Confederacy vs Fellowship - Philosophical Foundations

from "A Terran's Guide to the Galaxy"

Skip this part if you’re caught up!

Welcome to A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy, a companion volume to Arch/Eternal, which is a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

The chapters of this Guide are an attempt to render some of the world-building that this kind of book requires a bit more reader friendly.

If you’re feeling lost, consider one of the following options:

1. Go back and read the beginning of the Guide.

2. Start with the Prologue of Arch/Eternal, the novel-in-progress.

3. Dive right into the latest chapter - there’s even a short, helpful summary at the beginning to help you get caught up quickly.

Or of course you can go ahead and just read THIS to get a taste for what’s going on here.

Enjoy!

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Philosophical Foundations:
Confederacy vs Fellowship

So you want to be sure you’re one of the good guys. That’s natural. And totally fair! Nobody wants to be the bad guy.

It’ll be tempting for you to graft a simplistic archetype onto the Fellowship vs Confederacy conflict that looks a lot like the Empire vs the Resistance in Star Wars, or the Fellowship of the Ring vs the Dark Lord Sauron¹.

The reality is, as reality tends nearly always to be, more nuanced.

How about a for instance.

Some Fellowship worlds are shitholes. No kidding. I mean look at Earth! Well, technically Earth isn’t a citizen world yet, but you get the idea. And actually, there are citizen worlds worse off than Earth: more oppression, more suffering, worse allocation of resources. It’s not common, but in these cases, the exceptions prove the rule — it is by no means impossible for civilized Fellowship worlds to backslide into global degeneracy. Which means there are plenty of “bad guys” on our side of the galactic fence².

Meanwhile, some worlds deep within Confederate space are better off than the average Fellowship world: wealthier, happier, more productive, more egalitarian, frankly more fun, from what we’ve heard³.

As long as you stay in your lane, that is.

This is what most people fail to understand about tyranny — it only breaks down under tyrants who are bad at their job. One of the great ironies of liberalism is that it only has a fighting chance when tyrants are shitting the bed so badly that the majority of the people under their control become pissed off enough to organize a revolution. This just doesn’t happen under competent tyrants.

The eternals at the head of the Confederacy are exceptionally competent tyrants. They understand the practical benefits of a contented majority, and distribute wealth evenly enough that there is never a critical mass of desperate sufferers. They make it easy for people living on Confederate worlds to “stick with the program.” And who cares if you didn’t write the program, so long as it works for you.

And yes, occasionally this program may require a fairly substantial reallocation of some planet’s particular set of resources, and it turns out that the most efficient way to do this is directly at odds with the continued support of life on that planet. While it’s a shame that we live in a universe of trade-offs, progress sometimes requires such sacrifices. Besides, no one you knew lived there, so….

If you’re thinking now that the casual slaughter of an entire planet’s population neatly qualifies the Confederacy as “bad guys,” then you haven’t read enough Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill, who, if pressed, might have argued for a full cost/benefit analysis in the context of a galactic empire before passing some kind of moral judgment. After all, everyone knows that the needs of the many always and forever outweigh the needs of the few. 

Which begs the next question: what percentage of any given population is it ethical to imprison, torture, and kill, in order to ensure a standard of happiness and productivity among the rest? 

Don’t worry, we can consider this question rhetorical for now, because it turns out the Confederacy is NOT a classically utilitarian regime. Unless you define utilitarianism as only applying to the Firstborn. In which case, it works pretty well, since the Firstborn eternals at the head of the Confederacy do not consider any life, or any number of lives, to be equivalent in value to the life of any single Firstborn. 

They are, in a word, supremacists. And the many, many worlds under their unfailingly competent rule are simply means to whatever ends the eternals themselves are pursuing. 

Surely, you may argue, that makes them the “bad guys.”

Let’s draw one more analogy on their behalf before we settle on a conclusion. 

On Earth, most humans are confident in their unique station within the so-called animal kingdom. Sure, everybody is descended from the same basic soup of genes, but, at least as evidenced by their actions, humans generally don’t question their right to dominate non-human life on their planet⁴. And there seems to be plenty of evidence to support this assumption — how many monkeys, for instance, have launched a rocket into space, or built an iPhone? While there may never be unanimous agreement on the total supremacy of human beings on the planet Earth, there is certainly general and well-supported consensus. The point we find ourselves belaboring is that it is not obviously unreasonable or transparently immoral to reach this conclusion, and behave accordingly. 

With that in mind, let’s take another look at the Firstborn, between whom and us there may be as wide of a difference as there is between us and the monkeys. Sure, there are similarities, and yeah, maybe we did all evolve from very similar genetic soups⁵, but by nearly every relevant metric, the Firstborn are superior. And in terms of raw power differential, they might as well be gods, and we might as well be monkeys.

So you can kind of see their point, can’t you? These so-called Firstborn eternals?

And you can probably also see it from the perspective of Bob from planet 219-Z of the Confederacy, who learned this stuff in school when he was a little kid, and knows just as well as anyone else that if he does his little job, and goes about his little life, and doesn’t break the very reasonable rules, he probably won’t get callously exterminated in a utilitarian genocide, or be publicly tortured and killed as a reminder to his friends and family how reasonable the rules, in fact, are.

And can we agree that the statistical probability of Bob radicalizing into some kind of freedom fighter is approximately zero?

Meanwhile, the Firstborn archs at the head of the Fellowship keep insisting that we — grimy, unevolved, spiteful, confused, imbecilic sacks of meat — are somehow worth as much as them. It is a philosophy as radical as it is unreasonable. And they built an entire galactic empire on it, in direct conflict with their Firstborn siblings, who have been harassing them for it ever since. 

In some sense, the Fellowship can be conceived of as an epic piece of performance art, maniacally committed to illustrating one central idea: that self-determining consciousness is a surpassingly mysterious and precious phenomenon. That humans — human minds, human hearts, human souls — are worth liberating and protecting at nearly any cost. That whatever emerges from societies in which agency is best preserved is fundamentally more valuable than whatever emerges from societies in which that agency is suppressed. 

We are predisposed to agree.

But the eternals emphatically do not agree, and the archs’ fanatical commitment to this (frankly) religious idea presents a cankering and troublesome problem for them. If not for the Fellowship, they would have surely buttoned up the whole galaxy by now.

Instead, here we are, grateful the archs feel the way they do, and hoping very much that they don’t change their minds. You might consider that a precarious foundation for a liberal society, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

But for now, it’s the best we’ve got. 

1. Did the person who designated our galactic community the “Fellowship” have Tolkien in mind? Probably. We’ll leave that for you to go find out on your own, if you’re really that curious. Probably you aren’t.

2. See “Zero Point Portal Networks”

3. See “What news from the Feds?”

4. This is of course to say nothing of the humans who have historically had no problem dominating other actual humans, based on superficial determinants that can only seem justifiable within the context of extreme cultural ignorance.

5. See “The Great Mystery”