an exploration into human nature, the Id, Ego, and Super Ego
Upon viewing the Netflix adaptation of the "Three Body Problem" by Cixin Liu, one can't help but be drawn emotionally into the tragic life of Ye Wenjie. Experiencing the brutal murder of her father and her subsequent survival in a grueling Chinese Communist work camp nearly dying, her story is one of profound and extreme hardship. I was drawn into the movie and filled with sympathy for her.
However, her eventual betrayal, siding with the aliens, is as shocking as it is thought-provoking. Is this somehow revealing a hidden side of humanity? Are we this shallow? How is it possible that an entire cabal of people, humans no less, engaged in subverting humanity!
Under dire circumstances, trapped animals instinctively act irrationally to survive. We witness this when foxes, trapped in a snare, will bite their own leg off to escape.
There is a primal response in us as well, from the Freudian concept of Id, Ego, and Superego. The instinctual drive referred to as the Id is the most primitive part of our psyche, and includes our biological instinct of survival. So, is this betrayal originating from our Id and manifesting into the plot? Or is the author simply spinning a story.
If you believe like I do that movies are an extension of Id, Ego, and Superego then we should be able to see this as a theme or trend...
I wanted to verify this.
- I literally copied 693 from Science Fiction Movies on Wikipedia
- Pasted said movies directly into create-data.js, performed some staged functional programming to get the data into the copy-cut-paste buffer of my Apple Mac.
- The result of step 2, was a JSON object in my copy-cut-paste buffer, I pasted it into a new json file, data.json
- I created another file index.js which loaded data.json and called Open AI to ask questions about the movies ( Unfortunately I burned through $10.00 ).
- index.js made a really nice file called results.md. I reformatted this file a little.
- Then I created build-stats-from-markdown-results.js this program ingested the results.md to create the stats I present here.
There are 693 Sciences Fiction movies listed on Wikipedia, this is not comprehensive, the earliest is 1902 and latest 2025
Total count of First Contact movies is 459 which is 66.23% of all Sciences Fiction movies
Of the 459 First contact movies, Humans were traitor 162 times which is 35.29% of the time.
This data suggests a significant trend towards betrayal.
Are movies vastly different from reality? How close is this to reality? Or, is it simply there to provoke us? Does this imply a real-world propensity for humans to side with an Alien invasion? Are we going to experience a 35% likelihood of a traitorous population when we have First contact?
This figure seems high to me, and frankly, I would need to explore this further to have a conclusion, but it was fun to do and think about.