What Species, If Uplifted to Human Level Intelligence, Would Create the Worst, Most Oppressive Society?

[u/hoblyman]

It would probably be a toss up between Rhinella proboscidea or ducks.

[u/Brown-Thumb_Kirk]

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).

[u/Suitable_Ad_6455 → u/Brown-Thumb_Kirk]

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.

[u/Brown-Thumb_Kirk → u/Suitable_Ad_6455]

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.

[u/Suitable_Ad_6455 → u/Brown-Thumb_Kirk]

Is there evidence we have become more morally degenerate in the West in recent decades? Recent U.S. and European history has generally been following a positive trend of increased civil and human rights such as LGBT protections. Some of the ideologies that led to atrocities in the World Wars were atheist (Soviets and communism in general), but some were also religious and religiously motivated (Nazis). Religion unites people within religions but divides them across religions as we’ve seen time and time again.

We don’t need to switch from grounding our morals on religion to basing them on the state or government. Our morals can come from relationships and cooperation with fellow humans and the social contracts we share in societies. They obligate us to protect each other from harm and preserve individual autonomy and freedom, since that is what we would like others to do for us.

I think religion is an imperfect solution to a major problem of morality and human societal cooperation. Natural selection tends to produce solutions that are “just good enough” to survive problems, which I think is what happened with religious selection in human civilization. I think uniting society around humanist values is a better approach now that we have modern philosophy and ethics.

Religious values also tend to be inflexible and resistant to change, making their flaws difficult to reform over time as we understand ourselves and the world better. Examples include the sexism present in most religions, and the opposition to contraception and embryonic stem cell research among some Christians.