The World is a Mess, and I Just Need To Rule It

I ran across this excerpt of a post on one of the Fimfiction blogs I follow this morning, and while I’m using it out of context and off-topic – it’s actually talking about the Lex Luthor of DC’s Earth-3, the morally inverted one, in the context of their own work – it works perfectly to explain the Vinav Amaranyr phenomenon, for those of you who were around in 2012, and for those of you who weren’t, why the Fourth Directorate keeps a weather eye on the philanthropic just in case:

Imagine a philanthropist.

He started as an inventor, one who managed to hang onto his own patents. In time, his intelligence created one of the most successful corporations in the world — one which truly tries to do good, although it’s gotten large enough that he has trouble keeping an eye on the whole thing. He still spends time in the lab. Until recently, he was working on clean energy sources. […]

He tries to do good. He has more money than he will ever need, at least for the needs of one man. He donates to charities. Sometimes he gives directly to the recipients because he’s learned that charities can take more than operating costs. He brings forth his clean energy and runs directly into the thorns of the coal lobby, gets told he’s only trying to deprive people of their livelihood. When he points out that he offered retraining and employment, they say he’s destroying a culture. His attempts to distribute medicine are fought by insurance companies. Famine relief shipments get stolen by terrorists, and the army marches on the hunger of someone else’s stomach.

He knows he can help the world — if only the world would let him. But he’s getting frustrated. No matter how good his actions are, how much he’s truly trying to help, there’s always something in the way. He wishes there was something else he could do. Focusing his efforts on a single city, creating a model for others… even that creates trouble. There’s a new personality in the media, one who seemingly only exists to berate him. A so-called reporter who invents his own facts and preaches them to an unquestioning audience while his glasses steam with rage.

…okay. So you’re an Imperial, and you want to help the galaxy. You’re a philanthropist, and genuinely want to help all the suffering sophs who aren’t lucky enough to live in a functional near-utopia.

And you’re stymied in all these ways. This happens almost every time you do something, to the point that you, ridiculously, have to spend more time fighting pointless obstacles and generalized stupidity than you do on solving the actual, underlying problems.

And all the while there’s that little voice in the back of your head whispering, saying “You’re a gorram postsophont. Eldrae kirsunar. These… people… can only stop you by your consent, your willingness to accept their petty, nonsensical rules. You can make things better and all you have to do is sweep aside these trivial little problems. Dammit, man, you’re a god among insects!”

And then one morning you wake up to realize you’ve become the villain of the piece, if the Fourth Directorate hasn’t delivered the most serious censure to you yet.

There are those who go Renegade because of dark-side ambition or greed, or some obscure philosophical commitment to something like Dark Kantianism or the Balanced-Universe Heresy.

But they’re a bunch of pikers compared to the ones powered by compassion.

 

3 thoughts on “The World is a Mess, and I Just Need To Rule It

  1. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

    ― C.S. Lewis

  2. Taken in tandem with the last post, I’m going to make the following assertion:

    There is nothing in the Universe quite so dangerous as a paranoid philanthropist.

  3. I read somewhere that most of Reed Richards’ funding comes from established industries paying him “not” to patent inventions that would destroy their market shares.

    While pretty much everyone who tries to change the status quo is a “supervillain”.

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