Every once in a while a new “What superpower would you want?” thread is started, or an old one bumped, or a thread becomes a debate on which superpower would work best in what situation, or what have you. I’d like to propose that there is a superpower that would leave every other one in the dust (and which would be truly devastating if put in the wrong hands). And I think if I can explain it properly I’ll have you all convinced;)
We’ve all heard of the psychic … the person who can predict the future (both for entertainment purposes and for actual, useful, non-hotline purposes). Skeptical inquiries aside, let’s assume for the moment that such people do exist, and that they can predict with 100% accuracy (but they don’t predict everything, of course) things like sports scores and natural disasters and when X or Y poster is going to get banned:D
And let’s further assume that there are some people out there who, having dealt extensively with a variety of mental illnesses/arrangements/etc, have a pretty good grasp of how the human brain works. They’re the ones who combine book learning with extensive field training.
The sort of superpower I’m talking about is a mesh of the two. This is a person who knows not only what I’m going to do, but more importantly the thoughts/reasons … the mental process I go through to get there. This is a person who will see you walking down the street and know how you’re going to react if a car backfires or you see a woman beating her child or a plane flies overhead. It combines the “How in the world can you know that?” of a psychic with the “this is how the human mind functions” of a master of psychology. And with a combination of the elements of these two ideas, you could pretty well rule the earth. Let’s take a very simple example:
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You’re going to have a televised debate with a political opponent. You know that your political opponent likes to speak in generalities and you know she uses buzzwords and pretty wording to hide what knowledge she lacks. You also know that she has been trained well in the art of sidestepping an issue.
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You know that she will try to appeal to the lower-middle class citizen’s sense of pride and belonging to this country (“Because that’s who I am and that’s who I care about”) if you go deep into any issue with her, because while she’s been trained well, she’s essentially a figurehead. IOW, she can’t think for herself if a scenario comes up.
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You know that most lower-middle class citizens aren’t going to be watching this debate on television (let’s assume this and the next bit for the sake of argument). You also know they probably won’t read about it in the paper because they figure it’s just two people saying things they’ve been practicing for weeks, and they’d rather not waste their time.
This much of it is planning ahead and a bit of omniscient narrator (which could be called “psychic”, for purposes of this argument). And here’s where the psychology comes in: you can tell, when nobody else can, when she’s flustered and about to crack. You can figure out from casual discourse with her what her hot button or two is going to be, where’s she’s weak. You can tell that standing a certain way is going to make her feel more threatened and weak and maybe she’ll go off-dialogue. You talk to her during a mike-check before the session starts and you see that she really doesn’t want to be there, because she’s not sure her agenda is really going to work for the demographics predicted for this debate. And you, because you know how people think and what they’re going to do based on their thoughts, how she’ll react to all I’ve just said.
And you can apply this same sort of formula to pretty much any occupation of scenario in which there are people (which is its greatest weakness; if you’re alone in a forest and there are no people around for dozens of miles, and you know that, you’re pretty much SOL unless you have some fast transportation and food); work, home, school … whatever. I think really the only threat is assassination, and knowing how people think and combining that with a psychic sense is going to prevent that or at least provide for a fairly reasonable scenario for doing such.
So imagine someone who knows not only what is going to be done but why it will (or would;)) be done. How do you defeat that person? Kill, win a game, defeat in a political race, win a debate against, whatever. How do you end up with the check in the win column?