Is it weird that the general premise of "how would you ethically deal with a weaker alien civilization as an interstellar socialist power?" is actually something I think about multiple times a week?
I think the most general answer is you'd use high-tech surveillance drones to study the local languages and culture to the point that clear and coherent communication becomes possible and you have a general understanding of the local political situation. If there's no socialist-equivalent power then you carefully engage with the regional powers with policies that favor peace and materially providing for the broader public (so improving local agriculture and providing agricultural industrial capital, building infrastructure, building housing, building schools and subsidizing public education, providing medical supplies for local doctors and working with them to advance medical technology for their species, etc all contingent on these being things that have to be freely available to the populace) over an immediate redress of systemic grievances or the forcible institution of a socialist government, operating with the premise that a system cannot be violently reformed from outside without causing more suffering and conflict than it would solve. Even providing amnesty to the erstwhile ruling class in exchange for a peaceful transition of power would be worth it, as long as they were defanged and removed from public life in the process.
If there is a local socialist power then you do the same thing but more explicitly ally and work with them and materially defend them from the threats they're sure to be under, enforcing an armistice while still trying to deal with the reactionary powers to improve the lives of their populace and generally mitigate as much material deprivation and suffering as possible.
I think the ComIntergalactic, when encountering a Pre-Socialist world, should simply set up shop inside the capitalist system and outcompete the local tycoons and barons with their far superior technology and planning :deng-cowboy:
Bribe whoever can be bribed for an in to the market. Offer them a life-line of relocation to a pleasure-dome on Theseus V if they ever face consequences because of it.
Start small, play the long game. Ingratiate yourself with the local ruling class by demonstrating your skills in the art of profit.
You can literally never go bankrupt, because you have a line of credit with a pan-galactic post-scarcity techno-utopia.
Become the largest employer on the planet because you provide free healthcare and education for anyone that wants it, and people don't need to work themselves to the bone like in the other corporations.
Monopolize entire sectors, any capitalist that resists the giant payday from your hostile acquisitions gets the choice of pleasure-dome or lead-to-the-dome.
At all stages, you've been fostering worker democracy, and any worker uprising around the globe gets funding and equipment from a series of anonymous cutouts. Imagine an alien Karl Marx with a mech suit, the collected works of Lenin and Mao and ZERO carbuncles. :marx-guns-blazing:
Once you either have total monopoly or the burgeoning workers movement has done some cool shit, you can dissolve private property relations.
I think something like that would be part of dealing with a reactionary industrial civilization, yeah. You make treats for their privileged classes in automated factories elsewhere in the system, and use the profits to pay all the local workers you'd need for the infrastructure projects, schools, hospitals, etc and to hire anyone displaced by the changing economy. I think overall mitigating the harm to sapient beings wherever possible would be the best way to go about it, since you have such a clear power disparity at work.
Like, you don't have to worry about reactionaries attacking your offworld facilities, you have to worry about them attacking their own species, you don't have to worry about material limitations and a lack of capital, you have to worry about the cost in life and wellbeing that would come from not deploying it everywhere it's needed. You're effectively the hegemonic power as soon as you enter the system to such an extent that you have to be careful and precise to avoid harming the locals more than you need to figure out how to materially overcome their ruling class. And after seeing to their species' immediate needs you then have to think about how they can be integrated into the communist interstellar in a way that preserves their agency and dignity instead of just turning them into a new species of human so to speak.
And that's with an industrial civilization that may or may not have a socialist-equivalent ideology already present, how do you approach an iron-age feudal society, or a bureaucratic classical empire? What if they're semi-nomadic horticulturalists with no metallurgy but scattered copper working at the most? The power disparity doesn't meaningfully change because of how extreme it was to begin with, but how one has to interact with them does. Hell, how do you approach creating medical technology for a species that doesn't have an established body of work already? There's no way to approach that that isn't messy and there are countless pitfalls that could lead to inadvertently harming them in the process (like say you can build up a perfect digital model of them by destructively scanning a few already dead bodies, which lets you test simulated chemicals to see what effect they'd have and what would be safe, only to find out after deploying the equivalent an antibiotic that it interacts with specific genetic conditions to become fatal or even just not work at all and your models just didn't include any subjects with that condition, etc).
Do you accept that some of your would-be-helpful actions will end up causing death and suffering occasionally and decide that more aggressive actions still save more lives and improve the general standard living enough to make up for it, or do you play it as safe and thorough as possible even knowing that literally every single day that you haven't converted the planet to a socialist system with advanced technology countless sapient beings die and suffer needlessly in ways you could have prevented? That's the real dilemma to this, isn't it? Because I think just rolling in with legions of robot soldiers and taking control by force would obviously save many lives over doing literally nothing, but it would cause a violent backlash and a reactionary insurgency and the process of seizing power would end up killing a lot of locals needlessly, leaving long-lasting scars that would haunt any subsequent socialist projects. So the middle ground is probably the best, seeing eliminating material deprivation for the locals as the most essential first step while enforcing diplomatic solutions to any local geopolitical conflicts, and from there working to build a socialist system tailored to their species and culture and effectively bribing their ruling class to peacefully abdicate.
You're effectively unbounded by the material constraints that plagued actual socialist projects in this thought experiment, so I don't think the sorts of concessions that they had to make remain necessary to it. If you're not embattled, you have the luxury of peace and mercy in a way that an encircled state already suffering counter-revolutionary terror does not. If you have effectively infinite advanced industrial capital, you don't have to prioritize where it gets used and can instead ensure that every farm has a tractor, that there are freight rails everywhere they're needed, that everyone can have a comfortable and safe living space in a rapidly built housing block, etc.
Also what the fuck is wrong with me, I didn't just think this up I had all the pieces ready to go in my head already. Some of the questions in this weren't rhetorical but like actual ethical questions I've thought about posing as thought experiments here because I'm unsure of my answers to them.
Do you accept that some of your would-be-helpful actions will end up causing death and suffering occasionally and decide that more aggressive actions still save more lives and improve the general standard living enough to make up for it,
absolutely, if you can't accept this you can never accomplish ANYTHING
I have a fun alternative, go to the planet with advanced technology and claim to be gods. Create a communist religion with the goal of flying to the stars to meet the space gods.
Is it weird that the general premise of "how would you ethically deal with a weaker alien civilization as an interstellar socialist power?" is actually something I think about multiple times a week?
I think the most general answer is you'd use high-tech surveillance drones to study the local languages and culture to the point that clear and coherent communication becomes possible and you have a general understanding of the local political situation. If there's no socialist-equivalent power then you carefully engage with the regional powers with policies that favor peace and materially providing for the broader public (so improving local agriculture and providing agricultural industrial capital, building infrastructure, building housing, building schools and subsidizing public education, providing medical supplies for local doctors and working with them to advance medical technology for their species, etc all contingent on these being things that have to be freely available to the populace) over an immediate redress of systemic grievances or the forcible institution of a socialist government, operating with the premise that a system cannot be violently reformed from outside without causing more suffering and conflict than it would solve. Even providing amnesty to the erstwhile ruling class in exchange for a peaceful transition of power would be worth it, as long as they were defanged and removed from public life in the process.
If there is a local socialist power then you do the same thing but more explicitly ally and work with them and materially defend them from the threats they're sure to be under, enforcing an armistice while still trying to deal with the reactionary powers to improve the lives of their populace and generally mitigate as much material deprivation and suffering as possible.
My friend, The Culture awaits you.
I've read several of the books, yeah.
I think the ComIntergalactic, when encountering a Pre-Socialist world, should simply set up shop inside the capitalist system and outcompete the local tycoons and barons with their far superior technology and planning :deng-cowboy:
I think something like that would be part of dealing with a reactionary industrial civilization, yeah. You make treats for their privileged classes in automated factories elsewhere in the system, and use the profits to pay all the local workers you'd need for the infrastructure projects, schools, hospitals, etc and to hire anyone displaced by the changing economy. I think overall mitigating the harm to sapient beings wherever possible would be the best way to go about it, since you have such a clear power disparity at work.
Like, you don't have to worry about reactionaries attacking your offworld facilities, you have to worry about them attacking their own species, you don't have to worry about material limitations and a lack of capital, you have to worry about the cost in life and wellbeing that would come from not deploying it everywhere it's needed. You're effectively the hegemonic power as soon as you enter the system to such an extent that you have to be careful and precise to avoid harming the locals more than you need to figure out how to materially overcome their ruling class. And after seeing to their species' immediate needs you then have to think about how they can be integrated into the communist interstellar in a way that preserves their agency and dignity instead of just turning them into a new species of human so to speak.
And that's with an industrial civilization that may or may not have a socialist-equivalent ideology already present, how do you approach an iron-age feudal society, or a bureaucratic classical empire? What if they're semi-nomadic horticulturalists with no metallurgy but scattered copper working at the most? The power disparity doesn't meaningfully change because of how extreme it was to begin with, but how one has to interact with them does. Hell, how do you approach creating medical technology for a species that doesn't have an established body of work already? There's no way to approach that that isn't messy and there are countless pitfalls that could lead to inadvertently harming them in the process (like say you can build up a perfect digital model of them by destructively scanning a few already dead bodies, which lets you test simulated chemicals to see what effect they'd have and what would be safe, only to find out after deploying the equivalent an antibiotic that it interacts with specific genetic conditions to become fatal or even just not work at all and your models just didn't include any subjects with that condition, etc).
Do you accept that some of your would-be-helpful actions will end up causing death and suffering occasionally and decide that more aggressive actions still save more lives and improve the general standard living enough to make up for it, or do you play it as safe and thorough as possible even knowing that literally every single day that you haven't converted the planet to a socialist system with advanced technology countless sapient beings die and suffer needlessly in ways you could have prevented? That's the real dilemma to this, isn't it? Because I think just rolling in with legions of robot soldiers and taking control by force would obviously save many lives over doing literally nothing, but it would cause a violent backlash and a reactionary insurgency and the process of seizing power would end up killing a lot of locals needlessly, leaving long-lasting scars that would haunt any subsequent socialist projects. So the middle ground is probably the best, seeing eliminating material deprivation for the locals as the most essential first step while enforcing diplomatic solutions to any local geopolitical conflicts, and from there working to build a socialist system tailored to their species and culture and effectively bribing their ruling class to peacefully abdicate.
You're effectively unbounded by the material constraints that plagued actual socialist projects in this thought experiment, so I don't think the sorts of concessions that they had to make remain necessary to it. If you're not embattled, you have the luxury of peace and mercy in a way that an encircled state already suffering counter-revolutionary terror does not. If you have effectively infinite advanced industrial capital, you don't have to prioritize where it gets used and can instead ensure that every farm has a tractor, that there are freight rails everywhere they're needed, that everyone can have a comfortable and safe living space in a rapidly built housing block, etc.
Also what the fuck is wrong with me, I didn't just think this up I had all the pieces ready to go in my head already. Some of the questions in this weren't rhetorical but like actual ethical questions I've thought about posing as thought experiments here because I'm unsure of my answers to them.
absolutely, if you can't accept this you can never accomplish ANYTHING
deleted by creator
I have a fun alternative, go to the planet with advanced technology and claim to be gods. Create a communist religion with the goal of flying to the stars to meet the space gods.
If you have spooky floating-off-the-ground tech, you're halfway there
Exactly. Assuming you're significantly more advanced than the species you're visiting you can achieve this.
:I-was-saying: