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?
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.
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.
I think it depends. Most people could already get away with a lot of immoral or antisocial behaviors without super powers, but most of us still don’t.
The Boys is an interesting one because there are hundreds of supes out there, enough to have a community of depravity. If you were the only one with super powers and you decided to majorly abuse them, you’d be a social outcast, even if you didnt face strict punishment, which most of us would really not want.
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.
Well, a lot of people would suddenly find themselves with their pants down in public. So better put on clean underwear, people. The Timestopper is in town.
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.
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.
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…
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.
My morals wouldn’t change at all, my behavior would change since I don’t need to worry about consequences of fixing systemic injustice by doing “sick crimes”
I feel like the average person wouldn’t become immoral but they would probably become kind of a jerk. At least personally I wouldn’t hurt anybody but damn would I use super speed or invisibility to pull some incredible pranks.
Yeah everyone in this thread spouting social control theory forgets that humans have millions of years of evolution for social living, and the scale of moral ambiguity definitely scales with that to some degree. Most people would likely stop short of things which would seriously harm their community, and the knock-on effects of fairly small amounts of deviance would likely become apparent enough to keep most people from anything more than victimless crimes and simple mischief.
It’s really no different than the time travel paradox in a way. You assassinate a tyrant, and see the horrific civil war it causes and then try to intervene to correct that mistake and it all spirals out of control until it’s legitimately way worse than before. Most people would take that lesson and build a much more limited moral code around their powers, if they didn’t do that from day one.
I think I would probably be a jerk a few times, and it would escalate until I hurt someone unthinkingly, and seeing the results of that would shock me back to reality and I’d feel so uncomfortable with myself that I’d hopefully go back to being less of a jerk.
Looks up social control theory. It basically argues that we all are well behaved because we worry about the social consequences of our bad actions. You remove social control. The moral behaviours goes out the window. It’s pretty well supported framework for understanding human behaviour.
I feel like this doesn’t adequately explain why I can’t manage to force myself to do an evil playthrough of Baldurs Gate 3…like the social sphere there isn’t even real. Nobody bloody cares and I am missing out on a fair chunk of game content that I purchased but I feel too bad about being a dick to imaginary people who don’t exist to betray or kill them.
I have the feeling that if I ended up with a sort of superpower that made me able to stop time I would barely use it for anything like mean spirited pranks and probably just use it to get to work on time, take breaks when I feel like and have more free time to read.
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