scrape_r_rational/data/cache/5elned.md

Just watched Jessica Jones. How could one use Kilgrave's powers to improve the human race?

Post:

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Comments:

• u/thrawnca:

  Honestly? I wouldn't attempt anything for the whole of humanity with that. Way too much scope for a) making a catastrophic error and doing more harm than good; b) getting the wrong people mad and getting hammered; c) if actually successful in some degree, becoming too integral to the functioning of people's lives.
  
  Maybe I'd make a career in psychotherapy or similar, where people actually want to be influenced.
  

• u/Geminii27:

  You could influence politicians and other powerful people to set policy for how the planet was run. You could influence religious figures and televangelists to build you an army of people who were encouraged to set a particular precedent for social order.
  
  If your influence worked over recordings, you could have TV shows, ads, bit parts in movies, and so on, to reach a mass audience. Have your messages injected into broadcast media, ISP-level web page rewriting, and smart TV ads.
  
  Personally, I wouldn't want to try and make absolute change; that never really works out well. But I'd be OK with nudging society towards increased co-operation, intellect, and mutual assistance, and decreased aggression and crab-bucketing. When everyone's fed, clothed, housed, generally happy, and has opportunities to pursue their passions, there's not really a need for things like police, military, governments etc. Or at least there's a severely decreased requirement. It's a lot easier to get out of the mindset of having to fight all the time if nearly everyone you encounter is nonjudgmental and happy to assist you in achieving your goals (assuming those goals don't involve damaging other people without consent).
  
  Effectively, my own goal would be to advance knowledge and the lot of the human race, partially just by arranging for all the piddly shit and backbiting that holds people back to be taken care of. And making sure that the more power someone had, the more influenced they were to help others and to resolve conflicts amicably.
  
  It wouldn't even have to be massively overt. If society's heros and authority figures and popular media characters were overwhelmingly people who promoted and embodied win-win situations, and the processes of putting those together were taught in both formal and informal ways, people wouldn't even need to be mentally influenced directly in order to be far more likely to do that sort of thing automatically. Just following the crowd.
  

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