ch1466,
Thanks for posting such a civil comment. It's always nice to cary on discussions in an even-tempered environment. I hope you don't mind me offering some answers to your questions.
What I've done is copied and pasted your posting and inserted my comments in [brackets].
Orbit56,
In the film 'Men In Black' we are told that people are stupid, panicky, herd creatures, apt to jump on any bandwagon they see. _Persons_ are wise, altruistic, intuitive and curious.
The problem with that statement is that it is patently not true because it is based on the presumption that we are what our society forces us to be. When in fact, our society provides us with the ability to be MORE than the animals of our supposed inner nature and in any case, to exist at all as we do (and advanced culture) is a 'necessary evil'.
[While it's true that such provisions exist, they are not uniformly available. I can only lift myself with my bootsraps if I have the boots. Also, marketing and merchandising professionals have made an art out of trying to, and sometimes achieving, the manipulation of our wants. The release of everything from Cabbage Patch dolls to the latest Game Station inspires near-riot reactions when the department stores open their doors the after Thanksgiving. I might also observe that the spiteful divisiveness we see between Democrats and Republicans reflects some level of herd behavior. However, and this is where I think we agree, as individuals we can choose to rise above the mob mentality. We are at our best when we do.]
Whether you want to change man or change the society that he creates, you cannot do so while sustaining a policy of deliberate subversion of his awareness of how much better things could be.
We worry about oil. But nobody has 'bought' fusion from these people. We worry about overpopulation or 'lack of tolerance' but nobody has asked for FTL capabilities. Why? And WHY do 'peaceful aliens' want to come _here_ if we are so primitive?
[On a rational level, it does not make much sense that an advanced race would take such an interest in us. But the story needs this plot development. Also, I'm not sure Klaatu means humans are primitive, but he does describe tanks and standard armaments as such. My take is that he came because we were moving beyond primitive technologies to embrace nuclear bombs and rocketry.]
Apply this to TDTESS, and the same obvious, supercilious and outright contradictory metaphors apply. Why does an people that believes we are a threat to more than ourselves come across an interstellar void whose _shortest_ distance is one of 4 lightyears to tell us to behave 'or else'???
[While Alpha Centauri is just over 4 light-years away, I believe Klaatu claims to only have travelled 250 million miles, and insists on being considered a neighbor. For the purpose of the story, 250 million miles from Earth equals about 350 million miles from the Sun. That would put Klaatu's point of origin just beyond the Main Asteroid Belt. While there is no planet at that spot, Klaatu might have been a Martian and the distance he travelled would have depended on where Mars was in its orbit relative to Earth. Anyway, I think the idea was to keep Klaatu's point of origin close enough that human misadventure with the A-bomb could have threatened his home.]
Where are the variables of medicine, education, electricity, fuel-less transport, completely automated (no capitalism) manufacture to help /remove/ the tendency to war?
[If you mean why didn't Klaatu offer this as a solution rather than utter destruction of our race, then what I say further below might mean something.]
AFAICT, this is pure social engineering designed to make us feel sufficiently cowed by the magnificence as much as beneficence of these 'Aliens' to do what they say. But if that is all that it is, how is it an encouragement to be more than what we are already? Warring Beasts _according to them_.
[This is a puzzling point, but we do have current problems that echo the same mentality: pre-emptive war.]
I see no evidence of a Prime Directive to restrict their actions. And I see _absolutely_ no proof of human ability to move out to the stars in 1950s technology.
[Not every alien race would recognize the Prime Directive as a useful policy. Even by 1950, our rocket scientists had already been acheiving sub-orbital altitudes with captured V2 rockets. The screenwriter was aware of this, and that's why I think he included Klaatu's comment about us soon putting A-bombs on rockets.]
If it's a MAD based condition that they are after, then they blew it. Because had we had a nuclear war in the 1950s, or even early 60s, the U.S. would have one and we would no longer have to be so afraid with the limited number of weapons available and the particularly poor condition of the Soviet Union. [If I remember correctly, Klaatu said he wasn't concerned about how we handled our petty squabbles, so I don't think he was trying to induce mutual atomic destruction. Our destruction would come from Gort, if we took our nuclear wars into outer space. Also, the analyses I've read about any winners emerging from a nuclear war indicates they would have had an enormous challange in rebuilding any sort of civil society.]
Now, having survived our early nuclear phase, we face a world in which, theoretically, nuclear weapons no longer have to have radioisotopic triggers and thus any yahoo from terror-group-X can ruin a nation and the only thing we can do to prevent him is obliterate his country of origin on an ethnic rather than credo based affiliation. How is this an improvement? [It isn't. And as good as TDTESS reflected the early 1950s, I can't imagine anyone back then predicitng the complications we now face.]
Sorry but Hollywierd gets off on talking down to us with every-option-a-negative solutions. Pinning us into a no hope scenario that makes ZERO sense in terms of either the situation itself or it's damned if you do, thrashed if you don't outcomes. In this, they are not social engineering a brighter tomorrow but an entropic staticism. Effectively they get to provide a snide 'commentary' about things without ever committing to a solution path that fixes them.
[I wouldn't overlook the possibility that a number of films that warned of the dangers of nuclear war may have helped us survive the Cold War without a nuclear war. Also, I got the impression that Klaatu was just a plot device to encourage us to think about using nuclear power responsibly. When Klaatu explained to Bobby that his ship uses nuclear power, the bot seemed astonished that the atom could be used for anything but destruction.]
And THAT is ultimately more dangerous than anything else they do. Because in a world where people actually learn more from entertainment than real history or scientific disciplines, to encourage them to be powerless is to encourage them to be exactly the mindless cattle they are portrayed as being 'only worthy of warning'. And for all we know, it is the _frustration_ with that lock-down perception of society, that lie of containment, that is the real root of our aggression. [But this can be said of other, more influential, institutions. As you probably noted, there were some parallels between Klaatu and Jesus Christ: he came with a message to save mankind, he was rejected, he was killed, he was resurrected. I mention this because world religions often encourage their followers to be powerless, to let their god dictate their behavior and contain them like cattle. Many religions have a do-what-I-say-or-burn-in-Hell dogma. Also, why do most terrorists tend to be religious fanatics?}
Animals are not natively aggressive except when stressed. Some animals stress more easily than others. Maybe it's time we started asking why propoganda mills like Hollywierd keep putting out pablumesque interpretations of why we should just be good little herd bots if it is that tendency to group think which they blame for our present primitiveness.
[I didn't get that out of the movie. My impression was that Klaatu was encouraging us to get over the group-think beliefs that divide nations so we wouldn't have to be lobbing A-bombs at each other, so Gort wouldn't have to be ready to destroy us, so that we'd eventually be accepted into the Federation of Planets he represents. In a way, it was a retelling of H.G. Wells's novel, War of the Worlds. Written at the height of the Victorian era of the British Empire, War of the Worlds gave its readers a chance to see what it was like to be conquered by an advanced culture, just like Britain invading and acquiring territories in Africa, India, China and other smaller, undeveloped countries. I think Klaatu's, do-what-I-say-or-die message reflected the militaristic attitude we had already developed by 1950. Perhaps he was only echoing our own small-minded beliefs.]
Well ch1466, I'm really interested in anything further you'd like to discuss. You gave me a lot to think about.
reply
share