See, I don’t figure you need to arbitrarily decide that gold or silver or seashells are valuable to have capitalism. Currency is not an inherently capitalist concept. It’s just a way of simplifying the barter system, and I have a hard time imagining an intelligent species that wouldn’t arrive at the concept of “hey, let’s trade stuff.”
Capitalism is what you get when you have a system in which people barter or sell their labor, within a broader setting of self-interested competition. And I think that whether or not an alien race would arrive at capitalism as a useful propellant for civilization would depend on how motivated they are by advancing their own self-interest. To an extent I suspect this is genetic. Humans evolved from pack-based omnivorous predators. “Hey, let’s team up to eat the other guy” is about as fundamental a concept for us as it gets.
And there’s reason to think that animals like us have a leg up on developing sentience before other, more laid-back and benevolent races, not only because we keep eating them before they get the chance. If a species isn’t forced to compete to survive, why get any smarter? These big-ass brains of ours are huge resources hogs. They account for about 20% of our basic caloric needs. There’s no reason to evolve an organ that gobbles up ~300 calories a day if you don’t actually need it in order to, you know, not die.
Greed is an obviously useful impulse in any situation where there is scarcity (and without scarcity, there is no competition to survive). Our evolutionary ancestors had a better chance of living through the winter if they were greedier bastards than their neighbors. Also useful is an evolved predilection towards in-grouping and out-grouping, as you see in pack animals (and in our ancestors). The in-group is “your” people, who you will cooperate with and defend in order to increase everyone’s odds of survival. In-groups can scale up to the size of nations. But in order to exist, in-groups need out-groups: “Them,” who aren’t even really people, I mean, really, and who are fair game for killing, eating, mercilessly exploiting, and waging war upon. The out-group could be the poor, slaves, women, ethnic or religious groups, other political entities, whoever. In-grouping and out-grouping is inherently pretty sociopathic, and it’s not hard to see how our innate ability to go “yeah, but fuck those guys” made capitalism a pretty easy concept to wrap our heads around.
So yeah, a lot of aliens probably know about capitalism, since there’s no reason to think that the circumstances which governed our evolution into opportunistic jerks are in any way unusual. As they say on Wall Street, greed is good. In the boardroom and on the savannah.
Still, it’s not THAT hard to imagine an alien species that evolved intelligence without needing to compete with other races. For example: picture a race that evolved on a planet where the environment was the greatest hazard, instead of getting eaten by your neighbor. What if you were an aquatic species living in a place where there was plenty of food to go around, but sudden, fast-moving currents made life unpredictable and precarious? A smart critter might be able to learn to detect and avoid those currents, and keep others of its kind from getting lost. Altruism would be an evolutionary advantage with no down side. What use would a species like that ever have for capitalism? Why would it not share whatever it had with everyone?
Or: picture a species developing on a planet where far more robust and dangerous strains of bacteria and viruses evolved than we have here. What if the intelligent species which emerged on that world had evolved an incredibly complex immune system that required constant infusions of fresh DNA in order to withstand the microbial assault? This is a thing even on Earth: the more genetically distant someone is from you, the more likely it is that your children will be able to resist more diseases. That’s neat for us, but would be absolutely VITAL for our aliens in Germ Hell. What this could conceivably do is eliminate out-grouping: oh my God, are you a group of people unfamiliar to us? LET’S FUCK AND BE FRIENDS! Wouldn’t that be so great? An alien race with an aggressive evolutionary predisposition towards friendliness. Capitalism? Why would you want to piss off a group you haven’t genetically mingled with in a while?? TRADE, now, trade is great, trade keeps groups moving around and shagging new and different folks from far-flung places. But for a race like the one we’re imagining, the exchange of goods might be seen as mutual gift-giving. Why be suspicious or exploitative of unfamiliar people! We are all friends! We are all soldiers in the Germ War! Let’s not compete! Let us dance.
And like, I’ve interpreted the question “would aliens know about capitalism” to mean “would they have likely been capitalists EVER, in their entire history, even if they eventually managed to move past it.” Because I think even a race like ours could eventually accomplish that. I also haven’t gone into the exotic options for sentience, like intelligent crystals, or collective organisms, mainly because I’m hungry and this is already long.
TL;DR: most aliens have probably had a capitalist phase at some point, yeah, but I bet the ones that haven’t would be a lot nicer.
The evolutionary biology of capitalism. Aria should have a Patreon for Tumblr asks.
Just another WordPress site