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?
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.
Those kind of darker ‘realistic’ shows have a very cynical view of human nature where people are inherently bad and the social contract is what keeps us at bay from becoming monsters. I dont agree with that assessment (though I did as an edgy teenager)
The rich and powerful act the was they do not because they can but because they have nothing to strive for. IMO people require a certain amount of conflict and struggle in order to truly attain happiness and a fulfilling life. You also need to learn new skills to have fresh experiences. See this excellent documentary on the mouse utopia experiments.
You cant really appreciate success until you’ve failed miserably and earned it through blood sweat and tears. If you live your whole life being too rich to fail, and get everything you’ve ever wanted without having to work and struggle for it, then you eventually run out of things to want and life becomes hollow. Food looses its taste, drugs no longer get you high, regular and even kinky sex looses its appeal, luxury and convinence becomes meaningless as does social status. The only thing left is the thrill of depravity.
Time powers wouldn’t make a normal person with proper life goals and average moral values instantly go off the deep end. Only people who think money and power buys happiness.
Honestly I’d love the power of being able to see any point in space and time. To witness the birth and death of stars and look around alien shores. To peek at the absurdity of the diversity of life eons before human history.
I’d probably go mad pretty fast but hey, it’d be pretty neat.
This is actually one of the things I would wish for if I had a magic lamp.
The ability to grant or take away perfect immortality to any living thing.
To be the most intelligent human to ever exist (so far)
The ability to see any point in space and time.
You’re right that it would likely have psychological ramifications (probably end up like Brandon Stark from GOT). But it would be fun for a couple thousand years.
Can you imagine how it would be like to see Theia about to hit proto-Earth just above you? Then “pause” the scene and look at it a few hundred kilometres away…
Or just peek inside the clouds of the gas giants…
Or the depths of frozen moon oceans…
Or stars being slingshot’ed near supermassive black holes …
Dang, it almost feels like a curse to know how big and vast the universe is while being confined inside a single body for a few decades…
For some I’m sure that’s the case and would behave pretty remorselessly.
Others have a conscience.
Others still would engage in shitty behavior but probably destroy themselves pretty quickly dealing with the mental problems of doing what they know is shitty.
Be honest? Yeah, I’d do stuff I shouldn’t. But nothing I couldn’t sleep at night over. But one thing I know I’d do is find some way to bring down everyone fucking over regular people. Even if it’s as simple as stopping time, placing a recording device in a boardroom, and letting it record them plotting to fuck over whoever, and then retrieving it for public display.
Or robin hooding it to weath transfer from the ultra rich as a form of wealth redistribution. I’d definitely pass my own pocket a little thicker, to your point, but the main thrust of power focusing on personal benefit would be very narrow and short lived in scope.
Time is a measurement of change, and is inextricably linked to space, so stopping time stops change of any kind. You wouldn’t be able to move even so little as a falling speck of dust from its (now) absolute position in space. You wouldn’t be able to move, and consequently even breathe, since your diaphragm has to change position for respiration to happen (nevermind the fact that matter can no longer be moved anyway, so air is now fixed in place.) Stopping time stops you, completely.
But since we’re talking about imaginary powers, if I could stop time, I wouldn’t even bother with anything in this multiverse, I’d just walk over to explore a different one a few trillion multiverses away. After all, I’d get there in no time.
I’m sorry, but you’re not taking this idea quite far enough. If all time stopped except for you, and you posit that everything else is rigidly fixed in place with no exceptions, you would instantly be turned into a fine mist as your body slams into the suddenly stationary earth or atmospheric molecules while your body is still traveling a couple million kilometers per hour relative to the rest of the universe.
If your scenario posits that you are excepted from the effects of time throughout the universe halting, then what you posit would seem to be true, relative to that scenario. And it is interesting. In mine, the time stopper is part of the universe they’re in, and the instant they stop time, they too are frozen along with the rest of the 10^80 particles.
I’m just going all in for the scenario of “I’m gonna stop time and do all kinds of shit, or maybe just take a nap. Here… we… go—“
I’m stealing within the first day, pulling off the most ridiculously elaborate pranks within the week, and suicidally bored once the dopamine kick is killed after a month of world-befuddling shenanigans that will hopefully destroy even the conceptual understanding of bureaucracy. Loathe me some bureaucracy.
I mean, it probably depends on how happy you are with your life.
Depending on how it works i'd probably just use time stop to lose less time from sleeping. There's a lot of ways to improve your life with time stop before ever delving into morals.
What most people fail to realize, though, is that if you used time stop to sleep you would certainly have more productive hours “awake” – but at the cost of reducing your remaining life span in the time-wise world by one third. You’d still be aging while you sleep.
Though I don't think that's too big a loss when you're using it to sleep. If you used time stop for something that was both exhausting and wasting your time, that'd probably be worse honestly.
It would certainly become noticeable after awhile since as you said, it's one third of your life.
Power does not corrupt. It reveals. If you have the power to do whatever you want, it becomes apparent what you wanted to do. If having this power makes you do evil deeds, it means you already wanted to do evil deeds but lacked the power to.
I think the issue is that it’s impossible to have “perfect morals” and morals are subjective. Once you have absolute power there will no longer be someone or something to keep you in check when it comes to more questionable morals. Sure you might not think you are doing anything wrong, but you can still look like an evil villain to everyone else.
I’d just help people about to fall or get hit and not yell after my dog to come back anymore. Also do some woodwork while kids are sleeping unbreathing and Americans are patiently frozen waiting to get burgers.
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