Babylon 5: A Race Through Dark Places

[Steve]

I'd written about three differet long winded replies, and in the end they all boiled down to that, and I was tired and I find that kind of simplistic VS irritating at best.

I apologise for an unneccesarily brusque reply.

But...

Assuming every one of a given sub-group will act the same way is the definition of bigotry.

"All blacks are..."
"All asians are..."
"All women are..."
"All telepaths are..."

Same thing.

"All black people are criminals" or "all women are prone to hysteria" is bigotry.

Nealithi's argument is that the mechanics of telepathy undermine the threat you claim telepaths universally present. An argument supported by the show with events like Alisa Beldon's collapse at her mindburst (and her need to have Talia basically demonstrate building mental walls to become functional again). It's not bigotry to say the mechanics of telepath powers can be debilitating to telepaths instead of empowering them into being psionic gods.

The point is that...

Telepaths are different because they are telepaths, that is NOT an insignificant difference. I'm fairly sure one can assume that some of them are good, some of them are bad and most of them are mainly bored. I don't think a sane person would believe a telepath would never be tempted to gain advantage even if they're one of the good ones, but even if I were to grant that, there ARE bad telepaths. They cannot be policed by non-telepaths because they are telepaths. The only people who could police them are other telepaths. Hence the Psy-cops. Any telepath attempting to avoid the Psi-Cops would have to be a risk, given that they are attempting to avoid being policed by the only people that CAN police them. Ergo, Bester, in this episode, is doing the right thing, even though Bester is, as we know as watchers, a complete bastard.

The Psi-Cops are the only method to police telepaths, your other options would be genocide, or giving up on the idea of any kind of functional society.

I'm not saying Bester is a good person, or a nice person, or that the Psi-Cops act morally, just that they're right. The other options are far, far worse.

Add to that that, no, Nealithi's description of telepaths on B5 just does not jibe with what is shown.

Lastly, anyone who knows B5 knows that JMS never does anything in plain sight. G'Kar's line in the pilot "No-one here is exactly what they appear to be" is the entire flavour base of the show. We know JMS had plans to run B5 into The Telepath Wars as a connected but seperate show. Setting up the Psi-Cops to be just a generic jackbooted villain would be completely out of character for him and could never be sufficient to run an entire show off.

Okay, 1) it's funny that you denounce Nealithi as espousing bigotry for commenting that telepathy has limitations imposed by its fundamental mechanics, then you turn around and argue that if they're not thrown into an institutional ghetto, they'll end up mind-raping and abusing "normies" en masse. Yeah, sure, telepaths are the best fit to police other telepaths, but there's a difference between "All law enforcement agencies should have telepathic cops to police telepathic crimes" and "All telepaths should be forced into a ghetto, stripped of virtually all their rights, and subjected to a eugenics program".

2) I find this discussion amusing because I'm actually familiar with other "the Psi Corps is actually right" arguments. But unlike you they don't say so from the POV of "telepaths are such a threat that they have to be treated like this", but rather "telepaths are an abused minority and the Psi Corps is the only thing that protects them from even worse treatment".

3) Yeah, JMS could be tricky with how he presented things. And as it turns out, he found other ways of showing this. You may remember the three canon novel trilogies he approved of that were published post-series started with J. Gregory Keyes' "Psi Corps Trilogy", which actually shows us the internal culture of the Corps, and establishes that Bester's not considered the ur-example of a Psi Cop, he's a cautionary tale mixed with The Dreaded.

It also reveals that the scientific proving of the existence of telepaths led to a mass pogrom that slaughtered thousands of telepaths (and suspected telepaths) across Earth, mass abortions where parents terminated fetuses that had the telepath marker gene, and ultimately led to the proto-Psi Corps being established to assume control of telepaths inside the Earth Alliance. Additionally, the note in the show about the Psi Corps Director endorsing Clark takes on a whole new spin, since it's confirmed Psi Corps is overseen by a non-telepath Director appointed for life by the Earth Alliance Senate, and at least one of them used the position to literally decide life and death for telepaths in the Corps while ending up in the clique that supported Clark and allied with the Shadows.

I raise this point because while I'm always happy to think on what I'm being shown, and B5 does tend to ask us to think about things, this all shows that your interpretation may not be the most accurate one.

And to reiterate an earlier point, you may want to consider what bigotry actually means.

[G-Man]

I think one reason why telepaths (if left to their own devices) conquering mundanes is not likely is that there is no reason to assume that telepathy is something that will serve to unite people.

The reason why things like race and nation unite people is because they are just extended versions of family. When we talk about Brits (in the ethnic sense, not in the sense of "has British citizenship") we are talking about a group of people that pretty much share the same ancestors 1000 years ago.

Telepathy, however, seems largely to occur randomly. Perhaps eventually mundanes will stop having telepathic mutant children and all telepaths will come from established bloodlines, but until then, there is no reason to assume that a telepath would see more loyalty to other telepaths than to his family or his country (to whatever extent individual countries still exist; I would assume that there are still distinctions within the Earth Alliance). Even if they all came from established bloodlines, unless the bloodlines largely mixed, there is no reason to assume that rivalry between bloodlines would be a larger animating force than conflict with mundanes.

Ironically, Psi Corps may do more to unite telepaths and thus make them more of a threat to the mundanes than they would otherwise be.

That's why I think the Centauri do not seem to have any problems with telepaths the way that Earth does. Centauri telepaths are likely more focused on the good of their house (including telepathic and mundane members) than on the good of telepaths in general. And, at least for the aristocracy, the type of rigid life that Psi Corps demands of human telepaths is not all that different from what all Centauri experience. A Centauri told that Psi Corps is evil because it forces marriages based on genetics to build better telepaths would probably say "so marriages are arranged for breeding purposes. On Centauri Prime, what marriages aren't?"

[Beastro]

I think one reason why telepaths (if left to their own devices) conquering mundanes is not likely is that there is no reason to assume that telepathy is something that will serve to unite people.

The reason why things like race and nation unite people is because they are just extended versions of family. When we talk about Brits (in the ethnic sense, not in the sense of "has British citizenship") we are talking about a group of people that pretty much share the same ancestors 1000 years ago.

Telepathy, however, seems largely to occur randomly. Perhaps eventually mundanes will stop having telepathic mutant children and all telepaths will come from established bloodlines, but until then, there is no reason to assume that a telepath would see more loyalty to other telepaths than to his family or his country (to whatever extent individual countries still exist; I would assume that there are still distinctions within the Earth Alliance). Even if they all came from established bloodlines, unless the bloodlines largely mixed, there is no reason to assume that rivalry between bloodlines would be a larger animating force than conflict with mundanes.

Ironically, Psi Corps may do more to unite telepaths and thus make them more of a threat to the mundanes than they would otherwise be.

That's why I think the Centauri do not seem to have any problems with telepaths the way that Earth does. Centauri telepaths are likely more focused on the good of their house (including telepathic and mundane members) than on the good of telepaths in general. And, at least for the aristocracy, the type of rigid life that Psi Corps demands of human telepaths is not all that different from what all Centauri experience. A Centauri told that Psi Corps is evil because it forces marriages based on genetics to build better telepaths would probably say "so marriages are arranged for breeding purposes. On Centauri Prime, what marriages aren't?"

That's a point that slipped my mind. I wonder how much of this, and other problems with representitive characters of different species*, plays into them getting stereotyped in a way.

By that I mean the main window on the Centauri we get is Lando, and as much as he touches on what you describe, his character arc is clearly his own self-serving ambitions that don't factor into his family's as a whole. Besides him we mainly have Vir, which is a notible eccentric of the Centauri taking very different views of things and acting on them (Abrahamo Lincolni).

Emperor Cartagia doesn't help with that as well.

* I've heard it said many times the origins of Klingons warrior spiral into sterotype began with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCm-zV4g9GE

[griffeytrek]

I think one reason why telepaths (if left to their own devices) conquering mundanes is not likely is that there is no reason to assume that telepathy is something that will serve to unite people.

The reason why things like race and nation unite people is because they are just extended versions of family. When we talk about Brits (in the ethnic sense, not in the sense of "has British citizenship") we are talking about a group of people that pretty much share the same ancestors 1000 years ago.

Telepathy, however, seems largely to occur randomly. Perhaps eventually mundanes will stop having telepathic mutant children and all telepaths will come from established bloodlines, but until then, there is no reason to assume that a telepath would see more loyalty to other telepaths than to his family or his country (to whatever extent individual countries still exist; I would assume that there are still distinctions within the Earth Alliance). Even if they all came from established bloodlines, unless the bloodlines largely mixed, there is no reason to assume that rivalry between bloodlines would be a larger animating force than conflict with mundanes.

Ironically, Psi Corps may do more to unite telepaths and thus make them more of a threat to the mundanes than they would otherwise be.

That's why I think the Centauri do not seem to have any problems with telepaths the way that Earth does. Centauri telepaths are likely more focused on the good of their house (including telepathic and mundane members) than on the good of telepaths in general. And, at least for the aristocracy, the type of rigid life that Psi Corps demands of human telepaths is not all that different from what all Centauri experience. A Centauri told that Psi Corps is evil because it forces marriages based on genetics to build better telepaths would probably say "so marriages are arranged for breeding purposes. On Centauri Prime, what marriages aren't?"

Telepathy on it's own isn't that much of a uniting force. But solidarity against a wave of oppression is. When they are all the same flavor of societal pariah and outcast, they band together. After a few generations it becomes baked in. The telepaths form a sub group of which the others in the overall society have no protection from. Have no secrets from. This leads to some very predictable and in many ways understandable outcomes. Telepathy is not something that society at large would view as a great gift. Telepaths are a near unstoppable weapon that could be harnassed against the normies. Hence the normies react by rounding them up, walling them off and controlling them. Which leads itself to the outcome they most fear. It's a viscous circle, well laid out by JMS.

Did I miss something, or was there not some indication that telepaths would start fading, with fewer new ones appearing, now that the Shadows, the Vorlons and the Old Ones had left?