Why would people want magic to exist? If it did it would turn the world into a nightmare.

[P.K.Acredon]

This is just a fun hypothetical scenario. If magic was real, (power that just happens without any explanation) it would instantly corrupt people. Worlds like harry potters' wizarding world would be a nightmare because all of the students and teachers would be warping everything they could to their own liking without any laws. And just like many other superheroes stories have shown, having superheroes with powers would be a corrupt society full of individuals who don't see people as actual people.
I'm usually very pessimistic about magic. I know lots of stories that show the wonders of magic and who awesome it is. But lots of stories I've been writing about always paint magic as something horrible that easily corrupts people. I'm just saying. What do you think? Why would you want magic considering how corruptable it is?

 

[Wayne Mack]

Brandon Sanderson is an advocate for defining a rule set for magic systems and many other writers' tales do provide some limit on magic use, often a physical toll on the magic user or having it be unconnected pieces that have to be learned one by one.

The same can be said of other genres. Science is constrained, even if only because the equipment is failure prone. Super heroes have some weakness to be exploited.

 

[CupofJoe]

If magic instantly popped in to existence with no warning, then you may well be right. It could be like any disruptive arrival, fatal for the existing normal.
But if it was a process of evolution, then society would have adapted to deal with this. Maybe not perfectly. There would be taboos, religious edicts, moral guidance, even civil laws to limit the unfetter use of magic. And if the magic was truly chaotic in nature [and not inherently evil], then for each person seeking to run amok they would be people wanting the status quo.
Today, in the real world, people can wield incredible power on others. Personally or at a distance, but there is usually some curb on these action whether is personal morality, public revulsion, or criminal sanction.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

Magic does exist - it's just science we don't understand yet.

I have an autoimmune condition which comes with the tag idiopathic which means the medical profession don't have a clue why I have it. Every morning I take magic pills that keep me alive but we only sort of know why they work.

 

[G.T.]

If magic appeared, depending on the rules, there'd most likely be a magical arms race.

Like Dr Manhattan in Watchmen or the use of Dust in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, the superpowered and the magic itself would end up being used by one side against another.

 

[Vladd67]

Magic does exist - it's just science we don't understand yet.

As in Babylon 5's Technomages.

 

[.matthew.]

I doubt it would make the world any worse, people willing to do nasty things already exist. If anything, a force multiplier like magic could work in favour of good people, making them able to defend themselves from oppression.

I will add though that I've never been fond of the whole 'absolute power corrupts absolutely' thing. It seems like a poor justification for people behaving badly... "It wasn't really my fault, I was corrupted by the power."

The fact is that powerful positions attract corruptable people. Nobody is given power, they take it, usually through underhanded or at the very least manipulative tactics. Good people rarely gain authority, and when they do, they tend not to last long.

 

[alexvss]

I must disagree. I think the world would indeed get worse. If we suddenly had superhero-like magic, some people would use it to become supervillains. They would fight and, well, would destroy whole cities while doing it. Also, the superheroes would suck too. Just read/watch Watchmen or The Boys or Invincible. The whole concept of superheroes is a dumb idea.

That put, I'd say that this is not about people "wanting" magic to exist, like you said in the title, but it's about things that exist in the worlds we create, no matter if its inhabitants want them or not. Like youtuber shadiversity often talks about, if magical things existed, the society would change accordingly. For instance, cities would have ballistas to fight dragons; charms to uncover skinwalkers; silver to fight werewolves.

I say this because I often read stories in which only the protagonist knows about the magic, and everybody else is ignorant to it. As Brandon Sanderson says, it's better to deeply explore one kind of magic than write a lot of shallow, bland magic systems in just one story.

 

[luriantimetraveler]

The Power by Naomi Alderman is a great exploration of this question!

 

[.matthew.]

I must disagree. I think the world would indeed get worse. If we suddenly had superhero-like magic, some people would use it to become supervillains. They would fight and, well, would destroy whole cities while doing it. Also, the superheroes would suck too. Just read/watch Watchmen or The Boys or Invincible. The whole concept of superheroes is a dumb idea.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Sanderson's Reckoners series, where the superpowers literally corrupt people.

But no, unless you subscribe to that notion, there would be far more good people with magic than bad, and far more indifferent people who just want to live their lives in peace than both. This would have a balancing effect in itself.

You also need to consider the motives behind people's actions. In comic books, most bad guys are either criminally insane or out for world domination or some other silly reason. There aren't enough insane people in the world to make up a destructive percentage unless the magic you're talking about could literally wipe out a city in a single blow. Most magic systems (this didn't seem to be about superhero powers like invincibility etc) are fairly small scale, with mages being able to do very little destructively that a person with a machine gun or explosives couldn't achieve.

Most of the 'bad' people who had magic would also be far more likely to use it to gain wealth and power, and there are far easier and safer ways of doing that than going all evil wizard. Think about it...

• Portals and teleportation - you could have a freight empire or sell your services to the military.
• Ice powers - you could cut server costs down by billions a year and make a profit from that.
• Fire - they could maybe put out fires or be a mercenary for a government.
• Water - definitely putting out fires although this isn't a rich making one. Maybe some sort of water dancing act (edit: help with underwater construction or deep-sea research, or again military stuff).
• General Harry Potter Magic - sell flying cars! or potions for hair growth, de-ageing, immortality, luck, regrowing bones, magical prosthetics, etc.
• Weather - deliver rain to drought areas... for a price.
• Earth - work in the mining industry doing the job of a hundred men and 100 million pound machines... or building stuff out of rock.
• Mind - well okay, that one would get you straight up murdered if it was known about, nobody wants their secrets out... but you could use it smartly to win at cards or something.
• Healing - you'd be the richest person on the planet! Even if there were lots of you, you'd still be rich as hell.

That was mostly off the top of my head but there would be countless other opportunities for constructive use of magic and while you might get one or two crazies with cause, there should be enough sane people to keep the peace, much like how we maintain civilisation.

 

[BAYLOR]

I would love to live in world where magic was real.

 

[alexvss]

I'm surprised you didn't mention Sanderson's Reckoners series, where the superpowers literally corrupt people.

It's because I simply never heard about this series

But no, unless you subscribe to that notion, there would be far more good people with magic than bad, and far more indifferent people who just want to live their lives in peace than both. This would have a balancing effect in itself.

Indeed, there would be more good people (or maybe we just like to think this way). But I disagree with the notion of the "balancing effect". The bad guys, even when a minority, would wreck havoc while fighting the good guys, and the normal people who just want to live their lives would be in the middle of all that and, well, wouldn't be able to just "live their lives". Note that I'm talking about superhero scale power here.

Now, if the magic was in a smaller scale, it would be like I said before: society would change accordingly. Just like you said in the second half of your post too. The problem is that some authors don't realize that when they build their fictional worlds.

PS: delivering rain to drought areas is a terrible, terrible idea. Watch Weathering with You or read the Alabasta arc in One Piece.

 

[.matthew.]

It's because I simply never heard about this series

You should check it out, it's actually pretty fun.

The bad guys, even when a minority, would wreck havoc while fighting the good guys, and the normal people who just want to live their lives would be in the middle of all that and, well, wouldn't be able to just "live their lives". Note that I'm talking about superhero scale power here.

But what motive would they have for that? In comics and fiction, supervillains are written because the heroes need crazy to fight against. The heroes also fight a lot of battles completely alone because they're the heroes of their own stories. Imagine if the Justice League or the Avengers rocked up together to deal with each individual threat... those fights would last about 5 seconds

Now, of course, there would be extremists of some form or another, and maybe if they obtained powers they would use them as you say, but there would be great efforts made to combat them before reaching that point, much like current anti-terror operations don't wait for someone to rock up with a bomb before tackling them. So unless we're talking literal invincibility plus destructive abilities plus some way of reaching the target without being stopped, I can't see them achieving much.

Add to that, in comics the 'good guys' regularly do idealistic (next story) stuff to deal with the bad guys, like the prisons that they always escape from. In the real world, solutions would be more permanent - I don't see governments not just executing superpowered criminals on the spot or encasing the invincible in a thousand tons of concrete

 

[P.K.Acredon]

Magic does exist - it's just science we don't understand yet.

I will never believe that. Ignorance is not magic. Just because a famous guy said that, doesn't mean everyone should agree with it. But I'm not saying nobody should agree with it. To each his own. Heck, I'm not even saying it not interesting. I just get this vibe that people only say that phrase because it's popular and its said without ever thinking about it past that common phrase.

Personally, I believe Magic is a very internal process. It doesn't exist outside of the imagination but imagination is what gives it its power. Yeah, I don't know how a phone works, but that is just ignorance that I can overcome. Not magic. But if I would imagine all the different impossible ways that the phone works, it would be sources made from my own head. Sources that I made up. Not knowing why a phone works isn't magic. But making up different sources about why the phone works(which if using imagination, are only impossible sources) is magic to me personally.

This is why I think it would be very dangerous for magic to exist. Imagination can get very demented at times. And having a bunch of people using their imagination in the material world warping things to their own liking and becoming so self-absorbed with their power that requires no logic would be chaos.
Magic belongs in the internal parts of the mind.

 

[paranoid marvin]

In Harry Potter's world there is strict governance for the use of magic, which is why places like Hogwarts exist to teach people not only how, but also when to use magic. For those who mis-use it there is the Ministry of Magic or ultimately the Dementors and Azkaban. Judging by the books, it doesn't seem to take too much mis-use of magic to end up there.

I suppose in any magical world there would be those who would use their gift for evil , and those who would use it for good. Equally there would be suitable methods of prevention for crime in a magical world as there are in a non-magical one. Tbh though I wouldn't relish the thought of living in the Marvel universe, where one super-villain was capable of laying waste to a city.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I will never believe that. Ignorance is not magic. Just because a famous guy said that, doesn't mean everyone should agree with it. But I'm not saying nobody should agree with it. To each his own. Heck, I'm not even saying it not interesting. I just get this vibe that people only say that phrase because it's popular and its said without ever thinking about it past that common phrase.

I wasn't aware Arthur C Clarke had said it until you sent me looking for his quote. I do agree with him though. When things go wrong in our lives we have bad luck and misfortune. When things go right it is miraculous and fortuitous.

I've had fibromyalgia for 20 years and less common autoimmune condition called CIU. The I in CIU stands for idiopathic which is medical speak for we don't have a bloody clue why this is happening but unlike with fibromyalgia we can't say it's all in the head because we can see it.

The fibromyalgia cannot be seen and it's so random, it wasn't that long ago I'd have been accused of having a wandering womb for unnatural behaviour (within Arthur C Clarke's lifetime) or could have charged a witch with putting a spell on me or my illness be blamed on my loose morals and karma. Medical advice around the condition is to offer medication that they have no clue why it might work, graded exercise which is harmful etc When my fibromyalgia started to get better my doctor said I had been "lucky". Well no I had just taken copious notes and worked out what worked for me. It was a tad more scientific than luck. Had I been religious, I bet people would be calling it a miracle. If I had been religious some people may even say I was ill so long because I lacked faith.

My CIU can be treated to a point but beyond calling it idiopathic, and having a basic idea they need to keep my histamine levels down, again the doctors understanding of it isn't much beyond a pox on you. I know that meditation works if a person is going into anaphylaxis - not because of any "magic" but because histamine levels rising also raises hormones like cortisol causing panic and stress, bringing them down can make the difference between an airway closing completely or not. However, even in 2021 someone who is using their rosary or saying prayers to similar effect may call it a "miracle".

Miracles, karma, luck and magic still happen in this world but they're words we use even in 2021 for things that happen that we don't understand why.

 

[Astro Pen]

This is the fundamental difference between sci-fi and fantasy.
One has to think extremely hard and logically about solving problems encountered.
The other just invents a bit of magic, no deep thought needed.

This, unfortunately, leads to a dichotomy in our children, half of whom consider economic reality and half of whom think money grows on trees.

Signed:
Bank of Astro Mum and Dad

 

[psikeyhackr]

Yeah, I don't know how a phone works, but that is just ignorance that I can overcome. Not magic. But if I would imagine all the different impossible ways that the phone works, it would be sources made from my own head. Sources that I made up. Not knowing why a phone works isn't magic.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Smartphones are one reason the world is going to hell.

 

[Astro Pen]

Closest I have seen to magic is water dowsing. I did a course with a girlfriend many years back. I was a total skeptic.
However as soon as I went out with those rods. wow! They just had a will of their own, crossing and opening. They felt magnetic but obviously weren't. I did a load of dowsing after that, from underground streams to drain mapping. Only worked with moving water though, and map dowsing with a pendulum did nothing which was disappointing.

 

[Wayne Mack]

I understand the attraction of a mechanism to reduce manual labor, which is essentially what magic is. I would put magic in the same category as science, largely amoral. It is really up to those who use it to use it for good or ill.