Clark, the adopted son of the Kent family, grows up with confusion and many questions from his childhood. He discovers he is different from other kids in terms of strength and power. His adoptive parents, especially Jonathan Kent, don’t want him to reveal his powers in front of others, not even if someone’s life is at stake. Now, some of you may think that Jonathan Kent just doesn’t want to lose his kid out there, and that’s why he was so overprotective about the whole superpower thing. But I think he was being farsighted about it.
I’d say it’s pretty logical for J. Kent to think that Clark should hide his superpower. He understood the possible outcome of people knowing about Clark’s true self. The movie explained the reasons well too. According to Mr. Kent, the world will reject him (Clark) if they come to know who he really is. He mentions the visible fear on Pete’s mom’s face as an example, even though Clark saved her son’s life. A kid from outer space who has enormous power should be scary for everyone else. So, there is a probability that if Clark reveals his power to the whole world, the world will be scared of him rather than accepting him as the savior.
You probably know what happened to Superman in The Flashpoint Paradox (one of my favorites). If you don’t, here is the brief: the Flash goes back in time and changes the past (saving his mother from being murdered), and the whole reality alters. And as a part of the alteration, the spaceship of the alien kid Kal-El doesn’t crash on Kent’s farm; it lands somewhere else. The government finds the spaceship and imprisons him in a research lab as a guinea pig for his whole life. Just because he’s from outside of the world, they considered him a threat and confined him in the darkroom for years.
You understand what I am trying to point out here. We humans always feel threatened by something superior in power. And if a God-like powerful being shows up among us for real, we will try to control it. If we cannot control it, we will fear it.
As Superman said in Man of Steel (2013), “You’re scared because you cannot control me. You don’t, and you never will. That doesn’t mean that I am your enemy.” And we all know what happened next; Superman couldn’t gain their trust until he fought for them to the death against Zod and other Kryptonians. Dude, they literally handcuffed him and prepared the tranquilizer for him in the first place!
We see a glimpse of human nature in “trusting superheroes” later in Batman V Superman (2016). We see a large portion of people don’t want any alien around them. If you have a closer look at the protest outside the court, you’ll see the fear and hatred among people about Superman written on the signboard they are holding, even after what he did for the world over and over again.
Clark’s father knew what would happen when people found out that they weren’t the most powerful beings on the planet, which would not do any good to Kal-El. And Clark, as a kid, is
