Breaking the Cycle of Abuse; Aliens are Happy

In the first season of Star Trek: Voyager, there's an episode in which Janeway and the crew take shore leave on a planet called Sikaris. When they arrive, it's in response to a distress call, sent by the people of the planet. They make contact, and Gath of Sikaris tells them that they are in distress, and that he is offering shore leave, food, and abundant hospitality. They've heard of Voyager's plight, stories of the ship stranded far from home, and they want to meet these people! It would be a great pleasure to the people of Sikaris to host Voyagers crew and captain, and that is what these people live for. Pleasure.

For the better part of the episode, all is well and good, and Janeway even has a relationship with Gath that may suggest some romance. However, the people on this planet have technology that would allow Voyager to leap more than halfway home, and they won't share it, although the crew is more than welcome to a vast number of any other pleasures Sikaris has to offer, especially Janeway. At first, Gath is coy, but eventually she learns that he, nor any other officials, ever had any intention of helping them actually accomplish their greatest goal due to their prime directive. Gath even asks Janeway to stay indefinitely, which would completely betray her top priority.

Gath feels insulted by Janeway's insistence on the matter of the technology, and at a certain point tells Voyager to leave, because he doesn't want them "infecting their joyous way of life." Janeway feels insulted by Gath's apparent dishonesty, as well as by the way his decisions and actions led her to believe he viewed them as commodities, rather than valuing them as a people with a purpose.

I find this friction between these cultures so fascinating. If you boil it down enough, evolution is more or less based on a pain versus pleasure response. The most basic contrast in life we care about. Humans have evolved a certain way of life based on this response and it's been working out pretty okay for us. There have been at least two millennia since the point when humans eventually agreed we became what we believe we are, and then there's all the time before that while we were becoming what we are.

Winning in evolutionary standards means increasing.

But even as i typed that statement, i immediately questioned it. At face value from a human perspective, as an emotional person, i assume most would agree this is true. But on second thought, as a piece of the universe, i view this and it occurs to me, "winning," and "increasing" are (obviously) not only human values, but terms with polarity. They indicate change in a single trajectory. The limitations of these views are as human as i am. The cosmos is vast and diverse and unknowable, so if you applied these human terms cosmically, it would mean a homogenization of the universe, which would inherently change what it fundamentally is. From a human perspective, depending on the person, this might be viewed as a "good" or a "bad" thing. I love humans.

We evolve based on a pain/pleasure response. These fictional people of Sikaris had to have evolved based on the same thing, considering their extreme resemblance to humans, but if you ask me i think they did It better. An entire society whose sole function is to generate pleasure in the populous. Doesn't that sound like what everyone in our world wants? To live in a world that pleases them? Every self-help book, every self-discipline program, many Buddhists say that happiness is the goal, the most true and natural state of human being. The bliss of tranquility is Nirvana. Heaven is a place where everything is perfect, and that's where humans project their future to inevitably be after they die. We believe we want the things that we want, and we believe that if we have them our lives will be better. We want to be pleased. Hell, we want, period.

But in this situation, Janeway has a completely transcendent value: home. Nothing matters more to her, the elected patron representative of humans in the Delta quadrant, than getting back home. We, humans, wanted nothing more than to get back to the world we built, a world we designed to do for us what we want. We wanted our own world to please us, and not someone else's. If anyone but Janeway were captaining Voyager, who's to say whether or not they would have stayed? Humans rarely truly agree with each other.

But if you consider how different the plot of this episode would have been if you replaced a single human in the mix--a primary one, no doubt, but one human nonetheless, you might realize that humans aren't a collective singular entity, and there is so much friction between our selves as we are, which looks a lot like chaos. We live a life that disagrees with itself. We as a whole have no agreed upon transcendent values, and many of the individuals of us can't even make up their minds about what matters to them at all.

As always, i believe balance is the key. Humans live a thriving life full of pleasures--balanced out by equal suffering. Some of us have more pleasure than others, some more suffering. But as a whole we are more or less balanced. And all of us make up Humanity. Every human counts when you say "Humans."

As wonderful as Star Trek is, as much as i love it, it is also flawed. Every other species besides humans has one stark culture. Ferengis value currency. Vulcans value logic. Klingons value the honor of battle. Humans... are complex. We value exploration in Star Trek, which is a simulation of a world imagined by a limited group of humans, but even in their limited imagined world, each human has their own distinct values.

I get so rosy thinking about aliens. Intelligent life forms on far, faraway worlds, just doing kinda the same thing as us, so far away, and so oblivious. Or in my opinion of how i think the universe is likely to be they are. There's a moment in the movie Arrival when a character comes in close proximity to an alien ship for the first time, and he's moved to reach out his hand and just graze the hull with his gloved finger tips. I died. I cherish this moment in my memory. I feel that that moment was so full of so many things that represent how i view humanity, and by extension, life in general. It was quintessential.

This is the pleasure of life: life is a pleasure. We evolve to choose it. But something interesting happened when hominids evolved enough intelligence to understand that they had agency. We started to choose other things. We started wanting more.

I don't like to be alone; i want someone to be close to me. Physically, emotionally, intellectually, romantically. My desire to have someone close to me forces me to be painfully aware of the fact that i do not have a close companion who i feel is close to me in all these ways. It makes me feel wanting; and in another word, lacking. We humans do have needs in order to survive. We need water, shelter when the elements are unkind, sustenance in food, and we need relationships. In this, i am only very human in my desire for a companion, however. When i am in isolation, i experience anxiety. That lacking of not only a close companion, but any immediate relationships with physical proximity, causes me to have a bit of an extreme reaction. It's funny, though, because there's never actually really a need for me to be in fight or flight mode when all i need to do is take care of myself with the things i already have, food, water, sleep. Humans state of inner conflict is a reflection of my anxiety.

War is not healthy. It's a symptom of lacking, of friction by stark contrast, and an uncanny similarity due to the shared state of being human. Violence has a time and a place, for forests cannot evolve unless they are burned to the ground. Human birth could arguably be considered violent, too, with all that screaming, sweating, stretching, straining, and fighting. So many changes. So much of what so many people consider destruction. However, birth never lasts more than a day. Maybe labor sometimes takes longer, but the condensed experience of birth is short lived, especially when you compare a day, to a lifetime.

Humans' state of sustained conflict is draining us of so many things we need. It's taking over human life. Even i, who lives in a first world country with so many comforts and amenities that i'm able to take an afternoon and sit in a coffee shop of my choice with my laptop and blog, am seriously affected by humans apparent love of war that i experience acute anxiety over it from time to time. The conflict in the middle east has to take a long and scenic route through the Great Web of this universe to get to me in Utah, but it still does! No one is left unaffected by this. Even people who live in remote, secluded places who provide shelter and sustenance for themselves independently are affected by the car exhaust from the freeway two hundred miles away, and in my opinion, humans production of pollution is a war we are subconsciously fighting with our selves. We generate the most destructive forces we are ailed by.

We are slowly killing ourselves. It pains me deeply to know this, as i have been a human who didn't want my life, and i have been a human who wants my life, and the latter is just plain so much better. Humans still being alive as we are is evidence that we want to stay alive! And we're so powerful, just look at all of the ways we've influenced the planet we were born on since we were born--both individually, and as a whole. Civilization rules this planet. We make civilization. We make our own fates, and if you do the math, considering our current trajectory, our fate? Is destruction. We will never leave this planet.

But we've dreamed of being visited by aliens for decades, probably centuries, probably longer! We've even conceived of worlds in which we regularly interact with intelligent alien species. These alien species would have to be fundamentally different from humans in a number of ways in order for them to have convenient enough space faring technology that they make it all the way to us. They'd first, have to have decided that they wanted to interact with alien species on their turf. Then, they'd have to find all the members of their species that can contribute the right kind of intelligence that the technology could be invented. In order to find all those members, they'd have to understand that it could be anyone. To grasp that, they would have to value each member of their society equally, and beyond that, they would have to be able to cooperate at incredible degrees. In the human "race to space" (pathetic, sorry not sorry), it took huge teams of mathematicians and scientists, political support, years of research and ingenuity just to make it out of the atmosphere at all. This was with only countries working with their own people to get this thing done. Could you imagine how easy it would be to get to the next star over if we had the whole world in on the project? If everyone agreed it was something we wanted, and then actually did the work?

The world we live in does not allow for this. Even on an individual level, there is a good hunk of people who can't even stand to cooperate with someone who just looks like they're from a different country. Something needs to change. And i think all that needs to change is our perspective. Our attitude. It's that simple.

We need to love each other. Happiness is a byproduct of love. Basically, i'm convinced that aliens with space faring technology are happy.

We need to break the cycle of self-abuse. We are the generation of people who will see humans into what we now consider deep space. It's not actually that far off. Humans are so little, cosmically. Such an infantile species, still concerned with appearances, still learning just to wiggle our fingers. I am human, and i want us to grow. I think it will happen, but by god i will fight for it. I wanna be Janeway, minus the conflicts. I wanna be an alien on someone else's world, and i wanna bring my happiness to them.



P.S. This post is so choppy. Thanks for reading it to the end anyway. I did my best, but it took me some days to get it to a post-able point, and even now i'm not super happy with it. However, i will get better, and my next post will be easier to read. This is just sort of... How i feel. And how i feel is goddamn hard to communicate. Hopefully english will get better too--as well as my english. What a wild ride. I'm so glad i get to share it with you. Thank you.