Peter Parker used facial recognition like the US company
Palantir to spy on all of New York. The newest movie treats This as quirky vs the Nolan Batman movies where Batman does something similar and his allies threatened to quit.
It wasn't even good then. Dark Knight treated universal surveillance as an inherently good idea so long as one sufficiently Strong Smart Man was the arbiter of it. That's just not how shit plays out.
Tyranny is often based on the idea that a group of people are corruptible and not able to be trusted, whereas there will be a singular incorruptible individual out there who could therefore do the job of the group more fairly, less corruptly and more efficiently.
Of course, there are so many defects in this reasoning, including misunderstanding that it is in fact the steep hierarchical nature of a group that often leads to corruption of the group, and that an individual may always come across as uncorrupted but in fact be just as corrupt as anyone else. But when you’re looking at a group system failing, giving an individual power rather than spreading the group out even further seems logical. That’s how you get Caesar, Hitler, Bjelke-Peterson, Putin, Palpatine
Social systems can't be based on individuals, they have to be based on average risk vs benefit, because they operate on a scale above the individual.
The problem with absolute power isn't that people with absolute power inevitably turn bad. It's that bad people with absolute power tend to create a lot of harm that they couldn't have caused without it, but good people rarely NEED absolute power to produce benefit.
In the long run, the benefit just isn't worth the cost.
Cinncinatus was appointed dictator under emergencies; the need for a dictator wasn't planned, and it wasn't a permanent role.
This matters because if Supreme power is something that is reliably granted, it will attract power hungry people who will manipulate the selection criteria to obtain it. If the dictatorial role is an as needed, ad hoc role, they can't as easily do that - they'd have to engineer a crisis or something, push for a dictator position, and then seek it.
The problem isn't just that sometimes the king is bad, the problem is that by concentrating power, you've created a very strong incentive for bad people to seek kingship, and once they get wise to it, that's all you'll get.
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u/Melodic_Till_3778 17h ago
Peter Parker used facial recognition like the US company Palantir to spy on all of New York. The newest movie treats This as quirky vs the Nolan Batman movies where Batman does something similar and his allies threatened to quit.