The Most Dangerous Superpower

The other day, my youngest asked for my opinion on the worst superpower, in the sense of how quickly having it would turn you into a villain. I quickly settled on compulsion, undoubtably still influenced by Kilgrave from the haunting (and 10 year old!) first season of Jessica Jones. The next day I came across this discussion of Mormon theology that helped explain my thinking.¹

…humans are genuinely free moral agents…capable of reason, judgment, and meaningful choice.

Human reason isn’t fundamentally corrupted or unreliable. It’s a divine gift and a core feature of identity. That lines up neatly with the Enlightenment belief that people can use reason to understand the world, improve their lives, and govern themselves effectively.

…God proposed a plan for human existence in which individuals would receive genuine agency—the ability to choose, make mistakes, learn, change, and ultimately progress toward becoming like God.

One figure, identified as Satan, rejected that plan and proposed an alternative: eliminate agency, guarantee universal salvation through compulsion, and claim God’s glory in the process.

In this framing, the lack of free will is literally Satanic, and compulsion is thus about as close to pure evil as one can get. Many other evil things — murder, rape, slavery — are evil as extensions from this principle and specific ways of robbing others of their agency. Even lying seeks to influence other people’s choices by corrupting their inputs.

So how long could even a very good person expect to hold out with a superpower whose use is almost the definition of evil? I’d much rather be able to build a mech suit in a cave with a box of scraps.