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?
If I had the power to stop time I’d stop it, travel all around the world putting live grenades in the pockets of every type of evil greedy cunt I could find, then start it again and wait for the fireworks to ensue. Every time someone starts making psychopath money again? Suddenly a grenade appears in their pocket. Funding wars, poison and incarceration? Every person with a finger in haliburton or monsanto, turned into red mist at a board meeting. Shareholders, exploding in hot tubs, saudi princes splattered in their shitty lambos. Every jordan belfort wannabe fuckstick exquisitely morphed into charcuterie.
I feel like the average asshole would steal, probably trespass in Area 51, or the White House or whatever. In the former case if you steal from a big enough place its effectively a victimless crime. In the latter, you’re just not supposed to be there, so even less in the way of real victims.
Murder though? Thats when stuff gets real. I feel like no matter your stance everyone has a person or people they’d have to think long and hard about not taking out of the equation, whether for personal reasons or to make the world an overall better place in their opinion. Doubt most would even consequence free but some (not so) subtle influence here and there would likely happen.
Also if you’re a comic guy, give Irredeemable a go. It’s the same vein of plot as The Boys and Invincible.
I suppose with that kind of power you wouldn’t really need to use violence to influence them. Just leave a notes in the field of vision constantly until they give all their money to charity or whatever. Maybe upgrade to random cream pies to the face in public if they’re not getting it.
Knife stabbed into your least favorite government official’s pillow with a note on it that says “RETIRE” would probably be a rather effective deterrent to most, and if the first one doesn’t get the message across the second one after all the cops are watching every nook and cranny definitely will. Or just leave pineapples laying around for them, if you want to do things the funnier way.
The connection between madness and pineapples has been a topic of conversation for years, but no one knows exactly why the two complement each other so perfectly.
Losing my morals? Goodness no! My morals would be the only thing left, as there would be no one who could stop me. Justice for the wronged, help for the needy, and punishment for the wicked that knows no limits.
Is there a tyrant that threatens peace? Bound and delivered to the United nations. A disaster trapping civilians? Every injured person into the first hospital bed available, worldwide in a moment. Hell, I could read every medical book ever and become the most studied doctor ever.
Bruh you’re a better person than me. Aint nobody got the time to drag over some weak ass hitler wanna be halfway over the world. Much rather just grenade diplomacy them wherever they are, as another lemming mentioned in this thread.
EDIT: Just occurred to me that this would actually entail investigating and confirming their crimes beyond all doubt. Now I understand the appeal of just dropping them off somewhere with people qualified and trained to do that.
Lmao yeah but what about when somebody pisses you off? Like that’s kinda the whole point of this question but good job taking some weird moral high ground ig?
Also, what if your ideas about “wicked” and “good” aren’t the same as mine?
For example one of us could see Xi Jinping and the Chinese government as quite evil and actively carrying out a genocide, while the other of us might believe that to be western propaganda and that the Chinese government is generally benign.
What about when the death of the wicked means a power vacuum and strife for a region a la American imperialism?
Anyway just trying to get some interesting conversation related to the topic at hand.
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.
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.
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.
Not really, because you wouldn’t be able to see anything or hear anything if time stops. Even light particles would stop moving, and your eyes would just see flashes of light as you move through space.
I mean we could just assume it to be like what 1/100 seconds per seconds perceived by user and everybody else would be moving and perceiving so slowly that it accomplishes pretty much the same thing right? Bullets might be a bit tough to dodge now at ~12ft/s (for handguns) but not impossible so still seems pretty useful
At 1/100 speed, light would be so redshifted that you wouldn’t be able to perceive it. However, some X-rays (1-10nm) would be redshifted into the visible range (400 to 700nm).
I guess this means you would have x-ray vision. But you would see little to nothing since our environment normally does not include significant levels of X-rays.
None of the cleanup in your brain that takes place when you actually sleep is going to happen either, so you’d wake without getting any of the benefits of rest too, right?
Consequences aren’t the only thing that cause people to act they way they act. It’s certainly one reason some people don’t do certain things.
One reason Homelander is the way he is is because how he was raised. If tomorrow I got all Homelander’s powers, I wouldn’t instantly become a psychopath. I mean it might occur to me that any action I might take, and no one could stop me or punish me. But as Homelander observed (at least in the prior season, I’m not entirely caught up) that alienation from his fellow supers is actually a consequence he deals with.
A good example of this is asking yourself if you would kill your immediate family if you could do so with impunity. For most of us the answer is, of course, no. That’s because of familiarity, and how we think of them as our “in group.” Same goes for anyone else. If you’re morally developed then no one should be afraid of you, except maybe the truly vile.
I’m not a violent person and never get into trouble but if I suddenly became superman I’d immediately punch Putin to death. And a bunch of other politicans / plutocrats that have made the world 100x worse.
Spoilers for the first few seasons: the righteous non supers find drugs to give themselves superheroes so they can battle the corrupt super heroes. Yes, this cheat code to power begins to corrupt them too.
Further, the super hero Council and corporation works hard to replace the roles the military covers. They then become an unaccountable shadow agency that the people want to keep doing the work of the government… But then democracy is slipping away.
See I wouldn’t do any of that. I work from the top down only. Just keep punching assholes at the top to death, then the next person takes his place. Eventually there won’t be assholes left, so we’ll actually get good leaders 😅
I wouldn’t touch anything else, policing, military democracy it all unfolds as it does. But assholes wouldn’t run for office or lead any douchenoozle armies becuase, you guessed it, punched to death!
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.
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.
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