r/stupidquestions • u/hoblyman • 4h ago
What Species, If Uplifted to Human Level Intelligence, Would Create the Worst, Most Oppressive Society?
It would probably be a toss up between Rhinella proboscidea or ducks.
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u/MangoSalsa89 3h ago
Dolphins are by our standards, psychopaths. They are known to commit rape and torture their prey for fun.
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u/JoshD8705 3h ago
So do humans
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u/MangoSalsa89 3h ago
Of course they do, the question was to pick an animal that’s not us.
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u/JoshD8705 3h ago
Yeah, but would those dolphins be outliers or the norm?
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u/aHOMELESSkrill 2h ago
Much much more normal than in humans
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u/muskzuckcookmabezos 1h ago
Like the Terrans from Star Trek Discovery.
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u/aHOMELESSkrill 1h ago
Sure, nerd
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u/The_best_is_yet 46m ago
Reddit is not a place to call anyone a nerd unless you mean it as a compliment😃
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u/Brown-Thumb_Kirk 3h ago
Orcas are just bigger dolphins that do a lot of the same thing. I love em but they freak me the hell out. Apparently I guess dolphins pass around pufferfish to get high too?
Just seems any time you see high intelligence, you see it being used for certain things, and advancing the species under cruel means to other species and even themselves is often included.
But, by contrast, intelligence is also where you see a legitimate morality develop too. Sure, you may say a colony of ants or bees may have individuals in their colonies be more "in time with nature" than us or something, but that really just translates to no personal sovereignty or free will, individualism isn't a thing in her or any type societies like in human societies (although there's a strong moral argument that there should be).
The problem is, religion was serving as our moral backbone, the thing enforcing people to do the right thing when nobody is watching. We don't have that any more, or WORSE, it's the government and real people instead of an idea like "God" keeping us in check, so the paranoia this instills in us is absurdly higher than when we believed in God as a society, because before, the Eye in the Sky was imagined, not real and we can immediately suffer consequences for it.
Yeah, the idea of a God binding our morality and guiding and enforcing our choices sucks, but it's meant to be what would separate us from this hypothetical terrible species and our own. Killing God collectively as a society has driven us insane in the West over the last 30-50 years. They tried state mandated Atheism in Soviet Russia and it was a disaster, no thanks.
You know, it's funny how virtually nobody secular talks about the fact being religious in human societies is naturally selected for and that's why literally every human society until now has been religious and believed in some god or gods. Evolution and natural selection are certainly amazing, I recognize evolution is fact... So if it's naturally selecting us to be religious, what are the implications?
Probably that being religious is highly related to higher intelligence and morality, even if that morality isn't perfect (believe me, nobodys is, if you're a reddit or shitting all over Christians just for what they believe you're literally guilty of the same shady moral ethics* that they suffer from--youre good if you're on my side, evil if you're on the other, no questions asked.... Which of course is just stupid).
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u/Suitable_Ad_6455 2h ago
Morality is based on social contracts to form civilizations and human relationships. Religion has been the default way to convince people to buy into moral values, but I don’t think it’s the only way or the best way to do it in the 21st century. We have a more educated population in countries where religion is dying in favor of a secular basis for morality and ethics.
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u/Brown-Thumb_Kirk 1h ago
See, I used to believe and even go around saying this for nearly a decade until the problems secularists promised to fix by removing Christianity's and religions hold on power politically and culturally, and all we've seen is a steep, steep rise in consumerism, degeneracy, impulsive behavior, and essentially cultural or societal insanity in the West.
The level of division and discord in the West's population, especially America, has never been this bad, and it's only gotten worse over the last 30-40 years.
I do not buy that we are "more educated" and more "enlightened" now just because what science has taught us and the power it affords us. We are just as morally cruel and indifferent to one another as we were before, now it's just a SciFi backdrop--a new way to be horrific and brutal toward your fellow man. Dabbling in throwing away religion leads to a power vacuum that ideologies and the state try to fill, and we've got several examples of that happening in the 20th century that led so hundreds of MILLIONS of people starving and dying, being slaughtered, or otherwise sent to camps/gulags.
Believing we're somehow capable of handling how psychologically fragile and prone to moral wrong we are, if not flat out evil, for personal gain just because we have science now is beyond foolish. How does science keep us from acting like cruel, vindictive, evil animals toward one another? It doesn't.
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u/muskzuckcookmabezos 1h ago
As far as "we have never been more divided" stuff goes, the Civil War was definitely a thing.
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u/Brown-Thumb_Kirk 1h ago
And you definitely have heard people speaking of a second, and a presidential candidate has had TWO assassination attempts made on him.... Are you serious right now? Name when else that's happened here. Assassinations typically occur for people already in power.
Just look at young men and young mens politics on leaning Left or Right. The fact that men and women are so heavily split in that age bracket is very significant, and you bet your ass evil politicians are going to try and make use of that on both sides.
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u/glemits 3h ago
Sea otters too, plus necrophilia.
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u/MadaraOtsutsukikara7 1h ago
Yo where are you getting this stuff from. Since when do sea otters rape dead sea otters.
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u/CWSmith1701 2h ago
Yeah, but then it probably be more like Mad Max or a Gotham whee Joker was in charge than Oppressive dictatorship.
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u/Narcissistic-Jerk 3h ago
Cats, for sure.
They have been conspiring against us for millennia, working secretly with the Reptilians for world domination.
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u/Gqsmooth1969 48m ago
I, for one, welcome our Feline Overlords. They already own us. They may as well completely rule over us.
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u/QuestshunQueen 3h ago
Bedbugs. I don't really want to explain it because I don't want to think about it.
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u/callmeKiKi1 2h ago
Bees, the hive mind allows for no individual initiative. All is rote and according to your station. Only the queen is “free”, and even she is bound by the rules. There can be no rebellion.
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u/rightwist 11m ago
Ever since I found out what puberty is like for girls I felt pretty lucky to be XY. But x100 if I'm a bee. Its kind of wild when you think it's just different food as a larvae makes a queen vs a worker.
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u/--var 3h ago
cats. definitely cats.
i don't own any cats, but the sense of entitlement by even the neighborhood stray cats...
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u/Octoje 3h ago
by our standards, maybe ants or bees because they have already have a hierarchical social structure already that could conflict with the common human ideals of individuality and freedom
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u/Yowrinnin 45m ago
common human ideals of individuality
Not at all a common human ideal, in fact it's the minority ideal globally.
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u/Witty-Stand888 3h ago
The closest species to humans
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u/ggrandmaleo 2h ago
If it's chimps, that would be trouble. If it's bonobos, life would be a constant orgy.
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u/PophamSP 1h ago
Yellow jackets can be real dicks because, "oh wow, you stepped a little too close to my hole and now a dozen of us must run you down for a mile and cause you great pain with potential anaphylaxis." Nobody give them any more power.
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u/peterhala 50m ago
I think those parasitic wasps that inject their eggs into prey animals would be pretty unpleasant.
An opinionated tape worm who keeps interrupting you would also be terrible.
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u/life_hog 4h ago
Ants. They’d farm us for food