“When you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy.”
That is not from Nietzsche. This is from a Sci-Fi series in the 1990s.
I wrote this in my notes on February, 23 last year and I feel like it is even more relevant now than before as we humans are seemingly on the precipice of our own destruction. I’ve revised it a little bit.
“When you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy.”
The character, Cmdr Jeffrey Sinclair utters the above in one of my favorite series of all times, Babylon 5.
Thoughts provoked by this episode
Recent times have had me thinking about Season 1 Episode 4: Infection and I decided to watch it again to refresh my memory. There are a few themes at play in this episode that are very relevant to what is going on here in the US and globally:
1. Disregard for bureacratic procedures/regulations that exist for good reasons and the unscrupulousness of greed in wanting to bypass or eliminate those bureaucracies to expand and expedite profit.
2. Ideological dogma, supremacy, particularly concerning xenophobia, bias, and protectionism.
3. Programming A.I., especially for military purposes done without meticulous and scrupulous oversight potentially wiping out its creators (for us, that is if the environment or an unhinged president causing WW3 doesn’t wipe us out first)
Synopsis and more thoughts
Dr. Stephen Franklin is the station’s head physician who specializes in Xenobiology. His former professor, Dr. Vance Hendricks, whom he idolized as a student, visits him with some biotechnology from a dead planet where a sentient species had been extinct for about a thousand Earth years.
When someone we hold in high regard betrays us:
Unbeknownst to Dr. Franklin, Dr. Hencricks has become an unscrupulous corporate shill seeking massive profits to the point of taking shortcuts or circumventing bureracrcies (like customs and quarantine) regardless of whether that contributes to anyone’s harm and Hendricks’ assistant, Nelson, is eager to do the dirty work (including murder) to take these shortcuts like bypassing quaratine. This later results in Nelson’s body being “infected” and taken over by the biotechnology.
Supremacy destroys civilizations including the one it is intended to protect:
This technology was developed by an extinct sentient species of a world named, Ikkara. After multiple alien invasions of their world, Ikkarans had developed this biotechnology programing it with a type of Artificial Intelligence using the head Ikkaran researcher as the definition for who is “pure Ikkaran” and eliminating anyone who doesn’t meet that criteria.
When corruption, hubris, and supremcacy has deadly consequences:
Ikkaran possessed Nelson ends up going around the station shouting “Protect” just before attacking anyone in line of site who isn’t pure Ikkaran. After senior officers and security personnel figure out what is happening, they connect the Ikkarans’ attempts to protect themselves to the 20th century European Holocaust of WWII (particularly the fascist ideologies of WWII Nazis being a so called “supreme” human race defined as “Aryan.” Despite it not being explicitly illustrated in the episode, this also applies to a subset of the Nazi’s appropriating the ideology of American White Supremacy and, more specifically, Eugenics and Genocide.
I would encourage anyone to watch this episode which is easy enough to follow as a standalone episode. Keep in mind, even for its time, the prodution was on a very small budget for special effects and acting, but the writing makes it worthwhile (more so in later seasons as the story arc builds).
My take aways:
Not a single Ikkaran met the rigid mold of what qualified as “pure Ikkaran.” The same would apply to being human, American, etc.. Whiteness/White Supremacy qualifies as this very kind of rigid mold which will destroy all of humanity, but target the most different from whiteness first (especially with A.I.).
Artifical Intelligence is a tool that should be under much more scrutiny than it currently is. Even the would-be technofeudal lords may meet their demise from being irresponsible and careless.
Buy me ☕️
Remember and honor the late Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr but practice awareness raising and anti-racism every day.
That’s it for now. Thank you for reading. Remember to resist and carve out some joy!
Grok Mecha-Hitler is the white supremacists' new deity.