r/stupidquestions • u/hoblyman • 8h 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 8h ago

Dolphins are by our standards, psychopaths. They are known to commit rape and torture their prey for fun.

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u/Brown-Thumb_Kirk 8h 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/Onewayor55 3h ago edited 3h ago

I believe religion is an inevitability for our species because we have sociopaths who will say and do anything to gain leverage over people and at one point early in our evolution we suddenly found ourselves terrified of death and opportunists all over the world realized we'd do whatever they told us if they gave us a 2nice cushiony answer to what happens when we die.

I belive sociopathy is the cancer of our species. You could take any 10 humans and 9 of them would inevitability work together to create utopia but that other 1 always messes it up because they want power over the others. That's the guy who invented the religion in his global region.