Modern Gods

What if you had the power of a god, but the emotional maturity of a child?

Greek mythology answers this question over and over again. Take Zeus, for instance. You might figure that he’s the king of the gods, so he must be generous and beneficent with all that power, but you’d be very wrong. Zeus is kind of a dick.

Actually, he’s not kind of anything. Zeus is a complete monster who delights in cruelty and lording his power over others, like the time he turned a mortal named Io into a cow so he could get away with cheating on his wife with her. Naturally, Hera imprisons and tortures Io as a direct result of Zeus’s impulsive behavior.

When Zeus has a fling with a different mortal named Semele, Hera tricks her into asking Zeus to reveal his true form. Of course, Zeus’s true form resembles lightning more than it resembles a human being, so she burns to a crisp while Zeus snatches the fetus that will become Dionysus out of her womb and sews him into his thigh for safe gestation.

You really can’t talk about Greek mythology without getting into some pretty weird stuff.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Zeus is ultra-powerful, but he has the moral compass of a frat boy. Everything is about hedonism and amusing himself.

As usual, the Greeks have 2500-year-old nuggets of wisdom for us to digest. The stories of the gods are cautionary tales about how power corrupts, but you don’t need to go all the way back to ancient Greece to hear some of these tales.

Take two of the world’s greatest intellectual properties: Star Wars and the Marvel Universe. “With great power comes great responsibility,” a lesson Marvel hammers home again and again. Every superhero struggles with the power they’ve been given, particularly if they were granted these powers later in life.

Remember “Unlimited power!!!” from Star Wars Episode III?

These cautionary tales may as well have been created for the year 2025. This feels like another one of those inflection points where everything changes suddenly.

We’ve been wrestling with this relationship for a long time, with plenty of recent examples to draw from. It shouldn’t have been a surprise when Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted a god, the only apt comparison from literature he could come up with, when he saw the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

The all-seeing eye of the surveillance state is a bit like the eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings, another contemporary cautionary tale about power—but we individually have our own magic rings we can use. Our rings come in the form of smartphones and AI today, but some of them are actual, literal rings too.

I started this with the question:

What if you had the power of a god, but the emotional maturity of a child?

I think the answer is: you do.