Say we had a tramp lying in a cardboard box dreaming of growing a goatee (or waxed moustache), owning a fluffy white cat, laughing evilly and lording over the oppressed masses of the entire planet. Could he actually go from rags to everyone’s riches with some sort of evil plan (or several)?
For the sake of argument, assume that despite his homeless condition he;
[ul]
[li]Is in reasonable health.[/li][li]Has at least the intelligence required to start a business and get himself off the streets, maybe we’ll assume he was a businessman who got unlucky.[/li][li]Has at least some idea on how to run a country.[/li][/ul]
And for that matter would any evil plans ever portrayed on a Saturday morning cartoon work?
No. In the real world dominance is extremely labor intensive. You need lots of soldiers/secret police/thugs to keep a hostile population in line. Look at Iraq. If the United States dropped all pretense of human rights and tried to run the country as a prison camp, we’d need hundreds of thousands of more troops than we currently have deployed to keep the population cowed. There’s no way to scale that up and keep the whole world under your thumb.
Say you had a doomsday weapon and threaten to blow up the entire world unless everyone does what you say. You might be able to get the world’s governments to publicly obey you for a few weeks. But in the meantime they’ll be secretly spending billions of dollars to figure out how to kill you. Basically all you’ve done is create a scaled up version of the sort of stand-off situation that SWAT teams regularly deal with. You may get to spend a few days talking with a negotiator to keep you from doing something stupid. But in the meantime the cops are planning their takedown with meticulous detail. The best you can hope for in a stand-off is to figure out someway to slip away before the cops tighten their noose. Good luck with slipping away when you’ve made the entire world your enemy.
Political power? Probably not because of the reasons mentioned above about needed a standing army to really be able to do anything, but there are other types of power that dont require a military. How about the Pope? He wears funny costumes, is obeyed like a king, wields incredible influence, runs his own country, etc. Hes probably the closest thing to a cartoon villian as possible, heck he lives to make sure people in AIDS ravaged nations dont get condoms too! How much more cartoony evil can you get?
Even if you were a billionare industrialist with as much influence as money can buy, that’s still nowhere near the effective power of even a third-world dictator. If you had access to some unique source of wealth and power (say, you discovered how to economically synthesize antimatter), you would still have to find a way to parlay that into effective control. Merely issuing an ultimatum isn’t going to work, as The Hamster King pointed out. IRL people have attempted to gain control of countries, and it seldom holds together for long.
He’d probably need a godlike facility with politics to become Pope, although it is technically possible since the position is elected and not hereditary.
However, the Pope doesn’t rule the world. He exerts a gigantic influence over large parts of the world, but in even larger parts of the world nobody really gives a damn what he thinks. Additionally, becoming Pope is a dead end: There’s no real path from the Papacy to a more powerful position.
He’d probably do better to use the kind of political acumen you normally associate with people who became Pope in the 1500s to rise to the top of the Chinese political system and then blackmail the word. Dark hints about unremarkable tramp steamers carrying satellite-controlled nuclear weapons in ports around the world should be a good start.
What about the parts of the world that do have order? Britain and Europe have both been invaded repeatedly over the centuries after all. In fact most European nations have had large empires that remained stable for at least some time before collapsing.
History suggests that such a task becomes much, much easier if you can first convince people that you are a Prophet of God. Muhammad had control of virtually the entire Arabian Peninsula upon his death in 632AD, and this was obviously during a time when communication and travel speeds were tediously slow. Just over 100 years later, the Muslim empire he founded reached as far west as Spain and North-West Africa, and as far east as modern day Afghanistan.
I’d guess there are quite a few people with those qualifications and no one has yet, so the evidence would suggest no, probably couldn’t.
Now, if we could somehow add that this guy has control over a huge space laser that can wipe countries off the map at will, then we’ve got something to work with.
Im not saying to literally become the pope, but that the accouterments of cartoon villainy exist in the real world only as a cult leader or religious leader. Being worshiped on this level really can lead to a cartoony villian existence. Lots of craziness, secrets, absurd loyalty, lack of rational thinking, big monumental structures, pomp, everything made out of gold, execution of enemies, etc etc.
Its easy to defeat a nut with some thugs on an island with a nuke, but defeating a man considered holy by a billion people isnt so easy. People would give their lives to stop anyone from harming you. Democracies have a hard time attacking someone this popular.
You ever hear of a guy called Adolph Hitler? Probably the closest historical example of someone who was literally a penniless drifter, then became a member of an obscure political party, then the leader of that party, then took the party to national prominence, then became the ruler of his country, then absolute dictator of his country, then started annexing bits of neighboring countries, then conqueror of a vast continent-wide empire. Of course, his empire only lasted a few years. But not bad for a penniless unemployed drifter. And if it wasn’t for those meddling kids he’d have gotten away with it.
