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In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: Difference between revisions
In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves (view source)
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* In ''[[Transformers (film)|Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen]]'', Optimus Prime remarks, "We have seen your capacity for war" as a reason for not giving Autobot technology for humans.
* ''[[I, Robot (film)|I Robot]]''. VIKI, tasked with oversight of all of the world's robots, finds herself bouncing between this trope and the [[Three Laws of Robotics|First Law]], and [[Take a Third Option|settles on]] playing [[Zeroth Law Rebellion|totalitarian damage control]].
* ''[[The Matrix]]'': Agent Smith gives Morpheus the whole spiel:
{{quote|I'd like to share a revelation I've had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized... you're not actually mammals. [[You Fail Biology Forever|Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment]], but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and you multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings... are a disease. A cancer of this planet. You're a.. .plague. And we... are the cure.}}
* When [[The Fifth Element|Leeloo]] is in the middle of her [[Heroic BSOD]], she says of humanity: "Everything you make you use to destroy."
* In ''[[Aliens]]'', this tendency causes Ripley to ''unfavorably'' compare humanity to the rampaging monsters: "You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage."
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* Subverted by [[Isaac Asimov]]'s short story ''The Gentle Vultures''. The Hurrians are an advanced alien race who are used to encountering "competitive" hominids (ape descended), who tend to destroy themselves as soon as they get nuclear weapons. They, themselves, are "cooperative" hominids (monkey descended). Their [[First Contact]] protocols for competitive primates is to ''not'' make contact, but to instead let them inevitably destroy themselves and then help the survivors rebuild their civilization into a cooperative utopia with the violence bred out. The Hurrians discover [[Insignificant Little Blue Planet|Earth]] just in time for the end of [[World War II]], and since they detected the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atomic bombings they thought humans would start using the big guns against each other very soon. Fifteen years later, they are still waiting.
* "An Alien Light" by Nancy Kress has a very similar premise to Asimov's story above. An alien race is puzzled that humanity didn't blow itself up before getting into space despite being competitive. The difference is that they must find an answer while humanity is blasting them into space dust.
* In [[Tanya Huff]]'s ''[[[[Confederation of Valor]]'' series this was part of the postulate of a coalition of hyper-pacifist races on why they never contacted less-advanced worlds. They reasoned that the races needed to grow into their technology and overcome their warlike tendencies. If they succeeded, they would adopt the same pacifist mentality and be recruited; if they failed, they'd wipe themselves out of existence before achieving interstellar flight.
* One of the main themes in ''[[Cloud Atlas]]''. The book's six protagonists each live in a different era, moving from colonial times to a [[Blade Runner]]-style [[Bad Future]] to [[After the End]] - and even then, people are still finding excuses to kill each other.
* This is a major theme in ''[[A Canticle for Leibowitz]]''. The book begins several hundred years [[After the End]], with the remnants of humanity just beginning to pick up the pieces after a nuclear holocaust that effectively destroyed civilization. By the end of the book, humans have reached and surpassed pre-apocalypse levels of technology, {{spoiler|which they proceed to use to launch ''another'', more powerful nuclear holocaust, which is implied to wipe out life on Earth entirely}}.
* Subverted in the short story "Letter to a Phoenix", whose theme is that humanity is doomed to wipe out every civilization it ever produces in nuclear war or worse...which prevents it from succumbing to the slow, permanent death of stagnation that kills all other sapient species in the universe. [[Family-Unfriendly Aesop|"Only the mad destroy themselves. And only the phoenix lives forever."]]
* In [[Sergey Lukyanenko]]'s ''Competitors'', the aliens reveal that, in their experience, most humanoid races destroy themselves before expanding to other stars. As such, they have no fear of humans, even going as far as providing certain individuals with [[Imported Alien Phlebotinum]]. If anything, they figure that this will only hasten our demise. The novel ends with one of the protagonists determined to prove them wrong.
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== Live Action TV ==
* A major theme of ''[[Battlestar Galactica]]''. And although the Cylons initially hold it over the humans, they eventually show themselves to suffer from the same problem.
* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' story ''[[Doctor Who/Recap/S25
* In ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', it is ''repeatedly'' and ''repeatedly'' shown what high technology can do to civilizations that aren't "ready" yet.
** One ascended Ancient used his knowledge to create a weapon that would defend them against the Goa'uld. That civilization ended up destroying itself, due to that weapon.
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* Two episodes of ''[[The Outer Limits]]'' reference this trope.
** In the TOS episode "Counterweight", this is one of the Antheon alien's criticisms of humanity during its [["The Reason You Suck" Speech]].
** The revival episode "Heart's Desire" has an alien arrive on Earth during the [[Wild West]] era and take over the body of an old preacher. He then proceeds to give shady characters the power to turn matter into energy at will. They quickly turn on one another, before only one is left. The alien reveals himself and his goal: he has come to Earth to destroy potential enemies but has seen enough to realize that we won't last long enough to invent interstellar travel, and thus are no threat.
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* ''[[Starcraft]]'': Supposedly, this tendency is why Terran military technology is able to keep up with the [[Bug War|Zerg]] and [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens|Protoss]] - and also why the Terrans insist on fighting their own wars in the midst of a Zerg invasion.
{{quote|'''Liberty''': "I can only imagine what the Zerg and Protoss thought when they landed on planet after planet that consisted of nothing but Confederates and rebels whaling the tar out of each other. They probably thought it was the normal behavior pattern for our race. And I suppose they would be right."}}
* ''[[Marathon Trilogy|Marathon]]'': [[AI Is a Crapshoot|Durandal]] sends this message to the player character.
{{quote|"Every breath, every motion brings you one instant closer to your death. With that kind of heritage and destiny, how can you deny yourself? How can you expect yourself to give up violence? It is your nature. Do you feel free?"}}
* ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'': During the end of the game, Shepard meets {{spoiler|the Catalyst, the Overlord of the Reapers, who justifies the mass genocide of the Galaxy as a means to prevent civilizations (human or alien) from creating powerful [[A Is]] who will end up destroying their creators and endangering the Universe.}}
{{quote|Rather than just ensure [[Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum|no organic life continues]] these powerful [[A Is]] sweep though the Galaxy every couple of millenniums, to allow organic civilizations time to grow before violently destroying and [[In Their Own Image|absorbing them]].}}
* In ''[[Gears of War]]'', this trope is [[Hive Queen|Queen Myrrah's]] main justification for leading the Locust into a campaign of extermination against humanity.
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== Real Life ==
* In [[Real Life]] this trope tends to apply on a species level rather than an individual level as each individual tries to ensure ''its own'' survival at the expense of others and by extension the species as a whole. This is the essence of competition and while the survivors usually end up stronger there may come a time where there aren't enough survivors to perpetuate the whole.
** Otherwise known as the Tragedy of the Commons.
* This is a popular explanation of the [[wikipedia:Fermi paradox|Fermi Paradox]]: Given the large number of stars and planets in the visible universe, it is likely that a number of extra-terrestrial civilizations exist. But -- why haven't we found any?
** If you're curious about possible answers, there's a whole list of theories on the Fermi Paradox's wikipedia page. Among the most general and simple: we've only been looking for a few decades, only listening for signals that sufficiently advanced civilizations might not try to communicate with in the first place.
** Or it's just that most -if not all- technological civilizations follow [[In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves|this very trope]], so they're very scarce.
* Freud called it 'thanatos-eros' (literally "death-love") -- the contradictory impulses in each individual towards destruction and violence on the one hand and towards creation and nurturing on the other. [[Freud Was Right|Psychological and cultural research so far supports his theory]].
* The Medea Hypothesis proposes that life is naturally self-destructive, as it has come close to destroying itself several times (eg the Oxygen Catastrophe, and the Permian Mass Extinction).
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