Pretty much the title. I’ve been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality.
I think it’s easy for us normies to respect other people and their property because there are clear consequences for violating social norms. But what would the average person do if they had super powers?
You get that power, you use it on people who are making the world a shittier place first.
Now, that’s not precisely moral, but let’s be honest, beyond a bit of minor larceny there’s not a whole lot of personal gain you can realistically achieve.
Steal a truckload of cash? Sure, but then you’ve got to launder the heck out of it, and I’ve seen Ozark, that’s more drama than I want in my life even if I had the skills, which I don’t. And nobody pays cash even for groceries any more, have to wait for one of the non-card registers to open up and it’s a pain in the ass. Maybe you could rig a horse race or something, but the people involved in serious gambling are very good at spotting anomalous wins, and your life wouldn’t be worth dick the second time you tried it.
That pretty much leaves pranks and murder, and you’re a damn fool if you bring that within a dozen miles of any kind of personal connection.
Which pretty much only leaves assassination of high-level assholes as something that would a:) make a noticeable difference, b:) keep you under the radar and c:) be immensely satisfying.
If I could think of a way to become comfortably well-off without eitehr getting in trouble or living in crippling anxiety that I was going to get in trouble, that might be another story.
It’s just that getting away with shit is for rich people with powerful connections, and bootstrapping into that state without passing through an uninsulated trouble phase is pretty damn nontrivial. They don’t let just anyone into the club, and they stomp anyone who dares to try.
I don’t actually know about the international-super-assassin club, but I’m willing to bet it’s either a fair bit more porous, or a lot more discreet, to the point that you never have reason to suspect they’re onto you.
Maybe wait around the lottery office for someone with a good winning ticket and swap them when they go to turn it in, seems pretty risk free if you can freeze time
If you had super powers you probably wouldn’t have to steal anything or commit crimes to be rich. You’d just make money the same way people like the Kardashians do or worst case sign up to some sporting team and absolutely trounce everybody else then sign endorsements.
That’s a fairly good point, but I’d argue that it’d depend on how subtle the application of your superpower is.
My overall assumption would be that any application that doesn’t raise red flags will probably require enough work and moderation that it’d be more like a job - but it could be a very well-paying job.
I.e. for the time freeze: You could acquire a well-paid reputation as a freelancer troubleshooter for a certain type of WFH desk job (analyst? translator?) that can finish any overdue project in record time. Or, easier, become a stage magician.
You’d probably still eventually wind up in a situation where you watch some sort of unacceptable crisis on the news and think “well, I could do something about this” - be it removing a mass-murdering dictator or dismantling a hostage situation.
Snipers are a thing. And at best, who wants to spend their life on the lam? I want to play video games and eat toast, it’s hard to do that if you can’t spend an entire day in any given location.
Since Einstein’s papers from 1905, we know that every being lives in it’s own time and also every place and every thing in the whole universe has it’s own time. So, which time do you want to stop?
Yes. And i actually believe most people would not harm others. I believe people hurt others because of fear and superstition. If you are in the priviliged position to feel empathy you would feel disgusted when hurting human beings. Becomming a god might even make you more empatic, because you dont have to struggle to survive.
I think someone else in this thread said it best. The more power you have the more temptation there is to fulfill your whims. Why do you think billionaires live the way that they do?
At least, that’s how I see human nature. I made this post because I think there’s room for reasonable debate.
Why do you think billionaires become billionaires? They were already messed up before the money and had no morals to stop them from doing immoral things to get it.
If I knew I'd never be caught, I'd hope I would do things that billionaire brown-nosers think is immoral. But it's things I believe are moral. Like reclaiming stolen wealth from billionaires.
It’s easy to be cynical about human nature when the extreme negatives are so amplified and given so much publicity. You have to remember the vast majority of people do still possess empathy.
Reasonable debate about what? That most people would be evil if they had the power because the people who have power are often evil? That inference does not follow. That’s not a logical claim, it’s a self report at worst and a fallacy at best.
Not quite what I’m saying. It goes the other way around: people are morally questionable by nature and this comes out when people have the chance to act without facing consequences.
So the debate essentially boils down to whether you think people are essentially good/bad at heart. That’s something people can reasonably disagree on.
Your evidence for the claim that people are evil by nature is: billionaires are often evil and you would make immoral choices if you could stop time. That’s just a self report and a logical fallacy smashed together
Yeah but think about it: you could check someone's ass fully instead of stealing glances, put random dirt smudges on people's faces.. it's hard to resist such a power.
I’ve been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality.
You know that those were still written by humans to tell a story, right? I wouldn’t derive any universal laws from them.
Kind of a misunderstanding. Its not “law” they lay down, its archetypes. If it is realistic it means more like it is more relatable.
Immortality and immense power is meant to give a sandbox view of the world with lowered consequences. Also the naive inheritor in case of Invincible.
In case of The Boys, Homelander embodies the establishment that is not only more powerful, but hailed as the hero of all mankind.
Thats lots of peoples vibes. You are not the hero in shining armor. You are an insurgent at best. You dont just get on a suit and start saving lives, but you have to go up aganist THE establishment and fucking prove yourself first. The very thing that is being actively hailed.
I think you misunderstand my point. I’m not saying those shows lay down any laws. I’m saying you (the viewer) shouldn’t derive any universal laws from consequences or situations depicted in stories made up specifically for entertainment.
You would never be able to enjoy it or explain how you got it. Someone would eventually noticed all this money went missing from a bank and there is some rando with all this money with the same serial numbers on it spending.
I like my plan. You could even leave notes on the dead bodies of the dictators. Or leave warnings. Imagine Winnie the Pooh blinks and there is a knife on his desk with a note telling him that you want the genocide to stop.
First: Most people who use cheats in video games eventually either stop using them or stop playing the game altogether, because it gets boring.
Many people who win the lottery get a bit of splurging out of their system, then invest the rest into financial security but keep living their loves mostly like before.
So there genuinely might be some people who will eventually settle into just fixing their most glaring problems and then just keep living “regularly”, possibly with the occasional minor indulgence.
Then there’s people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to enforce their beliefs even without superpowers - imagine super-powered criminals and terrorists, but also super-powered firefighters, doctors or scientists.
And then there’s everything in between.
So, if it’s just one (or maybe five) people getting superpowers, it’d probably be a roll of the dice. Maybe there’d just be one person going through life easier. Maybe we’d get lucky and someone solves a major problem for us. Maybe we get unlucky and every president that doesn’t reinstate segregation gets assassinated.
If it’s more people getting powers… well, there’s already a lot of fiction exploring that in-depth.
Obviously not all of them, just like not every single person would abuse superpowers. But the numbers are still orders of magnitude higher than everywhere without weapons, even though shooting someone still has consequences unlike doing shit while invisible.
Not at all. It’s easy to get away with things even without superpowers. If I don’t do something, it’s because I don’t want to be a person that does that thing.
I feel the same way. Trying to be a moral person is quite time consuming, and people seem to love short circuiting it by relying on various rules of thumb. But once you start investing those, it’s like peeling an onion, there’s always another layer to it that you haven’t considered.
When is giving money to someone in need helpful and when is it enabling their helplessness?
How can you tell the difference between someone who needs your help and someone who just wants to take you for a ride?
Don’t forget that your time is literally the most valuable thing you can choose to give someone. If you had unlimited amounts of it you’d be a billionaire. Then again, perhaps it would just end up making it worthless because you don’t need to ration it anymore.
Everyone in this thread, “what’s this, I am a bastion of morality and its extremely important I convince anons on the internet about this.”
But for real when I dream about stopping time I dream of a pocket universe where I am the only person present. That way I can speed (I know I know I’m evil) on highways, explore, and learn without weird frozen bodies getting in my way. I would mostly use it for naps and cheating on tests (I know super evil).
Does it have to be murder. Can’t you just move them to a secluded island away from all communication technology and if they are found just move them again? I promise it would be more fun.
Unless the time stop powers get real weird with physics, I really don’t think I’d be down for carrying thousands of people thousands of miles and then babysitting their prison indefinitely.
The counterargument for this line of thinking is that it’s just theoretical. You don’t have actual experience with the scenario, so you can’t truly know how you’d behave.
We all like to think we’re paragons of virtue. But when the chips are down, most people behave in ways they never expected to.
In the words of an eminent poet, “Everybody got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Sure, I don’t know how I’d react. I know for sure I’d do dodgy, illegal things. I also know that legal and moral are not synonyms. And I also know that the only person I have no choice but to live with is myself, and I have no intention of doing anything that makes me hate myself. Stopping time doesn’t change that.
I’m on the same page as you, dude! My first thought was that I could take naps ANYWHERE at ANY TIME. It’d be a dream to never feel tired and always refreshed. Also to have absolutely no pressure from time commitments. I’d just be a happy guy most of the time.
Honestly I’m having trouble imagining what terrible things others here seem to be considering doing if they had the power to stop time. Hopefully it’s not more than stealing money from a bank vault?
I suppose it depends a lot on the nature of said time-stopping power. Using it to threaten some of the most powerful people on the planet into using said power to do good (or at least not bad) would be on the list of stuff to do.
For instance - a note threatening Putin with the loss of a toe or something (and further escalating consequences) unless he makes a public statement announcing the intent of Russian Armed forces to withdraw from Ukraine.
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