Aurrin wrote:RHJunior wrote:Add to that the fact that a gift, especially an extravagant one, can be percieved as an insult. Having an alien race drop out of the blue and start handing out extraterrestrial charity would be a debilitating blow to the pride of the human race... and a terrible insult to humanity's intelligence and capability.
RHJunior wrote:Yes, interaction with another culture will cause upheaval and conflict. But it is the only moral course of action to take, because to refuse to interact with them is to treat them as inferiors, and to deny them whatever benefits they might glean from our society...
Think about it a few minutes. I shouldn't even have to point this one out.
You're fabricating a conflict where there is none.
There's a vast difference between opening contact with another society and trading with them as equals, and descending from on high and offering them largesse in exchange for legal subjugation. I am going to be incredibly depressed if you cannot see the difference.
Mind, individual charity as a voluntary ethic is good. <I>Charity as a governmental diplomatic policy is not.</i> Allow me to enumerate why:
The recipient can have one of three negative responses: a sense of entitlement to that charity, guilt and resentment over imagined expecations that come with that charity, or worst of all--- and this we have seen in the Mideast IRL--- the misperception of charity as a sign of weakness..... or paranoia, wondering what influence the "charitable" government is attempting to buy.
The GIVER can also have several possible negative responses... the most common being a sense of insult and even outrage---and a growing hardening of the heart--- when their generosity is greeted with hostility, or is swiftly forgotten by the next generation. If not this, then an attitude of condescension towards the recipient for being so pitiful and benighted, or even a sense that they have a <I>right</i> to influence over those they have aided so many times before.There is also the matter of the growing bitterness of the taxpayers in the society for being coerced to hand over more and more of their hard-earned paycheck to moochers and ingrates.
It is better for all parties concerned if any exchange of cultures that goes on is 1)voluntary and 2)capitalistic. The weaker society WILL be at an initial disadvantage in the marketplace... but even a notably primitive society will have goods, services, and resources to trade, if nothing more than cheap labor and cultural/ethnic novelty. And if that "primitive" society is a free, capitalist society (or at least has a reasonable collective IQ) it will swiftly reinvest what it gains from the more advanced one and soon be competing on an equal footing. (It's practically been the cultural model for Japan for the last century. All other points aside, from 1900 to the 1940s they rapidly acclimated to western technology and science. In the 1950s, after the War, they were the product-quality equivalent of Taiwan. By the end of the 20th century they were doing better than Europe and giving America a run for its money....)
What we are talking about, here, is the difference between open trade, and coercive charity.
"] Although newer improvements have been made, one of the best ways of finding prime numbers was invented by a person born in 276 B.C. (sieve of Eratosthenese) It's the little discoveries here and there, filling in each others' gaps, that would have the best impact over time.
Oh crap.
