Monday, May 31, 2010

The Dick-tator


What would you do if you inherited the throne to a kingdom and became its absolute ruler, with the power to do anything you wanted? If you don't like someone, you can just have them killed. Don't like a whole group of people? You can have them all killed as well or sent to labor camps. You could force everyone to worship you. There would never be any consequences for anything you do. You have absolute power. Do you think you'd be capable of something heinous? Something that Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il has done?

I thought about this recently and I believe that almost anyone, if given the power of an absolute ruler, such as a dictator or a king, could be capable of committing heinous acts against other people. I mean, we've all had times when we wished certain people were dead. We've all wished horrible things on certain people. We've all wanted to silence certain people from saying things we didn't want them to say. And sometimes, some of us entertain the idea of sadism just for the fuck of it.

Most of us don't have the power to make these things happen, but what if we did? Take any ordinary human being and give them the power to do what ever they want with no consequences whatsoever, and I think most of them would be capable of doing the same types of atrocities that Stalin and Hussein and Il have all done. So what I'm asking is this: Is there anything really different about any of the previously mentioned dictators and what they were capable of, from what any other ordinary human being could be capable of in their situation?

That's a tough one to answer definitively. Think about it. What would you do if you had the power to do anything you wanted?

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