I feel like if you avoided giving it long-term goals you could still retain most of your humanity. You could also mainly rely on the divination aspect, and avoid the perfect-execution aspect unless necessary.

Would still be the world’s greatest crutch, but the sheer power it offers is too tempting.

Gonna have to be more specific. What part of life?

Path to Victory, from Wildbow’s web serial Worm.

It’s a two-part power. The first looks into the future to determine the exact set of steps necessary to accomplish any given goal, if it is at all possible to accomplish in any way. The second makes you execute those exact steps with zero chance of deviation or error.

It only fails when interfered with by another power also capable of seeing the future.

edit for grammar

Ultimately, I think it’s a convenient excuse to cover for how truly difficult it is to teach people important things.

The adult mostly doesn’t actually remember the specific logical and/or experiential steps that contributed to whatever understanding they now have. The events are too disconnected in time, and too large in quantity to really parse that way. You need that background info to teach well, though, otherwise you can’t handle questions, you can’t explain, etc, which are all genuinely important parts of teaching.

So, it’s easier to just handwave the problem away and focus on going to work, whatever is for dinner tonight, what’s going on in the neighborhood, cleaning the house, etc etc etc, and leave the teaching to the ostensibly qualified people.

If you want to attempt to do things differently, when you learn something life-lessony, remember that to teach it to a teenager someday, it’s not good enough to have just learned the thing. You’re also going to have to be able to offer a decent-enough explanation and answer any questions.

I have a feeling that an actual martial law declaration would be enough to motivate a general strike.

This actually happened when early nationalists tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic in interwar Germany. Some old generals and their men took over the capital and declared themselves in charge of the country. A general strike was declared, and the whole country shut down. The generals were then left “in charge” of a totally shut down society. Needless to say, the coup lasted a short enough time that it’s usually not even mentioned in world history lessons. This whole event pre-dated Hitler’s first beer hall putsch by like a decade or something, if memory serves.