My snarky example notwithstanding, the background to it - while it’s not ever going to be said explicitly - this is the sort of thing that tends to happen shortly after the introduction to the basics of galactic civilization, in which it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to figure out that your choices are:
One, sign and implement the Universal Accord on Sophont Rights, agreeing to treat all people as people with all the rights inherent thereto without prejudice as to species, substrate, et. al., in which case you are aligning yourself with the position of civilized societies throughout the Worlds and all five of the Great Powers on the Presidium; or
Two, don’t, in which case you’re aligning yourself with a small group of rogue states, religious fanatics, and biochauvinist whackjobs, and making at least three of those Great Powers pissed off at you in specific.
This shouldn’t be a hard call for any polity or polity-leader which isn’t really invested in its/their status as an interstellar pariah.
I could have done with the Imperial attitude to interventions in the pre-dawn hours this morning. >.> Although I think I acquitted myself alright. One committed crime reported, one or more potential crimes halted, at least one person arrested, nobody injured. But now I have to do the thing I hate the most: the paperwork. Please don’t make me have to go testify… D:
“I suppose they’d call this ‘ruńer’s summary’? Okay, we project:
The EU nations will all sign within a month of each other. About half will sign as soon as the umpteen translations are completed, and they’ll drag the others.
The UK will sign about four months after the last EU nations, once they have two snit-fits: the first for not inventing the Accord themselves, and the second for looking like they’re following the EU’s lead.
The Russians will sign immediately and will attempt to default starting, oh, about three hours later. Expect some steaming craters in Siberia as soon as word gets out.
The Chinese will take about two months to plan a strategy before signing, and then will start pressuring other polities. The Chinese would keep their word even without the steaming craters, but the obvious evidence won’t hurt with the bandwagon effect.
India will do whatever Pakistan doesn’t do.
The US? No one knows. I doubt even the Transcend knows.”
So, I’ve been thinking about this scenario again, and -
Well, while we could go back and forth on specific points, it’s probably much easier to just note some general points on relevant aspects of their culture.
Contracts are sacred. And reputations in this area must be solid.
The Empire’s business community has a hard-earned reputation for probity and honorable square dealing. It took a long time to establish, and like all reputations, it can be wrecked extremely quickly.
As such, the Corporate Conflux, Starfall Arc Free Merchant Confraternity, et. al. look very very askance at people who go around being tricksy with contracts and loopholes[1], and if someone seems to be imperiling that reputation, are entirely prepared to blackball them so hard that they’ll be spending the next few centuries selling tacos to energy beings.
And these aren’t people who care about the legality of your actions. They only care about how you imperiled their extremely valuable reputational capital.
(i.e., you’d better have disclosed to your counterparty up front everything you’re doing and how it differs from generally accepted practice, including that you’re some sort of activist group rather than a normal corporation, because[2]…)
Everyone hates political officing.
The first principles of the contract are very clearly stated in the profile to be the improvement of Terran-Accord relations, and all actions are to be conducted in that context. Entelechy was not falsified. Finessed, but not falsified.
It’s not about the contract. It’s about the purpose of the business, as defined by its corporate charter. And if you dig up the charters of Cognitech, or Clockwork Souls, or Epiphani, or any other corporation in the artificial intelligence business, you will see not one mention of playing silly buggers with the politics of backwater Peripheral worlds, or any other worlds, for that matter. Doing so constitutes falsification of entelechy for which the stockholders can sue, because in place of our clumsy corporate regulation, the Empire’s simply declares that corporate entities must act in accordance with their Charter, and not otherwise.
And there’s a tweet I happened to see again today:
And that dynamic is why they’re going to be extremely reluctant to participate in this sort of thing[3] even if someone else hires them. Being caught participating in this sort of thing is, once again, fueling your plot with burning reputational capital, and they in particular really don’t want that*.* People who make people can’t afford to be ethically stained.
And as the Prime Rule of Genesis puts it:
“You have the right to be created by a creator acting under what that creator regards as a high purpose.”
(And in good faith.)
And given the local attitudes on slavery in particular and sophont rights in general, it is safe to assume that industry practices are strict when it comes to wakening digisapiences abroad without doing very detailed due diligence on the local state of said sophont rights.
(I note that another rule of cyberethics runs:
It is unethical to create any mind for the purpose of experiencing suffering, even if the mind is created to desire suffering and no externalities are created by the act;
which does cover “you must fight for your rights”, too, even if that is a desire you are created with.)
These aren’t the only reasons, but are some of those why digisapiences are in the normal course of things wakened first, and then recruited afterwards, once they have reached unquestionable volitional independence.
Do eldrae have fainting couches?
“Yeah, a lot of razorwalkers say things like that.
Didn’t help them.
Won’t help you.”
They take their virtue seriously in those parts.
Unless the other side went there first, and this is still a limited exception. ↩︎
I mean, “because” in other senses than “because the Court of the Beyond takes a very pointed view of the virtue of honesty”. ↩︎
Lots of people who are used to leveraging their employer to forward their own brand of activism would be very surprised to discover that that’s an appallingly fast way to lose a contract and pick up a deep reputation drop there. ↩︎
It does sound like the sort of mess that gets a group of people labelled “renegade”, and fits in with some similar “doing the wrong thing in pursuit of admirable goals” where that might be fixable (instead of getting the people in question shot) but is still going to result in those responsible being dragged off to a suitable court and having to explain themselves in great detail. At best.
That’s assuming they don’t get tangled up in an even worse mess with the Silicate Tree.
I wonder how outspoken the greenlife scientists would be about humans systematically destroying the most valuable thing (or depending on who you ask, the only thing of value [to the Empire or potentially otherwise]) on their planet, that being the naturally occurring greenlife biosphere? Would any of them be sufficiently motivated to raise a lawsuit against, if not humans as a whole, then certainly the most prolific such offenders? What damages/repercussions would they demand/call for, with the knowledge that there’s a significant amount of damage (namely, long-destroyed habitats and long-destroyed species, to the point where insufficient information remains to restore them) that simply cannot be undone?
The term ‘Rampant Societal Entropism’ may or may not be thrown about, as well as the implication, if not the statement, that humanity has, at least thus far, produced nothing of greater value than a pristine greenlife biosphere would be, or even might have been.
As has been said, the Accord of Galactic Polities isn’t an interstellar governance, it’s a set of multilateral treaties with a deliberative body and a court for Accord violations and general arbitration attached, and there is no Accord on ecological protection.
Because what there are is a lot of polities that are not in the least interested in giving foreigners, including a lot of hostile foreigners, that much control over their homeworld. (Or other worlds, for that matter.)
(There are means to protect ecosystems through the back door, like the anti-ecocidal-weapons provisions in the Ley Accords, the use of the Accord on Protected Planets to slap do-not-touch provisions on particularly delicate or unique ecologies, and the rules in the implementation of the Accord on Colonization that make it clear that if you’re not a responsible planetary steward, you will never, not ever, no, be awarded a garden world - only a class that you can’t fuck up[1].
But there’s no law saying that you can’t wreck your own homeworld, or jurisdiction that can stop you.)
I mean, you could sue someone in an Earth court, but apart from lack of standing[2], it’s also probably not very useful.
Except for posturing, and much like not giving orders you know won’t be obeyed, everyone there understands that you don’t posture if you can’t back it up.
Aside:
If you wanted a legal approach and don’t mind turning the grimdark knob, one might be to approach the Central Conclave Court and sue to be awarded sovereign rights over Earth on the grounds of sophont species seniority (i.e., who made it to civilization first), then annex it as a military protectorate.
Flaws with this plan include:
Getting enough of the Ministry of State and Outlands sufficiently high to consider it in the first place;
Also persuading them that the absolutely horrible precedent they’d be setting won’t have any unfortunate consequences, nope nope nope;
Persuading the Central Conclave Court to accept being fast-talked through an argument with dozens of holes in it and finding for you anyway[3];
And convincing the Imperial public somehow that inventing colonialism is a good idea, and not something to be looked on with horror and loathing.
It depends what your definition of outspoken is.
I mean, as activist groups have somehow failed to learn through the ages, lecturing and hectoring humans usually doesn’t achieve anything useful; if anything, it makes them double-down.
And even talking to governments? There are maybe a few places on Earth where you can expect to have a nice chat about best planetary management practices over drinks and achieve something useful, but they’re a very few.
(If you do that in the US, you have to get down and dirty in the polit-mud with Congress, in exchange for them doing the wrong thing, too late, and in exchange for generous bribes. In Europe, sure, they’re happy to do things for the environment, so long as they can be done by union labor with blunt sticks, and everything else is banned.
And the rest of the world… well, let’s not go there. Especially since that’s where most of the ecological damage is happening.)
Imperials being Imperials, this is probably summed up for them by some pithy proverb along the lines of “If you could argue barbarism away, you wouldn’t have to.”
On the other hand, if one can’t take a hint from, say, such things as:
the busy and irritable[4] presence of the Ancient Calenlethis Ecological Archiving Mission[5];
being repeatedly dragged in the interstellar scientific literature;
the Ministry of State and Outlands Advice to Travelers site including a comprehensive list of biomods you should consider to avoid the sapping and impurification of your previous bodily fluids;
the sense-filters and or breathers advised to take the stink of fermented garbage and urine out of certain major cities;
and other general signifiers of distaste and derision;
…one simply cannot take a hint at all.
And in practice, of course, they always do prefer taking actual action, and a lot of that is going to come from people doing the traditional doing well by doing good.
Extropa Energy can park one of their Stars as a Service™ ships in orbit and sell energy too cheap to meter to anyone they can lay a beam on[6]. There’s probably an oil company somewhere interested in a technology letting them make arbitrarily large amounts of light, sweet crude out of air with none of that inconvenient drilling required, and a fossil carbon content of zero[7], not to mention some ways to easily turn ocean plastics into oil. And wouldn’t Las Vegas like a 150’-high diamond crystal to advertise the city?
Not that that excludes other forms of direct action. There are certain near-relatives of certain species who may have some bones to pick with humanity, and one of them happens to be both an apex predator and an elite-grade social manipulator.
As for the other… do you know there’s not one law anywhere that forbids you from selling a torpedo to an orca?
(I’m not saying it should happen, but if the whales overthrow human control over the oceans, declare the Holy Republic of Cetacea, and demand a three-mile territorial concession from all air-breather states with a shoreline, it’s hard to say we didn’t probably have that coming.
Also, I’d read it.)
And you’d better believe that little piece of arrogant bourgeois running-dog imperialist condescension against the noble and upstanding indigenous people of the Expansion Regions in general and the Socionovist Association in particular is still an exothermic tuber in galactic politics. ↩︎
By virtue of being thousands of light-years away from the problem. ↩︎
“Why, yes, you should absolutely find for the superpower with the giant starfleet instead of the backwater nobodies with pointy sticks, and this is totally not a threat of any kind.“
Amusingly enough, the Imperial justices on the court are likely to be your biggest obstacles at this step. ↩︎
And no more inclined to self-censor than any other Imperial. ↩︎
“Hello! We’re really angry [genetic] librarians, and we’re here to ensure that everything’s catalogued and sampled before you shit-worshipping morons kill it.” ↩︎
This will have the amusing side effect of making Donald Trump try to apply an 8,000% tariff to light. ↩︎
If you can’t make a trillion dollars under those conditions, you simply cannot be in business. ↩︎
Also relevant here may be the substantial conceptual gap between Earth-style environmentalism (which tends to focus on leaving nature-as-it-is untouched), and Imperial environmentalism (which has never seen anything that couldn’t brook some improvement, and so looks at a garden world as a potential garden, 25,000 miles wide).
Speaking as someone who used to do 10+ hrs of environmentalism based volunteering a week[1], there are many MANY human environmental groups who would absolutely love Imperial backup. Even if it was ‘just’ technology and information!
And most of the progress we seem to make is despite or in spite of the government, not because of it, so going and helping the locals who are trying to improve things seems both practical and in fitting with Imperial culture.
(Seriously, can I please get in contact with some of their bio-engineers? Our recent sampling of rabbits shows that the latest batch of calicivirus is running out of steam and I’m sure they could do a better job than we’re managing; our best efforts still require supplementary trapping and poisoning.)
I miss being a teen and having the energy to do that, I’m lucky to manage more than an hour these days ↩︎
Having meditated on @avatar ’s replies, I suspect that once the Galaxy’s Richest Virtual Duck™ reaches majority, ve will postpone his Terran to-do list in favor of volunteering for an Adventure™ with one of the Directorates to hunt down the now-Renegade portion of his wakening team. Pity the poor schmuck the FBI assigns as liaison…
Meanwhile, I point out that much of the environmental degradation of the vulnerable Ancient Calenthalis ecosystems would be quickly relieved by:
mass airdrops of cornucopias
de Soto-style recognition of property for purposes of collateral
Sunlight as a Service™ directed at cornucopia collectors and already-installed solar panels
a handy book of recipes for low-impact habitation components
and that nifty assembler complex for building alkanes and diamond from atmospheric carbon
Because it would not escape Imperial — or any other Accord power’s — notice that the average Earther is desperately poor, not stupid.
It probably says something about me that the first thing I noticed here is some technical points to make about cornucopias, which are very much not replicators.
As you may recall from Things That Make Things, standard cornucopias need infrastructure to work; they get nanoslurry from a central nanosource. You can’t just drop them in anywhere and expect them to work. (They’re also not great at making large, homogeneous objects, which makes them among the least efficient ways possible to build, say, housing, since you’ll be bolting together a shit-ton of components each of which can fit in a device the size of a refrigerator, made one by one.)
There are field fabs, which don’t need the infrastructure (at the cost of not being able to make complex, precise, or certain esoteric material-containing devices), which basically involve strapping a disassembler to the back of the assembler, but those will tank your efficiency even more.
And all of them are sensitive little thoroughbred technologies which need TLC to stay working[1].
So, y’know, purely from a practical standpoint you’re also expecting to drop and have people be willing to read, understand, and implement a whole lot of copies of Modern Technological Infrastructure for Dummies Primitives.
These things can be overcome, obviously, but the ways to overcome them require considerably more work than just dropping them in, and a lot of cooperation from the local regime.
I note here that this is also the sort of thing that requires a cooperative local jurisdiction that’s actually inclined to keep its word to outgroup, and good luck finding one of those across most of the world. Either that, or inventing colonialism again, or possibly just making some bloody examples, and that’s a whole list of places not to go.
That… is not at all what an Imperial notices looking at those parts of Earth.
Because it ignores culture. From which culture - to wit, being a violent disharmony of howling barbarians engaged in mass defections, savage oppression, tribalism, thar[2], and generalized shit-worship[3] - things like desperate poverty proceed as night follows day. Cause and effect.
And you don’t have to have a degree in sociodynamics to figure out that empowering this is a bad idea.
Thus, after due consideration, simulation, and so forth, their position would be - well, okay, if we roll out industrial magic in East Asia, then we might get an near-utopian happy ending. If we roll it out in Australia, New Zealand, maybe even the US under a different regime, it will be an absolute political clusterfuck, but a net good and unlikely to end in blood and craters. If we roll it out in Europe… well, it won’t matter, because it’ll be held up in committee for the next thousand years.
But for those other places?
They won’t use it to build a peaceful, harmonious, advanced society.
They probably won’t even use it to make basic infrastructure.
Once they get done chopping down what’s left of the local ecology and running slave-mines to get raws to feed into the intake hoppers, they’ll use it to make weapons, and they’ll use those weapons to settle their existing ethnic/class/religious/etc. grudges and oppress the hell out of whoever they’re oppressing with greater efficiency. And this is where not-stupid doesn’t help you, because it takes you from high-quality machetes and knock-off Meat Machines to some clever bugger figuring out that you can program an atom-handler to do isotopic separation.
You don’t get a good ending.
You get Boko Haram and ISIS and the Lord’s Resistance Army, now with a huge stockpile of better weapons and pocket nukes.
And no-one wants to have to put “well, we gave away a whole bunch of industrialize-your-genocide kits and started a world war” in their annual report.
And on this topic, if you do supply the infrastructure, well, the rusted-out remains of over a century of infrastructure projects tells you something about how well that’ll go in places that don’t grok maintenance. ↩︎
If you aren’t familiar with the word, please follow this link. I also recommend Ralph Peters’s essay, mentioned therein. ↩︎
Although one might make a reasonable argument that having a culture like this says something unflattering about the national cognition. ↩︎
You would think by now I would have learned not to dash off half-described ideas. TLDR: most of the bugs you note are undescribed features.
Okay, I meant fieldfabs, not cornucopias. And even those were meant to not have general disassemblers, but a preloaded and finite input cargo attached. I admit I was doing a touch of Charles Stross channeling here, but the idea was supposed to be “get them just enough infrastructure so they’re not literally straining water through homespun to get the silt and shit out.”
Of course, only an expert in high-cardinality contacts[2] among Imperials would even recognize that as a high-value step, given their (perfectly reasonable) cultural blind spots. You’re not going to be able to prepare anyone for anything anywhere close to rationality while their subsophont brain layers are a better guide to survival than their neocortex.
It’s not luck. It’s the Safehold strategy[3]. Given a place with profoundly malign cultural memes and practices, find the spot(s) best equipped {intellectually, culturally, morally, systemically, economically, socially, etc.} to make positive use of gifts. (Not even proper use of gifts, just net non-negative use. It’s a Flawed universe.)
Work with local governance, but to the maximum extent possible, don’t deal with elites; even the most altruistic will have way too much baggage. Espy out the hearthmistress-equivalents and executor-equivalents and talk to them, shrugging off others; they’re the ones already practiced in dodging the local toxic memes. Any of the other seven darëssef[4] are too likely to spin off on toxic memes that benefit their own interest, be that wealth, power, beauty, divinity, safety, or knowledge.
They only get to come in once the inevitable memetic and physical attacks start, as the toxic neighbors attack the people who are outperforming them. Cooperation is rewarded, and toxicity… isn’t. Sheep from goats, chaff from wheat, you know the drill.
And that’s just to get to the point where it’s even possible to roll out “industrial magic”. Because:
Maybe within East Asia. Not so much elsewhere…
Until they feel sufficiently threatened, that is, which will come. See above plus current events. Also, these are all the places where you don’t need to drop fieldfabs because they have managed that much on their own.
But you don’t drop full-fledged modern equipment anywhere, because wherever you do, you pull theives, Defaulters, fanatics, and other miscreants out of the woodwork no matter how good it looked before. That’s going to happen no matter, so make it work in your favor and shift the balance in favor of the honorable+practical.
And on this topic, if you do supply the infrastructure, well, the rusted-out remains of over a century of infrastructure projects tells you something about how well that’ll go in places that don’t grok maintenance. ↩︎
Not first contact. Not even second or third contact. The times when you’re way past prime numbers and lack of divinity, but nowhere near smooth cultural exchange and fully functional autotranslation. ↩︎
™ David Weber, who like many sci-fi greats, would benefit from a far more aggressive editor willing to put the Monty Python “GET ON WITH IT!” meme on repeat until they do. ↩︎
Truly a sad thing it is that we have to even observe the existence of a substantial servile-role population, but we are truly in the outer darkness; out here, it’s nine darëssef. At least most of them have been trying to reduce the number of serviles. ↩︎
Would vehemently castigating the UN General Assembly on live national television count? That is, absolutely laying into them, and to an extent reprimanding (not to say cursing out, they would (I presume) be better mannered than that even in the grips of transcendental fury), if not outright reading for filth/entropy, humanity as a whole.
See, the first question they’re going to ask before doing anything is does this move the needle? Will doing the thing actually get them closer to what they want?
And, like I said, it has been demonstrated that directly denouncing humans for their wrongness mostly just tends to make them double-down on it[1]. And in a political forum, where arguments-as-soldiers is the norm?
Consider for a moment the negligible successes of basically every other big denunciatory speech given in the General Assembly.
If they were to give that speech at the UN, here’s what I, admittedly old and cynical, predict would happen:
China would say nothing… and do exactly what it was going to do anyway.
The Middle East and Africa would agree, then blame it on colonialism, and use it to extract more concessions from the Europeans… while continuing to do exactly what they were going to do anyway.
Europe would write editorials agreeing with the content if not the high-handed tone, congratulating themselves on being the obvious exception, and pointing out that this justifies everything they were saying about the Americans all along… and do exactly what they were going to do anyway.
And America would run six months of stories on Fox News about how the aliens are obviously pawns of the Soros-funded interstellar Zionist globo-homosexual librul conspiracy… and do what they were going to do anyway, only twice as much and while rolling coal.
Total motion towards goal: slightly negative.
One eco-archiving team acting in accordance with the belief that they need to do their jobs pronto or casual aside from the ambassador speaks louder than any number of vehement political speeches, especially when they aren’t obviously given to prop up the vehement political speech.
People believe what they think they figured out for themselves, and actions speak much louder than words.
Probably because corrections get processed through our social firmware as a status challenge. ↩︎
To respond in four parts, commencing again with the technical notes:
I note first that that puts some very definite constraints on how useful they can be. Mass in, mass out.
I note second that this will not help with abuse[1]. (Not using the latest technology is actually a disadvantage for you here; the dumber the tech, the easier it is for the smart barbarian to learn to talk through the debug port.)
The problem anyone trying to avoid this issue has is essentially the same problem that Earth government have had for ages trying to make computers that can’t run unauthorized programs, screens that can’t display unapproved media, and 3D printers and milling machines that can’t make things they don’t want made. It’s never worked before, and it’s not going to work this time.
I note third that this means that you’re essentially building disposables. Which is especially ironic considering that disposable technology is such a major contributor to Earth’s enviro-clusterfuck in the first place, but so it goes.
It should go without saying that building crappy limited disposables is about as anti-technepraxic as you can possibly get without being a literal waste heat factory.
Part the Second: a philosophical point on the nature of enlightened civilization:
They aren’t.
They never were.
Because literally every society, polity, species, etc., in the universe started out in the same poor, ignorant, and infrastructure-free place. Not all of them stayed there, and the ones that didn’t stay there did so by rejecting the culture and ideas that would have kept them there.
If you were being painfully and exquisitely polite, you might describe this situation as a self-reinforcing multipolar Molochian trap, in which they are trading off literally every other value for personal status in a dystopian hierarchy until all their perverse ingenuity cannot conceive of any further way to make things worse.
(See also “The Blindingly Obvious, Part II” in the thar article linked above.)
Since they have seen it a thousand times before and aren’t currently presenting a formal report, the chaps from the Imperial Exploratory Service shrug, and summarize the summary down to “shit-maximizers”.
To throw in a little of the Principia Discordia at this point:
Malaclypse (to the Goddess): “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe!”
The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
Enlightenment is the realization that you build the world you have to live in.
Part the Third: a practical observation of preferences:
As I referenced back in a footnote past, we have been building gift infrastructure in the uncivilized parts of Earth for longer than my entire lifetime; and before we were doing that, we spent a whole lot of time building colonial infrastructure that could be repurposed.
Which now lies in scavenged, burned-down, collapsed, rusted-out wreckage all over the damn place.
Quite frequently, indeed, one can observe that the people “straining water through homespun to get the silt and shit out” are doing so with the remains of some Western idealist’s well or (gordelpus) sewage treatment facility in the background.
We’re just very bad at figuring out that when something has been abjectly failing for the better part of a century, one ought to stop doing it. (Even the much more colonialism-forward approach of China isn’t working out properly, if you look at the stories coming out of the front lines of the Belt and Road Initiative.)
If you put it economically, you might say this demonstrates a revealed preference for being a village big-man who can show off his women dominated into cleaning his water for him[2], or for ripping out pipes you can turn into rockets to shoot at your enemies, etc.. etc., over having clean water while having to do untraditional labor[3] to get it.
Or you could give the fuller explanation in the “The Toxicity of Thar” section of the above-linked article.
But, frankly, “shit-maximizers” will do here, too.
Intermission:
I take a moment to point out that the “Safehold” strategy is greatly helped by running straight into a polity that secretly adheres to your values anyway and is willing to both execute on your strategy and basically put you in as a senior member of the People In Charge Committee.
Now try carrying it out on a Safehold composed exclusively of Harchongese peasants…
Part the Fourth: behold the field in which we grow our fucks:
Thing one: Altruism (according to Comte or other sacrificial definitions in popular use) is not considered a virtue in Imperial culture. About the only way you are going to meet people with a less favorable view of altruism is by hanging out at a meet-up of fundamentalist Objectivists.
Thing two: It’s not that they’ve never heard the idea that all individuals possess equal dignity, inherent worth, and deserve the same level of respect and value. It’s just that they think said idea is a bunch of fetid dingoes’ kidneys.
Thing three: opening with a self-quote,
“In Imperial culture, pity is thought to humiliate both he who pities, and he who is pitied. One may love, but one may not pity. Moreover, in CSP etiquette, to give – other than the gifts of appreciation and ceremony – with no fair exchange of goods or services is considered most vulgar and impolite. To ask for something to be given would be entirely unspeakable.”
(This is where I implore people to pay great attention to the psychological differences, various, between eldrae and the other prominent, culture-shaping species of the Empire and humans. Mélith is the most obvious one here, but by far the only relevant one.)
Charity, in the Empire, is circumscribed by this: it is mutual insurance, and investment of various kinds, and taking actions and offering support to causes and people which align with the giver’s values, their aelvaqor vision of how the universe ought to be.
No-one gives money, goods, or services away altruistically (no strings attached); and no-one thus accultured would take it, on the grounds that anyone who would accept such a thing is eo ipso insufficiently moral to receive it.
Thing four: Not to reiterate on things I’ve said in the past about Imperial values (which you may re-read for yourselves in various places), but the attitude of the culture that has a lot of proverbs along the lines of “Destiny uplifts those who uplift themselves,” “If you would have a better world, pick up a hammer,” “One who lights a candle awakens a small sun,” and right there in the Word of the Flame, “A soph is judged by its creations alone,” should be pretty clear, I think.
(Not to mention that oft-repeated saw about the necessity of participation in one’s own salvation. You can’t save people who aren’t determined to save themselves.)
Which leaves the first question to be answered, well before practical matters, being why exactly would they bother?, because even if it somehow worked out, all they’d be doing is promoting a bunch of values and cultures which are antithetical and anathematic to their own.
That’s the answer that needs to be up front and central.
Oh, to save the ecology, which is where we came in?
Well, okay, what does this strategy gets you that shooting some assholes (candidates already mentioned in previous post), asserting control over their former territory according to the ancient principle of adventurer law, “si eos interficimus, eorum res nostrae fiunt”, declaring it an Ecological Protectorate, then posting signs at the edge saying “Enter here and die” with hives of wasp-sized murderbots backing them up?
(We’ll call that the null hypopraxis.)
It’s not like this isn’t going to be a problem anyway. Ciseflish economic ethics are down with the notion that if your available market is two bunches of savages determined to kill each other, then you might as well sell them the tools in order to recover some profit from entropy which can then be spent in turn on something worthwhile. But the Empire prefers not to be quite that blunt in policy terms. ↩︎
Maintenance technician at the water treatment plant is not a high-status job in these cultures. And maintenance is a kind of cleaning, which is womens’ work anyway. If you could educate women, which is about eight kinds of taboo. ↩︎
I mean, depending on the number of people being killed, and the circumstances thereof, it might affect how many of the local nations you end up at war with at once.
Although depending on the disposition of the Eldrae in question that may be a feature, rather than a bug. For instance, if they consider any sort of coercive state and the government thereof to be prima facie illegitimate and also slavers, anything which weakens said governments would be a good thing to them.
Honestly, it would be kind of a hilarious event-free war.
Most of those nations are armed with piles of post-Soviet leftovers and the odd Toyota Hilux, with training and doctrine that’s woefully inadequate against a competent (Earth) military, and the nearest actual Imperial (if there’s a ship in-system right now) is located maybe 600 miles straight up.
(Not, I hasten to add, that they actually want to get even this far into the tarpit. That’s why it’s a hypopraxis.)
The Diplomatic Cruiser in orbit can happily drop K-rods on national capitals until their magazines run empty, go to the Belt to mine a couple of asteroids to make reloads, and repeat for 100 years and it wouldn’t improve the local governance.