Alien Nation
So, it’s the future. January 2025. We’re deep into the space age if the shows of my childhood are to be believed.
To be honest, I was expecting more from hoverboards and humans in general, and I definitely expected more action from aliens.
But it seems all we get are weird skateboards, exploding Teslas, killer drones, the continued disconnection from our humanity, habitat collapse, and a backward slide into religious dogma and fascism.
Good times all round. Thanks for nothing unfettered greed and capitalism. Thanks for nothing monotheism, ya Dark Ages sticky-shit troll.
But this does bring me to a thought I’ve been pondering (yet again) about humans and the stories we create.
Whether they be little fibs we tell ourselves and others, movies, TV shows, books, theatre, poems, art, or songs, stories sublimate the powerful archetypal forces that overwhelm us; they act as puppets for us to project our shadow selves onto so that we’re able to cope with the big feelings we struggle with: the horror of vulnerability, the fear of abandonment or of obliteration, the terror of loss, of grief, the beasts of rage and worthlessness…
For example, zombie movies are actually about loss of identity and meaning in the wake of predatory capitalism and mindless consumerism, and Westerns are about creating the ego: individualism and heroes and justice, and so on…
One particular story that’s been tickling my brain lately is the alien invasion story.
You know how it goes: we’re just minding our own business and then BAM! The meanies from outer space come down and invade our environment with their nefarious, slimy alien business, pillaging and slaughtering and annihilating, using us and our resources without a care for our feelings, needs, or opinions on the matter. Without considering us at all, really.
They don’t ask nicely before they land their spaceships. They never negotiate. They’re never coming here just to hang out and learn about us without some horrifying mistreatment of us somewhere down the line. They never give a shit about anyone but themselves. They’re almost always an evil that humanity must endure and eventually fight off.
In our stories, aliens are almost always self-serving, militant, violent, rapacious, and either aggressively or quietly Very Bad News.
Sounds kinda familiar doesn’t it?
Sounds a lot like us, doesn’t it?
Much like the Ancient Greeks humanised their gods, we humanise our depictions of alien life forms.
But I feel like we’ve made aliens in our image not just because we’re limited (we are), or dull of imagination (we are), or even because we’re so riddled with fear we can’t imagine any intelligent life form that isn’t equally riddled by fear (we are), but because we’re unconsciously trying to negotiate our feelings around the fact that when it comes to our fellow species here on planet Earth, we behave like the aliens we’ve created.
Think about it.
You’re part of a little colony of ants living your best collective life in a happy patch of meadow, when BAM!, these shitty two-legged monsters come in with giant machines and bulldoze the meadow flat, destroying your food sources and networks, and spraying what’s left of the area with toxic liquid that burns your body and wipes out your entire colony.
Or, you’re part of a pod of whales merrily swimming along minding your own business, singing the song of your people, enjoying spats with next door neighbours, when BAM! the two-legged, flat-faced worms bring barbed bones and bang sticks and slaughter half your family.
I’m not saying there wasn’t a time humans had a right to fight to survive. We are as much ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ as the next primate. I’m just saying, it’s been a long time since we’ve needed to assert ourselves in that survival-serving fashion.
With what we know now, with the level of information and data we have, we don’t need to be behaving the way we are.
And yet, we’re still shitting where we eat.
When it comes to using and abusing most of Earth’s organic life, we don’t negotiate the best outcomes for other species let alone our own damn habitat, we don’t consider, we don’t measure our taking.
Whatever space we want, we simply claim as a resource, using every one of our fellow species as a stepping stone for our survival and thrival. (I know that’s not a word, but it should be.)
And yet, what thriving, for how much longer?
Even if you forget other species for now, and even if we can’t ‘kill the earth’ as so many would like to suggest, we really are quite capable of fucking up our own liveable habitat for ourselves.
I think our collective spirit understands this imbalance. And so, I’ve started wondering whether alien invasion movies are our collective unconscious’ way of trying to get our individual consciousnesses to build empathy for our environment and other species.
After all, how else can we begin to imagine their position when there is no life form on Earth that can put us – collectively – in their position: that of endangered victim?
So, we imagine a greater force from somewhere else entirely – a stronger force, a more intelligent force, a force with all our own collective rapacious, violent, thoughtless tendencies – and present the facts of species annihilation as fiction: Look how shitty it is, look how terrible for sentient life forms, isn’t that a really shitty way to treat another species?
And, of course, the villainous aliens get their comeuppance for being such assholes.
So wouldn’t it be nice if we got our own hint before we suffered the comeuppance we’ve written into our own story?
I don’t know. It’s just an idea. Besides, it’s been a while since alien invasion stories were in fashion. And, I must say, the last one that made the greatest impression on me – Arrival – was so wonderful for the new narrative it introduced into the collective consciousness: alien species as benevolent, helpful, compassionate; humans as capable of collaboration and setting aside their fears to work together for the greater good.
But that’s in the minority and the last time it really happened was in Star Trek.
Anyway. That’s a lot for the first post of the year.
Maybe all my subconscious mind really wanted to get across was this: Come on humans, be better aliens!
The way things are going 2025 doesn’t seem likely to be the year we get going on that, but it’s a nice thought at any rate.
Here’s to nice thoughts becoming nice things.
T
In the beginning was the word...
I was once Mother Goddess. Or, at the very least, I was channelling her. It was a one-person, one-night-only performance and I was an electric vessel in a state of afflatus, a powerful force of devastating wonder.