Power Levels and Worldbuilding

Why Magic Violates the Assumptions of Democracy

I’m a writer. At least I certainly hope I am, given that I’m writing this now.

But I also write fiction. I prefer to work in what’s called genre fiction, or fantasy and science fiction.

One of biggest draws about genre fiction, for me, is the worldbuilding: designing a fictional world with its own rules, laws of reality/physics, society, and so on. I’ll spend hours just contemplating how the addition of magic to a world will affect it, in ways both subtle and stunning.

I’d like to talk about one such consequence here: the idea the magic, as it is traditionally implemented in both normal and urban fantasy, makes democracy an untenable form of government.

As with many of my musings on worldbuilding and magic, the thought originates with Harry Potter.

Power Levels

Harry Potter implements what’s called a soft magic system. There are some rules, but they tend not to be absolute. You need a wand to do magic most of the time. You wave your wand in the right way and say the pseudo-Latin nonsense words correctly, and you get a predictable effect.

That being said, there’s plenty of magic in Harry Potter than’s unexplained (Dumbledore’s deluminator), unexplainable (sacrifice and the power of love), or purposefully mysterious (the Deathly Hallows). This flexibility in how the magic works is a part of the setting.

Harry Potter has something in common with many - perhaps most - soft magic settings, which is:

Some people are vastly more powerful than others.

Wizards Are Not Created Equal

It’s traditional, in a soft magic setting, to have varying power levels. Which is to say that some people are more powerful than others.

At the lowest power level you might have a hedge-witch or squib (in Harry Potter terms). People with only the barest ability to use magic at all.

At the highest power level you’ve got master sorcerers and archmages, like Dumbledore or Voldemort.

And everyone else tends to fall somewhere in the middle.

This is even more true in anime, where power levels often range from normal human to completely ridiculous.

But the key point to understand with power levels is that they tend to be logarithmic, not linear, in nature. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a linear relationship means that going from (in a made-up example) power level 1 to 4 means being 4 times more powerful. A logarithmic relationship means that, instead of being 4 times as powerful at level 4, someone might be 16 times more powerful. Or 10,000 more powerful.

Basically, not only are people in soft magic systems unequal, they can be vastly unequal. In real life, one person cannot defeat an entire army. One person, no matter how strong, fast, or well-trained, is in real life unlikely to be able to win a fight with five people at once, let alone a hundred or a thousand.

This has consequences for how our societies work.

Society and Power

In real life, because one person can’t physically force one hundred people to do their bidding, all leaders, no matter how tyrannical, require at least some percentage of the population to follow them willingly. At the very least they need the army to follow their orders, and then the army can physically threaten everyone else.

We’ve seen this play out in history time and time again - dictators live and die by the loyalty of their military, i.e. their ability to project force.

In other words: in a world with only one power level - a world in which no one can exert significantly more violence than anyone else - government requires buy-in of some sort. It can be the buy-in of a minority of the population, even a small minority, but a leader cannot force literally everyone else to follow them.

This does not hold for fantasy worlds with multiple power levels.

One Wizard Army

In many fantasy settings, one being, be they wizard, sorcerer, archmage, cultivator, angel, demon, etc., is perfectly capable of fighting and defeating an entire army of enemies.

In Harry Potter, we see both Dumbledore and Voldemort engage multiple enemies at once and win (although never quite an army). In The Lord of The Rings, Sauron alone could have defeated the entire alliance of men and elves if Isildur hadn’t cut the Ring from his finger. In anime, one character quite commonly defeats an entire army. A single high-level cultivator from a Xianxia novel can defeat an almost unlimited number of lower-level cultivators.

Even in modern superhero settings, no amount of normal humans could defeat Superman or Wonder Woman. Even the Avengers, much less powerful than their counterparts in the Justice League, are capable of engaging and defeating entire armies.

In these kinds of settings, one character is perfectly able to enforce their will upon thousands of others with violence. And this violates one of the foundational and load-bearing assumptions of democracy: that everyone is created equal.

Democracy Without Equality

In a democracy, broadly speaking, one person’s vote is not supposed to matter more than another’s. This isn’t strictly true, but the whole point of rule ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ is that every member of ‘the people’ gets a similar say in how things are run.

What I’m drawing attention to, however, is that the equality of people’s vote (or voice) is matched by the equality of people’s capacity for violence.

This is not a coincidence. Everybody poses a similar threat to the government, so everybody gets a similar say.

(Imagine that our world was visited by Superman or some other ultra-powerful wizard or figure, and that said person wanted a change in our government. I think that person’d have a much larger say in how things are done, compared to the average citizen with their one vote. After all, if the average citizen doesn’t get what they want, what can they do? But if Superman doesn’t get what he wants, well…)

We see something similar in our world with how the ultra-wealthy can exert above-average political power. Money is, after all, a kind of superpower.

With real superpowers, however, or a system of magic that allows some people to become vastly more powerful than others…

How can a system of government built upon the premise that all are created equal survive, when all are not, in fact, created equal?

Consequences for Worldbuilding

So what does this mean for a writer of fantasy and science fiction?

The first consequence is that democracies, in a world with wildly varying power levels, can only endure if someone powerful enough wants them to endure. In Harry Potter, although it’s never stated, the democracies of magical Europe endure more or less because Dumbledore supports their existence. Without him, Grindlewald or Voldemort would have taken them over and been ruling them instead.

Note however that Dumbledore is the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards - in other words, he has a position of great power in the setting. And for most of the books, if he wants something done, it gets done, regardless of the legality of the action.

Something similar goes on in superhero settings. It’s no coincidence that both Superman and Captain America are fervent supporters of democracy. If they weren’t, democracy would not last long.

The Jedi in Star Wars were bound to the defense of the Republic for thousands of years, and yet a Sith Lord ended democracy in the setting in a single generation.

So if you happen to be reading or watching a movie about a fantasy world - or building one yourself - remember that the governments and ruling structures of that world are going to be shaped by the nature of its inhabitants. If everyone is created equal (or close enough), then democracy is possible.

But if there are archmages and sorcerers of fantastic power, if the setting includes monks or cultivators or druids or wizards who can defeat armies by themselves, then any democracy in the setting must be very fragile indeed.