You are offered the position of Absolute Dictator of the United States for a period of 10 years. You can implement any changes to the Constitution, fire anyone, disband anything, change any law, even have people arrested and imprisoned or executed. True absolute dictatorial powers to remake the nation in the image you desire over the course of a decade.
But the catch is that you personally will be put to death at the end of the decade no matter what. It's the one thing you cannot change, cannot avoid, cannot alter in any way. Even if you do the best job ever, you will be put to death at the end of your term. So no clever 'I would change the rules so I don't' or 'I would flee to another country right before it's over' or other dodges like that. You absolutely will die after the term is over. You in essence will be performing a soldier's sacrifice, but only much more effective and individually focused. Instead of giving your life for your country in the hopes of saving it in the abstract, you personally will be able to actually save it in whatever form you think that takes, but you will absolutely be giving your life for it.
Do you take the deal?
Honestly, I don't think I'm brave enough to take that deal. I also have doubts about whether or not I'd be cunning enough to actually fix shit in a way that didn't backfire horribly. 10 years is a very short time.
Skill issue.
Not everyone can be perfect like you.
Yes, correct.
Fuck you. I dissolve NIST and issue an edict redefining the length of a year to be a period of 10 orbits of the Earth around the sun. It's going to be a long decade.
The honest answer is no. If you have to use absolute dictatorial powers to achieve your goals, they'll probably fall apart shortly after your death. We've seen how the enemy plays this shrewdly. People have to think they're acting of their own free will even when they're not.
But I think you need to clarify one aspect of this scenario: secession. Obviously you have to plan for the power vacuum following your death. Does this bargain get offered to someone else on your death? Do you get to make the offer? Can I spend 10 years looking for / preparing the perfect leader and them appointing them as dictator for life on my last day?
Exactly.
This particular scenario only works based on who succeeds you.
Any one of us could come up with a ten year solution to fix the U.K., or the U.S., but it's what happens AFTER that matters most.
The long march through the institutions wasn't even something that took a decade... it took multiple generations.
The sacrifice for ten years of progress is only worth it if -- as you pointed out -- there is going to be succeeding results that mirror what you've accomplished based on who takes over next, otherwise it's an absolutely pointless sacrifice if everything you've done gets undone once you die.
Bold of you to assume there would be anyone left to succeed me after a decade of Scar-level mismanagement.
I'm thinking there'd be a 1 year gap where people can form political parties & stuff, then have a general election :/ So making a (not literal) clone of yourself wouldn't work.
Now in my case, there aren't going to be many idiots left, so the Public can be trusted for a generation or two.
You know what's crazy? If you used your absolute dictatorial power to simply enforce our laws as written, you would substantially improve America. Border enforcement and deportations to stop immigration, sanctuary cities destroyed, anti-trust to bust up media conglomerates, no tax dollars to NGOs, criminals actually go to prison instead of restorative justice, activist judges impeached for violating constitution, communists removed from power, Islam declared unconstitutional, election violations recognized and punished, FDA and FCC torn away from corporate interests, civil rights act overturned, the list goes on and on. The biggest problem with America is that people don't follow the law and then nothing happens to them. As a dictator, you wouldn't even have to be arbitrary or capricious. Just enforce our laws and everything gets better immediately.
Of course.
Agreed. I would do it for as little as 6 months I think. Any lower than that and I would have to think about it but would probably do it. That is absurd power
Ten years makes it not even a choice.
Sounds like a life extension with the bonus of being able to save the country's demographics. Deal.
IDK the option of slaying all my enemies but dying after 10 years is kind of appealing. I'd die before I'm 50 so I wouldn't have to deal with the crap that old people get. I would get to basically be Caesar after the war, knowing that I'm going to die so idgaf, and set the country on course for a brighter future?
Honestly sign me up. I could solve the country's problems in like a year, and spend the other 9 like a Dubai Sheik with 3 days to live.
No because the time limit breeds complacency.
One of the biggest issues we have with term limits at the TOP is that it makes people go 'we can just outlast this and change it back later' so no matter what impact you have, there will always be 'pull back' from those after your reign. Especially if this is a one time deal.
You can have term limits in lower positions but at the very top if the person has THIS much authority, it's best that they can focus on legacy than have to keep watching the clock for their 'term limit'
Probably but it’s a tough one with such short time. I do t want to go on just a vengeance tour and do nothing, but more leave what remains of the populace in such a great state that I’m revered as a hero for all of history. With easily the first chunk of that being caught up in a lot of uproar and possibly causing a war there wouldn’t be much time to fix the system afterwards in such a way that the people don’t just revert it all the next day.
The other question I’d have is can I be killed during the term, or is my life guaranteed in this scenario to ten years. I’d likely want to be assassinated by a lot of people and by countries who would actually do it.
Am I assuming everyone is doing their best to enact my policies and not constantly sabotaging me? If so, probably. I doubt I could solve all our problems but at least I could steer us a bit away from the oncoming cliff. Buying a little more time for my kids to not have to grow up during the worst of it would be worth it.
I think that would be required. Just stepping into the current Swamp would take more than 10 years just to drain it. Well, 5 anyhow, half your time wasted!
Also other countries can't kill you, or invade or drop nukes. They can block trade & stuff though, I'd guess, to keep things interesting.
In a blink, I'm 62 and in poor health anyhow!
And I have many plans already...
That's a pretty fantastic deal.
I mean, if you die a week before the 10 year mark, they can't put you to death at the 10 year mark unless they invent necromancy, which in itself would be quite the accomplishment which would let you circle around it anyways. If it's some divine right God decree of immortality and invulnerability for 10 years... That's a LOT of power and a concerning solid proof of deific power never before seen... But...
I am not smart enough, alas, to solve every problem. In fact, I think I very much would create many more problems, with only 10 years to work with. If I could accept the offer 10 years from now, and have 10 years of peasant-level prep time to learn and plan, then probably I could effect change for the better. But just the 10... it's a toughie. I'd probably lose 5 just sorting out what is needed, and what is needed likely has, itself, a minimum of 5 year lead time, minimum.
The dying at the end part is, ultimately, an unnecessary part of the thought experiment. We all die at the end.
If I could leverage the obvious divine blessing, I might be able to get a strong enough new faith going that could continue the great work once I ascend, but again, all the options there, it would take time to parse and plan. It is easier to destroy than to create, and it took 3 generations of planned sabotage and destruction of our institutions to bring it to what it is today from its heydey. 60 years of destroying.
I would just greenlight all-in on Mars. Best and most logically moral, which will include some brightest but not all. The USA itself cannot be fixed in that time, it is a write-off, but its descendant might have merit.
I wouldn't, but not for the sake of my own life. Besides the issues others have raised, I know what I am and I know what I am not. I am not smart and/or wise enough to properly fix everything even if I had a hundred years to do so. If the deal were altered such that someone with my values but sufficiently smart/wise/skilled/etc. to succeed were installed instead of me while I still paid the price at the end, I would absolutely take the deal. The only thing I could think to do if I was forced to try to fix things is to literally 'kill them all and let God sort them out' with nuclear armageddon. I'm not clever enough to remove such deeply embedded rot any other way. (And since nuclear armageddon is a bad thing, generally speaking, I wouldn't want to take the deal.)
In a way, I'm glad you added the guaranteed death caveat, because otherwise it seems too much of a perfect fantasy. But as other users have pointed out, it's not so much what you do, but what follows.
What you would need to do to have the maximum desired effect would be to act as a societal weedkiller, that is to say not just kill the plants, but the roots and seeds. You would need to make it so that even after you're gone, society does not start to regress in your absence.
This would necessitate redefining what "communism" is, and any aspect of it is immediately forbidden from being taught in school, college, or shown on TV. This would naturally include trooning out children among other nasty ideas. All communist politicians are jailed indefinitely. And we would make communism seem incredibly undesirable by conflating it with child abuse. That it is a core tenet of communist belief.
Ditto with environmentalism. Naturally I'd switch the US grid to as much nuclear power as I could realistically commission, but forests would now be managed on a bi-yearly basis and any treehugger who tries to interfere with that is deemed an enemy of the state and appropriately dealt with.
Anyone who graffitis or vandalizes public property is also a communist.
Being a dictator, I'd then do what all dictators do and elevate all of my close friends to high-ranking positions in the government, priming them to replace me. This guarantees the laws I set will remain in place for at least another 30 - 40 years after I'm gone.
Voting is changed to homesteads only, with the patriarch (father/husband) ultimately getting the final say. If you do not represent a household, you do not get a vote.
Crime is redefined in a manner that's similar to how it was in the film Demolition Man, but without the cops becoming complete pussies. Killing someone with intent, pre-meditated or not, is an automatic death sentence. And with how bad the prison state is, I'd create a division of the police whose job is solely to take these people to deserted corners and execute them. Leave them in the communities they inhabit as a reminder of what can happen to them.
The internet becomes property of the US government, and every country that wants to use it must agree they will follow US law. That includes minimal censorship and no draconian bullshit they're trying to implement.
California gets broken up into two states. No one state should have that much land and that many people.
Texas gets broken up into two states, East and West. No one state should have that much land and that many people.
X becomes an immutable government service, with Elon Musk appointed as its controller. This is due to how some people in this thread, myself included, believe laws can simply be ignored if you're a faggot leftist and have committed general crime. X will be used to expose these people. Every week, there will be a post or set of posts talking about these injustices, and it will be upon X's userbase to decide which one gets talked about.
If the commie decides to acquiesce and admit to their crime before it reaches that stage, they get a lighter sentence. If X/Grok finds them guilty, they are put to death with the details of their crime widely publicized. That simple.
Finally, we annex Cuba and the Bahamas in the interest of protecting US waters. Anyone who lost property during the commie revolution gets fully recompensated with inflation and interest, and anyone found to have benefitted from the commie regime gets punished.
Reset to pre-1920