This thread is inspired by an old thread I made about whether or not it is wrong to step on bugs, but with a different subject. There is an episode of the Twilight Zone called the Little People where a couple astronauts get stranded on a distant planet and while repairing their ship, they stumble upon a tiny civilization of intelligent, flea-sized people who are at least sophisticated enough to build houses, boats, trucks, cities. They appear to be identical to humans in all aspects except their size.
Here’s a still from the episode to give you an idea of the size difference:
What happens next is an alien version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. One of the astronauts decides he’s going to be their God and begins to dominate the little people through fear and cruelty, based on no godly qualities except the advantage of having evolved to be massively bigger than them. It was a cool episode.
Anyway, what’s interesting (at least to me) and possibly shocking to some, is that I don’t think I’d act very differently from that guy in his circumstance. If I somehow came across a planet of tiny little aliens that were the size of fleas or smaller to me, I don’t think I’d have much of a problem with taking advantage of the size difference. I would love the chance to be revered (or even feared) as a god. Why let them have self-determination if through sheer force, I could make them engineer their society in my own image?
In spite of what I’d do in the above situation, I wouldn’t consider myself to be evil, immoral, or unethical. Rather, I’m generally considered to be an all-around great guy by friends and coworkers. I help people all the time for nothing in return, have donated to charities, given people rides, and I even volunteer as an EMT when I can. I run competitively, coach track for no pay. Besides stepping on bugs occasionally, I like animals.
How would you behave when in a situation where you gain absolute power over others? Would you be kind or cruel? Or would you walk away from the situation? Try to stay respectful of one another!
I’d serve myself up a $25,000,000 (after taxes) bank account, and hand the power off to someone else (someone I could trust to not confiscate my 25 million bucks). Who needs the tsuris?
I’d trade with them. Commodity goods in exchange for intellectual property. I sell them energy, raw materials, etc. and they write books, film movies, develop technology, etc. One unit of stuff is, to me, worth like a billion units to them. But the stuff they give me has a 1:1 exchange rate. I can then sell that to others for full price.
I’d carefully manicure their civilization, like weeding a garden, to ensure wars don’t break out, etc. Aside from that I’d mostly leave them alone. I’d buy a giant warehouse for them once I got some money coming in. At a certain point, I’d have billions of them at my disposal and I could easily spin up new tech giants on my own, like Google or Microsoft.
Of course, chances are it would all go wrong, and they’d end up worshipping me anyway, murdering each other based on tiny differences of opinion. So once I announced my presence they might not last long enough to create anything of value.
I have no interest in dominating others. I once did, when I was young, but honestly it seems to have been all about festering resentment over having been dominated and bullied by others, and I worked that shit out long ago. I figure the ones who treated me that way got to be that way by that same process, it got done to them and I was the convenient target to take their frustration out on.
That’s not to say that I wouldn’t abuse my advantages. They might tell me I have obligations and responsibilities that I don’t see myself as having, and maybe I’d develop a “go fuck yourselves” attitude. Just because they can’t easily hold me accountable.
Non-interventionism seems like it could be wise, but the chance to shape and manipulate an entire civilization of tiny, intelligent people would be too exciting for me to pass up. I might help them on certain projects, but I would also flatten any structure that didn’t idolize me in some way.
It’s interesting how your perception of it going all wrong is if they end up worshipping you and fighting with one another. From my perspective, those things would signify that I’m doing things right.
Even in video games, I feel bad if I don’t manage to resolve a situation such that no one gets hurt. Even to the point of knocking out and moving to safety characters that I know will otherwise be killed by the bad guys. Since these are actual people, I’d definitely do everything in my power to prevent them from coming to harm.
That said, I also have no problem taking advantage of my situation, as long as the end result is mutually beneficial.
I’m not sure how the scenario in the OP translates to “absolute power.” Sure, I could easily destroy the little folks if I wanted to, and that fact would likely get most of them to do my bidding.
But to what end? What’s in it for me? I would probably get as bored with this as I do playing The Sims.
Plus, I don’t think I would actually kill anybody, and they’d figure that out eventually and stop listening to me.
Yeah, being really big hardly strikes me as absolute power. Plus if you think they won’t eventually figure out a way to do you in, you don’t think they’re really people.
Honestly, I’m picturing what humans would do if Galactus suddenly showed up, sat down on the moon and put his feet up, and told humanity to…wait, what are these tiny people supposed to do for me again, if I were to dominate them? Their entire society couldn’t so much as make me a sandwich. Aside from scintillating conversation these specks can do nothing for me.
Regardless. Even if I made no threatening moves and managed to befriend some large portion of the population with my generous, er, ability to demolish abandoned neigborhoods on command? No matter how many people like me, there are going to be some number of Lex Luthors out there who fear and hate me, and will plot to kill me - and doubtlessly eventually succeed. I mean, I’m not exactly a hard-to-hit target, and I still have to sleep eventually. Some morning in the near future I’ll find I’ve been poisoned or have choked to death on a Volvo. And this’ll happen all the sooner if I try to tyrannize them. It’s an inevitable outcome.
So no, there are only two ways to ensure my airways remain free of Volvos: slaughter them all down to the last one (which could be hard to pull off, since people as tiny as dust mites can probably hide pretty good), or avoid them. As a non-slaughtery type who has a problem dealing with destined chosen ones avenging their race, walking away seems like the better option. Or running, if the situation seems to merit it - on the upside my longer stride will work in my favor there.
When I read that as a teenager I though having sandkings would be supercool. Only I’d be all benevolent and stuff. Now that I’m a bit (a BIG bit) older the urge to play God and watch wars seems to have receded…
Unless I could become God-Emperor of Earth of course .
No, you make a sandwich for them. 5 minutes of your time feeds their entire civilization.
In return, you can run a tech support call center for pennies. You can contract out programming and engineering work, tax preparation work, investment services, remote medicine, and a zillion other service jobs. Play your cards right and you become the first trillionaire. All of (the equivalent of) Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. are yours because you have access to an enormous supply of service workers for basically free.
Speaking as a computer programmer, I don’t think I’d trust the work of programmers I got to work for me via mortal threats and the gift of a giant sandwich.
Most people do work in exchange for certificates that they can exchange for food, energy, etc. And if they don’t they eventually get thrown in jail or starve to death. I don’t really see any difference.
You don’t see the difference between being paid well in “certificates” that can be exchanged for material goods and services, and “Make me a computer program NOW or I will step on you!”?
I didn’t suggest anything of the sort. I suggested trading stuff that is cheap for me (energy, food, raw materials, etc.) for stuff that has a 1:1 exchange rate (service jobs). Or I trade it for nano-dollars, which I can use to pay the nano-people.
Imagine some giant comes to our civilization and says “Hey, here’s a power cable that supplies 100 gigawatts of electricity. What will you give me for it?” And of course our civilization would quickly figure out how to make use of that and give something in return, like the output of hundreds of thousands of programmers. No one would be working under threat of getting squished.
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