely on those with strength and power.  Now I just need to figure out how to get this guilty look off my face.