Taking Over The World

When I was a little kid, I used to think a lot about taking over the world.

I mean, not like I personally was going to do it; even as a small child, I knew the world has a LOT of moving parts, and that trying to operate it all personally would involve a lot of hard work and more responsibiity than I wanted to deal with. So, no, I didn't want to do it MYSELF, no.

But as a child, I consumed a lot of the basic media intended for children -- comics, cartoons, TV, and movies and such -- and I quickly observed that a LOT of the villains seemed to have world domination as their primary focus and motivation. Gonna TAKE OVER THE WORLD, muahahahahaha!

These villains were actually pretty similar to one another. Invariably, rather than go to law school, go into politics, or bribe a politician, these villains would either build some kind of a gadget, or steal a gadget from the government or a good-guy inventor, with the intention of using it to TAKE OVER THE WORLD, muahahahaha!

I outgrew this form of entertainment pretty quickly. It didn't make sense to me. For one thing, there were too MANY of these guys all with the same game plan, and it seemed unrealistic. It was all "evil for evil's sake." None of them seemed to have any real idea what TAKING OVER THE WORLD would entail, or any real plan for what to DO with it afterwards. Surely, a grownup smart enough to build a laser cannon that ran on D batteries was smart enough to think all this OUT, right?

As I grew older, though, I realized that I'd been wrong. There are plenty of people out there for whom evil for evil's sake seems to be a perfectly good and satisfying motivation. Hell, I wasn't even out of grade school before I learned that some people need nothing more out of life than hurting someone else.

And if the last five years have taught me anything, it is that there are, in fact, guys in a position to take power who have no clue whatsoever about what to do with it when they have it...

http://www.skulduggerypleasant.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Lost-Art-of-World-Domination-1.pdf