Are aliens bigots? (Details)

We’re all creatures of bigotry and prejudice. My eyebrows will go up if my neighbor slaughters a goat in the street, and he will frown when I spit out a wad of gum on the sidewalk in front of the mosque.

This is what keeps you up at night huh

^LOL…Yes. It’s of grave importance.

My intuition tells me that if it were the case that humanity were but one of many thousands or millions of intelligent life forms throughout the cosmos, then there would be no reason to believe that we were unique among them, and it would be reasonable to expect that we shared many broad characteristics with them, such as our compulsion toward prejudicial behavior.

If they on the same intellectual lever as us, then they’d hate each other, not us. We are another species. They’d probably look at us the way we look at animals, and direct their hate to themselves.

I have, actually, spent a significant amount of time pondering this very thing.
In books and movies visitors from space are nearly always made the bad guys, except ET, who was a pacifist, and Vulcans, who are indifferent. Wait, Vulcans do view themselves as superior.
I have come to the conclision that environment would play a big role.
If their home environment were cozy, and resources plentiful, they would have little reason to rally against anyone. Also, if their home population were very diverse, I would think there would be greater tolerance than if divisions were few.
Another factor would have to be brain development.
If rational thought were more rapidly developing than creative thought they would likely be more tolerant. It is lack of rationality which causes superstition, and creative thought which invents gods to blame things on.
That results in religons.
Religon is the crockpot where bigotry stews, and bubbles, and becomes a well cooked hate.

Of course not. We are above these things.

Haven’t met any yet, but to prejudge them would be kinda bigoted of me, I think.

It would be illogical to assume that all alien life forms fall into a single category.

Since this is in Social, I can get away with this: ;D

I’ve met some exceptionally brilliant aliens and some that are barely capable of taking care of themselves. And I am sure that some of them are bigots and some of them are not. I’m sure some of lthe aliens that come up from Mexico are bigoted, and others are drug runners, but I think a lot of them are just hungry and want a better life for themselves and their kids.

And I wonder how many of them think the people who made our immigration policies are totally unintelligent.

Yes they are, to all men with the normal 2 balls, they are extra testical bigot bastards.

Interesting points.

@Patty_Melt especially. I wonder, if there is research to support/dismiss if resources, and environment impact prejudices. I can guarantee that people have a tougher time coexisting when they are ,for instance, hot, and hungry, and thirsty. And have to compete for everything….

Maybe not. Apparently, neanderthals were not prone to violence against themselves or other beings except for hunting, while cro magnons were. Or so it is theorized. Could be wrong, but if there’s some truth to it it means that not even all homo sapiens were prone to violence, let alone what we dont know about the rest of the beings from homo genus.

With this in mind let’s not assume anything about what other intelligent life forms there may be out there are like, until we actually meet some. And well, perhaps they don’t want to meet us because of what we’re like. I mean, Jesus was the Savior and look what people did to him. Lol

If I was an alien I’d be like, fuck those goofs, not goin down there.

Umm…I think people do fight over religious ideologies, borders and power.
I’m definitely attracted to women of all different ethnicities and love all kinds of people so I don’t think I could hate anyone just because they look different.
My son is mixed and I love him more than life itself.
I think if aliens landed here and we were all respectful of each other’s right to religious freedom, we said to hell with borders and we all had to live as one on this planet maybe we wouldn’t “group up” and attack anyone who look’s different.
I mean that’s kinda how I view the planet now, like what if there were no borders?
Would we all live as one as equals or would it be absolute anarchy?
Anyway, these aliens you describe sound kinda sexy and I’d welcome them. : )

Or maybe I miss understood the question.
You want to know if alien’s could become bigoted like some humans?
Like I said if they lived together they wouldn’t fear one another because of minor differences .
They would find more things in common that they could relate to.
I think bigotry, racism etc. results primarily from segregation and forming tribes and competing over resources.
Otherwise people and aliens would be more accepting in large diversified groups.
Just my thoughts, thanks.

^Yeah. You got it the second time.

I think you should examine in more detail what you are talking about when you say humans naturally find ways to hate each other. I don’t think that’s actually strictly accurate. I think more is going on. What’s a clear example of what you’re talking about?

^To me? A clear example is the Middle East. The people there seem to have a lot in common. But they hate each other over,sometimes, minor differences.

There are many others. But that one is never ending.

I still think bigotry would be less common or non existant if there were more diversity. I don’t mean just eye and hair color, and language.
If there were people who were amphibious, people who had separate orafices for eating and breathing, etc., the differences would be less an issue.
It is something which would have to be from early time though.
I think it is something now too ingrained to ever overcome.

^
BAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA that avatar you have is so hilarious. This comment has NOTHING to do with this question, but I sincerely laughed out loud when I saw this. Man Imma sleep good tonight lol.

Sleep well, my friend, with lotsa pillows.

@MrGrimm888 “A clear example is the Middle East. The people there seem to have a lot in common. But they hate each other over,sometimes, minor differences.”

I don’t think that is about human nature. I think it is about religion and culture and tribal identities with overlapping territories with historic feuds that go back to the earliest recorded days. It may be human nature to identify with tribe and family and this leads to violence when there are ancient blood feuds and you still live in contested territory with other seemingly hostile tribes, and especially when on top of all of that, foreign people meddle in the region for whatever sick reasons and there are people organizing terror groups and blackmailing families and there is little or no way to provide for one’s family and on and on. That’s not human nature to me. It seems very unnatural.

^I agree that there are many variables to the Middle East equation. But I think people not liking each other is (sadly) human nature.

Has anyone else read the article “is your baby racist?” I think it was in Time, or Newsweek… Very interesting experiment they did on young children.
Basically, they gave half the kids in some elementary school red shirts, and half blue shirts (kids of different races.) And they wore the shirts for a time. After a certain amount of time, they were asked questions about the qualities of kids. Like “would a kid be smarter if he/she wore a red shirt, or blue?” The children mostly conformed to the opinion that the shirt color they wore, meant that they were superior to the others, wearing the other color. So. One could infer that divisive behavior does come naturally. Not based solely on that experiment, but human history.

It’s advantageous to form tribes/groups. As a side effect, people can sometimes grow disdain for other groups.

People do get attached to their own family and tribe, sure. How they react towards outsiders could be negative, but I’d say it has to do with circumstances and whether they perceive some sort of threat.

I haven’t read the racist baby article, but it seems to me I might also infer that the adult is suggesting to the child that the adult is saying there are positive and negative value judgements correlated to shirt color, and asking the child to pick whether theirs is positive or negative. Seems like a mighty projection of a messed-up adult cultural idea to frame things that way. Kids generally get good at learning to go along with adult suggestions, when neither one tends to be really conscious of or questioning the thought patterns being spread from the past onto the young.

Also reminds me of the broken US political thinking which tends to frame everything as Republican versus Democrat or Liberal versus Conservative as if that’s just the way the universe works.

^The U.S.‘s political system is broken?!~

LOL

;)

Is this what you were talking about, MrGrimm? http://stateofopportunity.michiganradio.org/post/what-you-can-learn-about-prejudice-putting-kids-different-colored-shirts

I had never heard of the red shirts/blue shirts study… Only of the probably more well-known blue eye/brown eye study… It was initially surprising to read the first iteration of the study, but makes sense as I think about it—how the simple act of dividing people, kids in this case, by shirt color in a “separate but equal” scenario may cause the people to form opinions/assumptions based off the groupings. (And then how those opinions magnify several fold when qualitative differences are manufactured.)

As for aliens…

I can’t believe that bigotry is inherent to life. (If I did, I’d have a harder time going to sleep and getting up in the morning.) I believe bigotry can arise naturally given certain circumstances, because we’ve seen that it has, but I can’t believe it’s a forgone conclusion.

Admittedly, the current worldwide rise in nationalism has this belief of mine wavering a bit, feeling more tenuous than I would like it… but at the same time, I like to imagine that from a larger historical perspective, this contemporary rise is just part of the final, vestigial spurts of an ideology running on mere fumes… a hiccup in the overarching trend.

In the above study, even the apparent innocuousness of the red shirt/blue shirt situation, of the separate-but-equal treatment, told the students “there is a difference here, so pay attention to it.” And left with no other context, the students filled in what that difference might be as best as they could. Given the context of blue shirts doing better, they filled that difference in more dramatically and definitively… and worryingly. I suppose, since we are not a homogenous species, since we are a species so susceptible to suggestion, what that study tells us is we need to be sensitive to the narratives informing our experiences, and probably be proactive in how we allow those narratives to take shape.

As for the aliens, of course it’s impossible to say, but I like to imagine the best.

I do think, that if the aliens are more intelligent than we are, they are more likely to be without bigotry—or at least be with less of it. I can’t believe that bigotry survives the scrutiny of intellects higher than our own, since we ourselves continue to make headway fighting it.

^It’s not the same article. But maybe the article I read was based on that study. It’s been about 5 or 6 years since I read it. ..

But you get the idea.