Ultimate Power Is Physical

There are so many ways that we think we hold power over people. Certainly, we can influence others through many means, like logical argument, guilt, threats of retribution, and we can consider these to be ways of holding power over people. But not all of these powers are equal. In fact, one power truly trumps them all.

Ultimate power is physical. The only thing that can truly stop you from doing what you want is somebody stronger than you physically stopping you from doing it, or somebody using technology that can physically dominate you. Think about anything that you might want to do. Who is going to stop you?

If you work in an office, your boss might think he's in charge, that he can tell you what to do and you have to do it. But I have seen plenty of disgruntled employees do whatever they damn well please and their bosses did nothing to stop them. In fact, terrible employees often stay in companies because the management is afraid that firing them would cause them to...wait for it...use physical force against them.

Cause trouble in society and it's not the senators who take you down; it's the cops.Those big strong people with handcuffs and mace and stun guns and real guns. Those are the people who stop us from doing whatever we want.

Every jackass looking for trouble always says, "what are you going to do about it" and the only answer that calms them down is violence.

The reality of the world is that might truly does make right. We only have order because the collective might of a society tends to be greater than that of any individual troublemaker.

I think this is what leads to a certain staleness in writing (or at least a cynicism). You either get physically harmed or you don't. Most consequences aside from violence are based on the victim accepting these consequences as a problem. So when you want to explain that your characters are facing a legitimate threat, it is a threat of violence.

Similarly, that is why everything is life and death in action movies and the fiction of teenagers. It is permanent, irreversible, and total. But when everybody always has violent antagonists and results are always death, it gets boring. So we have to make these non-physical threats that have non-violent resolutions, but the whole thing is a hoax, because all too often, they are making a needlessly complex plan to solve a problem that isn't an issue with a method that is inefficient (if not downright ineffective).

Still, I suppose we must do what we can to keep our audiences entertained. And if they are bored,we failed. It just becomes difficult, knowing that we are losing a sense of realism to be entertaining.