posted
Three days ago I was coming back home from short vacations my family had (catholic Great Night holiday). The trip is quite long, about six hours. It was boring. And so we started to discuss an issue that was also picked by OSC. Would all humanity join to fight against aliens, or mobilize our strength to developing new ways of destroing an asteroid that is on it's way towards us? IS it possible to create Hegemon, Polemarch and Strategos, leave stupid fatnatic wars and unite? Tough difficult I think it's possible. And you?
Posts: 723 | Registered: Dec 2004
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posted
Well, is difficult, in the starts the humanity can't it but when we are in disappear danger I think we could
Posts: 111 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I don't think we would need the whole world to unite under one banner which would be really hard. I do think there are enough people out there that would come up with a solution or whatever is needed and we would survive or overcome whatever it was we are faced with. Especially with the internet and global communications we have today. Ordinary people can get around governments and stuff like that
Posts: 1918 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
BTW, that's a common theme in sci-fi, a threat uniting mankind--many writers have used it.
In my better moments I agree with the three of you, that we would pull together and overcome a common threat. That's a good point, DarkKnight, that modern communications could allow people to go around their governments in brainstorming and implementing a solution.
But sometimes I wonder, maybe we would just squabble amongst ourselves, until it was too late.
Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage, against one another,hasten the dying of the light!
posted
Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series is a good example of that theme, an alternate history where World War II is interrupted by an alien invasion.
I believe humanity would unite in the face of an outside threat. While it seems like many nations are embroiled in unreconcilable conflicts, most nations (and people) are willingly to set aside differences to deal with what's perceived as a greater threat. Just as the threat of Nazi Germany forced the U. S. and Soviet Union to cooperate.
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Ya... just as how ironically aliens forced the states, germany AND Russia to unite in the same world war series.
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Yeah, my father also thought we would unite. Nazi threat is a good example. There's nothing so dangerous as a destruction from inside.
Posts: 723 | Registered: Dec 2004
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No. Not a chance. Most of the world would believe it was just like the Moon Landing - the U.S. faked it up in order to try to dominate the world. Meanwhile Europeans who DID know they were real would try to sell them weapons.
So the aliens would take over, but just when it seemed that all was lost, Bruce Willis would turn out to be accidentally caught in their space ship and he would kill them all one by one and then come out and punch a reporter in the nose.
posted
oy, good thing your joking Mr. Card else I would've been depressed. Doesn't history have plenty of precedents of human beings caught up with strife uniting to beat back the invader? China in 1937, the greek city states, the 13 colonies...
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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But the world didn't have Bruce Willis in the 1930's. I mean, OSC's right. In today's world, we must rely on the bald action hero to destroy the evil aliens. The good ones on the other hand, can stay...Provided they have green cards, or whatever the intergalactic equivalent is these days. I think it's fucia now, but I'm not exactly sure.
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posted
It's also got plenty of examples of people who when presented with a super-ordinate threat, using the resulting social flux to really take it to people they don't like. The different iterations of the Robber's Cove experiment demonstrate the sometimes even a clearly super-ordinate threat is unable to motivate people to overcome their prejudices and hatreds. Especially when there's a group of people trying to capitalize on the psychic energy and loosening of social structures and strictures who turn people's focus onto a nice convenient scapegoat. Pat Robertson (I think, but I'm a little squiffy right now) got up after 9/11 and said it was the homosexuals fault.
The tension introduced by an alien threat supplies us with energy towards change, but it's largely scalar instead of a vector. That is, there's a huge amount of energy, but it's undirected. The logical thing to do is band together to face the threat but history is replete with examples of masses of people not choosing the logic thing in response to threat.
A lot would depend on the state of things going into the crisis and a lot would depend on what happened following it's introduction.
There's a phenomenom in group behavior I like to call the two-door effect. It's related but not equivilent to the type of pluralistic ignorance that leads to things like the Kitty Genovese tragedy. A crowd of people leaving somewhere where there are two doors at the exit, but only one of the doors is open, will often spend a lot of time only going through that one door instead of opening up the other to secure double the egress capacity. However, what usually happens is that one person will eventually open the second door and then people will start using both doors. I think, but am not sure that there are specific types of people who are "door openers".
The smae situation sort of exists here, but with a whole mutiplicity of options. There's a lot of people under tension, but few of them are initiators. They'll be waiting for someone to do something and, as long as this something is within their bounds, will follow along. This influence will often be magnified by the group polarization effect, where as people are doing something, they assume that other people are even more into thn they are and move their own attitudes towards this perceived group consensus, thus making the artificial consensus a real thing.
This isn't necessarily the bad thing that people like to make out when talking about "mass behavior". The influence can be used to influence people to behave better and more altruisticly than they would otherwise. It could also be easily turned towards less constructive purposes.
Unfortunately, many of the initiators are initiators because of their lacks and weaknesses and the things that they initiate tend to be pretty bad. However, they can also go too far. Robertson, if it was him, had to back-peddle pretty quickly because only small sections of the U.S. public were willing to buy his idiocy.
But there are also plenty of people who can be initiators who would turn things towards a more positive bent. For me, one of the great tragedies of the post-9/11 world is that on one was willing or able to sucessfully mount a campaign to focus the dislocation and energy engendered into a strengthening of America's social infrastructure.
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Please forgive me this. We've been out celebrating a friend finishing his dissertation. It got me in a mood.
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that's so comforting
