No Hope in the Hegemony

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@Jade Nekotenshi <nekotenshi0@gmail.com> on 2016-07-26 08:11:13 wrote

Yipe. Now that’s the kind of dystopia I can’t even imagine living in…

I can get my head around what enforced equality at memepoint might look like. I can kinda grok what ultra-regimentation a la 1984 might be like. But that? Ouch.

I’m guessing they’re nice enough to their neighbors that nobody can quite muster up the political will to go in and… alter things? Or that doing so would be infringing on sovereignty in ways that would open up all kinds of doors that saner people would prefer stayed firmly sealed?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-07-26 08:51:07 wrote

Mostly, the problems with dealing with these various places tend to be twofold:

First, that most polities perceive a definite interest in not allowing the precedent that you can go in and knock over polities that you happen to find objectionable, just in case it gets applied to them down the line. (Just like here, really - I mean, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of gratuitously nasty regimes on Earth that we-for-whatever-values-of-we wouldn’t be perfectly justified in knocking over on humanitarian grounds, and yet no-one does that without finding or manufacturing a really convincing casus belli, for essentially this reason.) And even those polities which really could give a couple of shits for galactic opinion may not want to take that to the extent of hazarding a general war over a peripheral interest.

And second, that knocking them over is the easy part. Trouble is with regime change, though, is that then you own the resulting mess until it’s turned back into something at least approximately resembling civilization, and probably thereafter. Welcome to Space Afghaniraq. Have fun down in the tarpit!

(While there are people willing to do this sort of thing, at least at first, the Empire’s in general and the Lords of Admiralty in particular’s reaction to that sort of prospect is along lines best summed up as:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijr0sqAnRkw )

@Jade Nekotenshi <nekotenshi0@gmail.com> on 2016-07-26 14:07:57 wrote

That’s pretty much what I figured - that’s what I was hinting at with “doors saner people would prefer remained firmly sealed”.

Well, and to say nothing of the quagmire. (Which, as a veteran of the US Military, I’m more familiar with than I’d like to be.)

But it has happened before - though I suppose that was “let’s not tell the Vonnies that they’re about to kick over a long-standing anthill”, more than it was “interfere for the Greater Good”. Not that there are any parallels in /that/, not at all

More directly, that’s what I really like about the world you’ve built here: no funky handwaving of such things, more just “whack ideas into the established framework and see what consequences tumble out”, which has the advantage of tremendous verisimilitude and richness.

@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-07-26 23:22:15 wrote

The thing that terrifies me most about this is that it sounds so much like the sort of dark road that an “ambiguous utopia” I’ve been working on for my own writing project could have taken, for want of a nail. I’m not sure whether that’s a good sign for me or not…

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2016-07-27 21:13:57 wrote

Well, if there is a theme to most of the dystopias and other assorted badnesses I employ (not just the blights!), it’s “We meant it for the best,” and the manner in which good intentions don’t guarantee good results. Seems to me that it’s likely to be one of the most common failure modes of utopias, inasmuch as we’re so good at fooling ourselves on that point, and where (ObTrope) Utopia Justifies The Means is concerned.

(The Imperials’ insistence on their fundamental consensuality ethic has at least as much to do with this as it does with unenlightened self-interest or actual malice, maybe even more.)

@Specialist290 <specialist290@hughes.net> on 2016-07-29 17:41:49 wrote

This leads me to wonder what some of the Imperial “also-rans” might look like – those societies that started on the same consent-, obligation-, and purpose-driven model as the Empire, but either failed to get the right proportions or (more tragically still) were cut short by a failure cascade from some apparently tiny failure to plan sufficiently far ahead despite getting the ethical side of things right.