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?
Me, personally? My morals are not defined by my own ability to weild power. Except maybe where the power to make someone else’s life better is morally right.
The average person is a fuckingidiot and would expertly execute the “time travel” equivalent of taking a shit with their pants on.
The tl;dr is: just because you suck, doesn’t mean everyone else automagically does.
Here’s the thing about the power to stop time: if it doesn’t come accompanied by a lot of secondary-required powers (2RPs) , then it’d become so cumbersome and harmful in short order that your morals wouldn’t have time (stopped or not) to flush down the toiler in the first place. Plusminus the “if you’d do it, you never had high morals in the first place” argument.
Simplest cases:
No 2RP power to start time. Ooopsie there goes your life as soon as your start your first experiment.
No ability to transfer movement / moventum to things, including air, in stopped time. You could stop time to think over a plan, but not to take prep steps for it. Forget about going to bed to take a nap: even if you could move, the bed, the carpeting and the pillow would explode into plasma as soon as time resumed.
If time is stopped, that means you are blind, right? Photons going around are stopped, and they can’t interact with your body that way.
Breathing too, for that matter. Dragon Ball Z actually toyed with that idea with a character who could stop time but only while holding his breath.
Yaknow I just thought of one technicality that would make time stopping a very miserable super power. What if you are also paused. Or what is the physics of paused time. Like do you need time to make stuff move. If that’s also the case wouldn’t your clothes stop you from moving in paused time. That’s not even mentioning air is also mass. That needs to move to let you move about. Edit: also if mass doesn’t require time to move. What about energy. Would everything feel like it has a shit ton more momentum than normal. How tiring would walking be.
I’m a little tired of everyone being such a doomer all the time tbh. No they wouldn’t, and The Boys isn’t realistic, it’s cynical. Maybe you believe you would start doing immoral things given this power, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else would. If the only thing stopping you from doing it was the potential consequences, then you didn’t have those morals in the first place; you always wanted to do those things, you just didn’t have the ability.
That being said, I would totally do things that are illegal but not against my own morals. Do you know what you could do with that kind of power? You’d be like Dr. Manhattan, the only superpowered individual in the world. Anything you want to be the case (physically), given enough time, you could make it happen. Whether your desires are good or bad, there’s really no reason not to enact them. TL;DR: Things go very differently depending on who gets this power.
It would depend on how the power actually functioned, but my descent into time-stopping degeneracy would probably happen in stages. I would take care of money first, doing whatever to get my house paid off and. Basic needs taken care of for life. Not really sure the quickest and/or easiest way, but robbing a bank maybe? Though that seems a bit too out there for me. Maybe money doesn’t even matter when you can freeze time, you can just grab whatever you want anyways, apart from paying your rent/mortgage. I’d still work my job, but my weekends would probably last awhile. Hell, I’d probably take a day off in between each day. Probably the biggest danger with time-stopping is that I’d prematurely age from all the extra time I’d be taking off (assuming I aged normally while time was still).
Depends on the person. You can see a clear discrepancy in what a person does without super powers. Some work toward a better planet, others toward a more secure life for the self. Adding super powers would just amplify existing MOs.
I have a theory that moral traits, like many other things in nature, follow a normal distribution. If I'm right, we can make some estimates of who would violate social rules given the chance. The bottom 5% of the distribution are going to do some terrible things. About 45% are going to be kind of shit, maybe not terrible. The remainder will be some level of decent to pretty well behaved, actually. Admittedly, that depends on what we think the mean level of morality really is. Having observed many a group of kids playing, I don't think it's that bad. Honestly that's why so many teenage edgelords and doomers get told to go touch grass; reality will almost never be as bleak as we think it will be. There's a well documented cognitive bias towards negative events, but it IS a bias.
The Boys isn't realistic so much as it's a deliberate deconstruction of the genre and a bit of speculative fiction ("What if Superman was a sociopath" seems to be the question it asks). It has elements of satire too, so it's not really concerned with being fair so much as creating the story conditions that allow it to show us its narrative.
If you want a more "realistic" superhero show I think the 2012 movie Chronicle is more plausible. And yeah it does go badly for some but not for others.
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