Politics Of Super-beings
Being mortal, killable, injurable, trappable and otherwise vulnerable matters. Also caring.
Imagine if everyone were an immortal, unkillable, uninjurable, untrappable creature, similar in those respects to Superman and the other survivors of Krypton’s explosion when in a yellow star, one gravity environment. They wouldn’t need the full set of Superman powers, just never dying from natural causes, impossible to kill with any kind of force or weapon, impossible to lock up in a cage or prison because they can get out, and so on.
How would such creatures coerce each other? They can’t kill those who won’t obey, they can’t threaten to kill them, they can’t kill others to serve as an example. the same for injuring, and the same for trapping.
Coercing people, killing, injuring , or imprisoning them, or threatening to, is the heart and soul of of private, personal crime, and public, collective government. We can have violent criminals and governments because we can die, but want to live, we can be injured, but don’t want to feel pain or be impaired, or disfigured, we can be trapped, but want to run free.
Advancing beyond our stupid system of taxes and prison and wars will be difficult because it stems directly from our nature as mortal, vulnerable beings.
There are things super-beings could do to motivate each other. I as a super-being could get up in your super face all the time till you do what I want. If you’re able to throw me away I’d just come back. Being immortal, you might decide to wait me out, but I might decide to wait you out. This kind of coercion could be extremely dull.
If you cared about something I might be able to motivate you by threatening to destroy that. A beautiful lake, for example; I could boil it with my heat vision or blow it away or whatever. So caring about things external to one’s self is a weakness, so we’ll add lack of caring to the list of superpowers. Now I can threaten to destroy the earth and it won’t phase you a bit.
We fragile humans are just the opposite so far as caring goes. Instead of being incapable of caring, we care about things that don’t exist, and can hardly keep ourselves from doing so. We care about abstractions, like our country, our political party, we care about the fate of imaginary future people, we care so much about imagined things that we are willing to kill, injure, or imprison real people in order to feel like we have protected people we’ve only imagined to exist in the future.
A lot of what we care about about other people is related to their mortality and fragility. We don’t want them to die before their time, or to be injured, impaired, disfigured, or trapped. If we were all super-beings we wouldn’t have to care about those fates befalling others, but we could want others not to have some super powered jackasses badgering them all the time, ruining all their fun, so there would still be ways to manipulate others if the others cared.
We humans might solve our problems in getting along, in not committing crimes on the small scale of street crime or the large scale of governments, by being intelligent, thinking clearly, and caring only about the right things, but not too much, but I think that’s about as likely as us all turning into super-beings.
