How can you combat something whose force and effects you can feel and see, but which you cannot fully describe or comprehend?
Ruthlessly.
The Caldari have been doing it for, literally, centuries, and a lot of their larger, hairier warts (e.g., borderline-racist selective breeding via officially-arranged marriage) seem linked psychologically and culturally to a frantic desire NOT to assimilate with the Gallente. They'd probably be a lot less militant about being themselves if they didn't have to work so hard at it.
Yes true, and I would agree. I was just trying to point out that it is particularly difficult to define deliberate agency or identifiable actors on the part of the Federation as regards cultural assimilation or adoption of what might be described as its normative ideologies and values. Because its core ideologies and values are premised on individualism, freedoms of expression, and liberalism it assimilates other cultures because enough individuals
choose to adopt those values and become Gallente. Which for the Gallente itself isn't even a racial or ethnic term but a humanist cultural identifier since the word itself for the Gallente was a multi-ethnic identifier they used when they globalized under a single unified culture.
That's what makes the Federation so pervasive and effective at cultural assimilation: anyone can decide to be Gallente if they want to, regardless of their genetics or culture, and those genetics and culture then become Gallente just as all the rest. It's not assimilation as much as a form of multiculturalism unified under a singular dominant
ideological basis and not ethnicity or race.
In a sense, the Gallente and the Federation just by being as they are manage to exert a real cultural pressure that everyone else reacts to. To prevent it creates an absurdity for the Gallente, because what can you tell them?
"Please stop being a society of trillions of networked individuals in an information society continuously expressing your own personal values and ideas; or sharing the products and content of your arts, media, technology, sciences, and entertainment with everyone else so people stop
deciding of their own free will to accept Gallentean ideology and values"?
Will that view be shared on the IGS that depends on the FTL communications technology the Gallente themselves invented and developed that allows others to express their own personal values and ideas?
So yes, with the Caldari as your example in order to resist that process then creating a rigidly hierarchical political/societal/economic system with the ugly warts of top down measures of repression that can result in things like militarism, selective breeding programs, forced marriages, racial xenophobia, and homophobia is a good way to go.
Curiously this also ties into the nature of the Gallentean meta-game. Because as an example, the most accurate reflection of what the Caldari are like as written in their actual lore and in Source is Diana Kim. Yet the content of what that character says, full of militarism, anti-liberal ideology, racist thinking, and homophobia is
exactly what is written about the Caldari.
To me, the reason the character is really met with such constant criticism is because other players don't enjoy having shown how completely unlike the State is to the Gallente, and thus to modern Western Liberal thinking, values and ideology. Because there is very little objectionable to the nature of the content expressed by the Diana Kim character as regards the written lore of the Caldari.
The Federation is just a political entity with identifiable borders, but the Gallente culture is something else. One without borders that resides in the realm of information, memes, and ideas to reproduce itself among humanity. An inability to divorce oneself from any form of liberal ideology, individualism, or patterns of modern Western thought as a player from the character can be seen only as the acceptance of Gallentean values on some level, because it remains only the Gallente that are written in the lore as having direct parity with those ideas.
Which is why I've always found it strange over the years when players either directly or indirectly complain about how their respective faction is unappealing in the metagame sense to a modern audience. Because if one really wanted to be part of a faction with strong parities to modern Western civilization then why not have chosen the Federation in the first place? Any attempts to bring other factions "in-line" in that sense would mean essentially they have begun the process of Gallentean cultural assimilation/integration towards its liberal, individualist worldviews.
That's why all the other major factions and cultures feature elements that could be considered repressive, authoritarian, and generally counter to modern liberal culture because then they'd just be Gallente. Even the Jin-Mei that are integrated into the Federation practice a discriminatory caste driven society and defend it in order to maintain their own cultural identity.
You are aware that homeostasis is a property of Complex Adaptive Systems? All human societies are by necessity such systems.
I don't think that analysis is either correct or helpful.
It was an in-character analogy using systems theory, and sure a good CAS needs some degree of negative feedback otherwise you end up with cancer or something.
Calliste as a character was just trying to explain that, as a society, the Gallente and the Federation is one built on rapid technological progress and societal change: on positive feedback.
This is borne historically in fact when compared to a place like the Empire.
The Gallente took 765 years from constructing their first stargate to where they are now. The Empire took 2063 years. The disparity is even greater when it is taken from the time of planetary unification with the Gallente taking 890 years compared to 2982 years for the Empire.
The Federation itself as an entity is only about 200 years old. It has grown from a treaty organization composed of a diffuse confederacy of independent homeworlds and their colonies to a constitutional supranational entity with stable political structures and robust institutions that effectively manages to represent the varied interests of trillions of people and hundreds if not thousands of different member-states.
And those internal networks and structures are all able to change and adapt to meet new needs and developments far more rapidly than in other societies. When the State invaded the Federation, the pretty rapid response to it was the creation of a new Agency in the SDII/Black Eagles and the expansion of its military industries -- to the point it now has a private corporation in Roden Shipyards providing military security in addition to other agencies.
An Emperor trying to make similar changes to nature of the Empire faces institutions like the Theology Council, the Privy Council and the Heirs, the House Holders, and an Imperial bureaucracy that even in the lore itself is described as, "Byzantine" in its nature as impediments to change, which together act in the analogy as the negative feedback in a homeostatic system.
Even the Caldari ended up rejecting the reform attempts of Tibus Heth and the CPD because it seems its culture, corporate structures, and executive stakeholders all similarly resist any attempts at uniform change of their society.
It's not that change doesn't happen in societies not the Federation, it's just that comparatively their rates of progress, change and adaptation are far slower because they are structured differently.
And that seems reflected in the lore.
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Topic: Worldbuilding: Fan Clubs! (Read 19468 times)