Thanos' Infinity War Snap Wasn't About Resources

A new MCU Phase 4.

While Marvel Studios started teasing the existence of Thanos in 2011 in Kenneth Branagh's Thor. Since then, he appeared in several ways throughout the franchise, slowly establishing his presence in the shadows. However, it wasn't until 2018's Infinity War that he properly made his entrance. ittedly, this was a big risk. The film was already packed as it was, with all pockets of the universe coming together to fight a common enemy. Luckily, directors Joe and Anthony Russo, with writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely found a way to effectively establish the Mad Titan as a credible threat. It also helped that he's supposedly driven by the right intentions — to prevent the scarcity of natural resources that sustain the growing population.

In Infinity War, Thanos was motivated by the idea called Malthusianism which is "is the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off." But u/IsaiasRi claims that this is not the case; instead, the villain's intentions were driven by his personal ambition to be a Leviathan. The idea comes from Thomas Hobbs' book Leviathan which posits that "for as long as men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in the condition known as ‘war’; and it is a war of every man against every man." Using the snap, the Mad Titan wants to establish himself as the all-powerful being that would keep the galaxy both in awe and terrified — so much so that men are preoccupied that they don't have the time or energy to fight off one another. Through this, eternal peace is preserved.

Thanos using the Reality Stone to create an illusion in Infinity War

This is why simply doubling the resources, which many have pointed out to be a more simplistic approach to the problem, wouldn't accomplish Avengers: Endgame; he realized that the only way to be a Leviathan from that point would be to create an entirely new galaxy that considered him untouchable.

Looking back, this is a deeper way of analyzing Thanos' actions and motivations. Given his relatively limited screen time in the MCU, Marvel Studios didn't have the opportunity to go in-depth with Thanos' personal story. He claimed that the snap was motivated by good intentions in Avengers: Infinity War, but this doesn't necessarily make that true - as there's always the potential that he was so blinded by his self-righteousness that he never really understood where this need to balance the universe was really coming from. Much of what's known about Thanos also came from him, with no other sources to corroborate whether or not he's indeed telling the truth.

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