Does Absolute Power Corrupt Absolutely?

At the end of July Amazon Prime Video premiered The Boys, which is based on a comic by Garth Ennis.  The show is about a small team of guys (and one woman) who terrorize superheroes.  The idea being that in this universe most superheroes are secretly assholes, especially the biggest one "Homelander" who looks like Captain America, has Superman's powers, and is a complete sociopath.  He murders numerous people and we find out he raped and impregnated the wife of one of the main characters, Billy Butcher.

About a month or two before this I read the first book in Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners series called Steelheart.  In it some weird red star called Calamity suddenly appears and people start to get superpowers.  Except inevitably all the people with superpowers turn evil.  The eponymous Steelheart is naturally the Superman-type character, only of course evil.  (And he has the power to turn stuff to steel, hence his name.)  Steelheart and other "Epics" force the governments of the world to capitulate and then split the world up amongst themselves.  Ten years later a kid joins this group called "The Reckoners" who go around assassinating Epics.  With his help they're able to finally kill Steelheart.

So in both of these cases people who get superpowers are inevitably assholes and/or evil.  In The Boys the evil is mostly kept hidden thanks in large part to the evil Vought corporation while in Sanderson's books the evil is usually on full display.

Which brings up the title of this entry:  does absolute power corrupt absolutely?  Greek philosophy says yes.  If you got superpowers, how long until you started to use them for evil?  I mean if I got Superman powers, how long could I resist the temptation to walk into a bank and take the money to pay off all my debts and shit?  I'd say about as long as it'd take me to get to the nearest bank.

Or maybe you don't use it for outright evil.  Maybe you sell your powers to the highest bidder like a mercenary.  Or like in the recent Shazam movie set up a demonstration to essentially do super-powered tricks for money.  And like in The Boys you could probably eventually set yourself up with all sorts of endorsement deals like an athlete.  If you follow sports at all you know the sort of shit a lot of athletes get up to in their personal lives because they have all this money and easy access to booze, drugs, and floozies.  See Tiger Woods, Pacman Jones, Michael Vick, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, and Aaron Hernandez for some recent examples of athlete malfeasance.  Plus there are numerous DUIs and such every single year.

I hate to say it like this, but DUIs and a few sexual assaults is almost a best case scenario.  The absolute best is that you'd only use your powers for good and be squeaky clean like Superman or Captain America or Spider-Man.  The absolute worst case scenario is that like Steelheart you decide to take the world (or a chunk of it) for yourself and force all the unpowered people to be your slaves.  Maybe like Sanderson and Ennis I'm a bit cynical about this because it's hard to see most people actually being squeaky clean if they suddenly have superpowers.  If you go digging it's hard to find anyone with money and/or power who is absolutely clean.  Now if you give someone like that superhuman strength, invulnerability, flight, and heat vision?  We're all fucked.

But maybe you think you could resist the urge to just take whatever you want--or think you're owed.  Good thing we'll probably never have to find out.