Truth of the Divine (Noumena, #2)

by Lindsay Ellis

“The paradox of anti-government hysteria is it tends to lead to authoritarianism. The arrival of space aliens has not united humanity; they’ve only made us more tribal, more fractured, and it’s only going to get worse in the months and years to come. And now you have these proto-fascists arguing against the very idea of alien personhood and advocating for the creation of a whole different category of person altogether. One might almost say … three-fifths of a person.”

“It’s about us. It’s about how we treat our aliens, our lower classes. If they create a whole new class of person with fewer rights than a natural person, one created specifically for a nonhuman alien, how long do you think it will be before they start applying that to human aliens as well?”

“Assigning gender to pronouns is just as logical as assigning race or height or any other physical attribute to them, and just as relevant to me.”

Is this just a function of human nature? he wondered. Is this just something we do, over and over—we identify patterns, we identify problems, and we tell ourselves that we’ve figured it out. We tell ourselves that next time it will be different, next time we will know better, next time we won’t make the same mistake. But then we do.

“No, I am not saying you are the one to do anything, any more than I am. That’s not how this works. There is no One Great Man that’s going to change the world here. There is only you and me, two people who have some influence, who might be able to influence other yous and mes out there.”

“It feels like we’re rats on a ship. Rats on the Titanic trying to move the rudder. Even if we did have real power and influence, I don’t think there’s any force on Earth that’s going to change the direction of this ship.” “That might be true. But if this ship is going down, I’d rather go down with it than abandon it.”

“I just don’t get the appeal of his worldview. His whole platform is based on the idea that people are inherently barbarous and need a boot to hold them down.” “Well, yeah, baby fascists,”

human civilization—bellicose, competitive, consumptive, dangerous, xenophobic

It wasn’t just that humanity had built a civilization whose inertia toward its own self-destruction was too strong for it to change. This was a civilization that, in the face of adversity, turned on itself, devoured itself, ate its most vulnerable. Flesh-eaters, pugilists, militarists. This was a civilization that did not deserve to be saved.

When we make the conscious effort to take down the barriers put in place as a result of our culture, our upbringing, or even our natural instincts. I realize that I’d crossed the barrier of seeing him as a person a long time ago, probably within the first few hours of laying eyes on him. And by now I think of him not only as a person, but as a friend. I’ve thought of him as such for some time. I know that I’m not unique. I know that if I have the capability to make this mental leap, anyone does. I decide that this will be the hope that I cling to; if I am able to go from pure animal terror at this alien to seeing him as a friend in such a short amount of time, then as conscious humans, as intelligent beings, we are stronger than our natures.

By nature, we are more competitive than they. We are more violent. We are more consumptive. We are more individualistic. We are more tribal. Most terrifyingly to them, we are omnivorous. Imagine being of a species descended from herbivores looking in on us humans, who eat nearly anything, but especially delight in the flesh of our fellow animals. We raise and slaughter them in factory farms, and that’s not even the worst of it. We go to war with each other constantly. We continue to pump greenhouse gas into our atmosphere, knowing full well how future generations will suffer for it. We traffic and enslave our most vulnerable, and those who don’t turn a blind eye to it. What intelligent being would look at a species like this and not see a potential threat?

But perhaps this is why he and I became such fast friends, despite such otherwise incredible differences—against all logic, we still have some hope that the inertia of the systems we were born into is not unchangeable.

There are people in this world who look at their fellow humans and see the worst in them, and their solution is a tilt to authoritarianism. They believe that human nature is immutable, not a construct, and therefore must be controlled with an iron boot. Calling the worst, basest impulses we possess a function of human nature excuses us from change and dismisses it as impossible.

History shows us that liberal democracies and democratic norms are easily exploited when populists capitalize on mass fear for political gain, when they position a fearful majority into an “us” opposed to a nebulous, terrible “them.”

This phase we are about to enter as a civilization may be our last, and already I am staggered at how shortsighted many have become. These fearmongers provoke the anxieties of an already insecure populace not because they have any strategy regarding our survival as a civilization, but because they desire power. They don’t care about the cost, perhaps because they don’t believe there truly is one.

We all have ways of showing our patriotism, and mine is holding my country to account. I want to dissuade her from her worst, cruellest impulses, for I truly believe that if she does not evolve past them, she will not survive. In that way, America is synecdoche for humanity as a whole—capable of such feats of wonder, such innovation, such compassion, but also such greed, such exploitation, such consumption, such empire, and such cruelty. Are these truly traits of our shared human nature? Is this an inexorable, inescapable state of our being? Or is this all the result of a shared construct that we have erroneously agreed is a necessary evil of civilization, a fiction agreed upon, one that might be changed?