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Despotism Justifies the Means: Difference between revisions
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Whether it is to eliminate the competition or to dissuade any future rebellion, you find that [[Take Over the World|World Domination]] is hard to achieve without crossing the [[Moral Event Horizon]], sometimes just because [[Evil Is Easy]]. Now, the world might turn out to be a better place with you running the show, but just to be clear -- that's not why you are trying to do it. Nope -- you sacrificed your friends and family, your fellow countrymen (and theirs), and perhaps most of humanity in the name of social advancement. It might turn out to be a [[Crapsack World]] -- but hey, ''c'est la vie''.
Total global domination is the most common of all villainous goals. But with this trope, the [[Big Bad]] takes it too far.
They will, if they deem it necessary, nearly destroy the world in pursuit of this goal. Power and position are what they are after and they are not particularly fussy about the state of the world insofar as those ambitions go. Ideology and especially morality are secondary, which means examples of this trope often fall into [[Complete Monster]] territory.
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== Films --Animated ==
* ''[[The Lion King]]''. Scar isn't interested in anything but being King, and he was quite happy to murder his brother, try to murder his nephew, and turn the Pride Lands into [[Mordor]] to do it, although its implied in the musical that he regrets the last part, especially when its actually going to cost him his kingship.
** Most Disney villains are like this, actually. [[The Little Mermaid|Ursula/Morgana]] and [[Aladdin (Disney film)|Jafar]], for example, care nothing less than becoming ruler, and have absolutely no qualms of backstabbing their current ruler, murdering people (or [[Fate Worse Than Death|worse]], in the case of Ursula), or killing anyone in their way.
* The only thing Prince Charming did with Far Far Away once conquering it in ''[[Shrek]] the Third'' was force everybody to watch a musical he wrote and starred in about what a great person he thought he was. Perhaps if his mother was still around he would have been able to come up with some kind of government policy.
* In ''[[The Prince of Egypt]]'' Ramsees is portrayed as a more [[Anti-Villain|sympathetic]] version of this, refusing to be the "weak link" that would destroy their dynasty.
== Films -- Live-Action ==
* ''[[You Only Live Twice]]'' features a plot to start [[World War III]] so SPECTRE (or their shady foreign backers) can rule the post-apocalyptic aftermath.
* Palpatine from ''[[Star Wars]]'' orchestrates a civil war (between two armies of "disposable" soldiers with plenty of civilians caught in the crossfire) and commits genocide on his way to becoming the evil Emperor. Darth Vader was never in command but he did some bad things for power too. Vader wanted "to bring order to the galaxy", though, and once naively talked about trying to stop people from dying. Palpatine got him on board by convincing him that this will lead to peace, and he had to convince himself that the Jedi and the Republic were corrupt (not totally unjustified, even though Palpatine was the architect of much of this anyway). He is a very dark example of [[Utopia Justifies the Means]], and he did not want power for powers sake.
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* And the title character of ''[[Richard III]]'' (in ''Shakespeare,'' no matter what you think of his [[Real Life]] counterpart) kills a great many people in order to become King of England, but is at a loss for what to do once he gets there (other than killing ''more'' people so he can ''stay'' there).
* Toward the end of ''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four]]'', the protagonist has a conversation with a representative of the oppressive government, who asks him why he thinks the government has gone to such lengths to control people's lives. He says that he supposes it's because they're trying to do what's best for the people; the government representative laughs at him and says that really they did it because they wanted power for its own sake.
* [[The Lord of the Rings|Sauron]] started out motivated by [[Utopia Justifies the Means]], but while his goal was always to create order, by the time the novel takes place he's suffered [[Motive Decay]] so that his fundamental goal was to perpetuate his own power. He did not, however, fall as far as the ''original'' Dark Lord, Morgoth, who went completely into [[Dystopia Justifies the Means]]- while cruelty was a tool for Sauron, it became an end itself for his master.
== Live-Action TV ==
* In ''[[Doctor Who]]'', the first part of a season finale, ''The Sound of Drums'', ends with The Master taking over the world. His first order of business? "Remove one-tenth of the population."
** Then, in another season's first part of a finale episode, ''The End of Time'', ends with The Master taking over the world... sound familiar? This time he changes everyone on planet Earth into himself, which effectively makes our species extinct.
** His main motivation here was never actually power, though--back when he had truly selfish motives, he usually focused on true immortality, to replace the limited Time Lord kind. He messes with Earth like that partly because it's fun, but mostly because ''it will hurt the Doctor.'' 'Look, Theta! I can break your toys! Cry!'
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== Tabletop Games ==
* ''[[Mage: The Awakening]]'' has the [[Ancient Conspiracy|Seers of the Throne]] work to keep the population from achieving enlightenment, because that means mages out of their control.
** The collectible version of ''[[Illuminati]]'' offers the Power For Its Own Sake card, changing the goal of the game for its player into simple accumulation of power without regard for the conspiracy's ideology.
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== Western Animation ==
* This is the motivation of [[Big Bad|Fire Lord Ozai]] of ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'', in contrast to his [[Well-Intentioned Extremist]] grandfather Sozin. To drive the point home, he relinquishes the title of Fire Lord to his daughter [[The Dragon|Azula]] and declares himself the [[God-Emperor|Phoenix King]].
**
*** The actual ruling part was never the issue for him, and anything besides conquering may have gotten a little vague by the time he was actually free to make his ultimate move.
== Real Life ==
* [[Napoleon Bonaparte]] said on several occasions that his primary motivation was power, and though he governed well, he made it clear that he did this as much to stay in power as for any other reason. It was this that drove him to make two disastrous marches into Egypt and Russia, get thousands of men hurt and killed, then high tailed it out of there when things really went south. In the former he left and then overthrew the Republic.
* Salvatore Riina reportedly killed at least 1,000 people to become head of the Sicilian mafia.
* Fascism has often been accused of being all about this trope, turning it into a political philosophy. While there is more to it than that, opportunism, self-aggrandizement, contempt for the masses and [[Chronic Backstabbing Disorder]] are all Fascist hallmarks.
** In [[Nazi Germany]], Hitler governed by pitting all the other Nazi bigshots against each other, letting them foster competing political empires and turn the Third Reich into a bureaucratic nightmare (eg. there were at least 3 rival Foreign Offices- one for the Party, one for the State, and one for the SS), so they couldn't unite against him and so he retained a mystical "above it all" authority who could have the last word on anything. He let the country go to hell so he could exercise absolute power. Though, that said, this was all roughly in line with Nazi [[Social Darwinist]] philosophy. As much as Hitler loved the immense power he wielded, it was all in the pursuit of fulfilling some sort of racist fantasy by restructuring the world into a hierarchy of "lesser" and "stronger" races. Note: This would put it under the [[Social Darwinist]] variant of [[Utopia Justifies the Means]] more so that this trope!
* Boy Scouts. Saddam Hussein rounded up all his followers in a hall after he took power and had a man, clearly tortured and dehumanized, read a list of supposed traitors one by one, a thug dragging them from the hall after their names had been read, until half the hall was empty and then had them ''kill each other'' outside (the non-traitors kill the supposed traitors). Not good enough? He had the whole thing recorded and televised. As [[Christopher Hitchens]] said, "Hitler didn't think of that. Even Stalin didn't think of that, and he thought about these things a lot."
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