There is a joke about world-building in science fiction. Many writers simply don’t know how to introduce their past history, and therefore have ridiculous lines of dialogue like “As you know, Bob, we were invaded by aliens in 1945.”
My question is – how do we know we haven’t been?
No, I’m serious, look around you.
Those of us who read history can see this perhaps more clearly than others. When a culture is invaded and occupied, the first thing the occupiers do is take over the education of children (sometimes by force), the means of disseminating news (there is a reason we joke about invaders taking radio and TV stations first), the cultural life of the country including entertainment.
All of these mechanisms are turned to giving the children of the occupied land the idea that their occupiers are in fact redeemers, and that the old culture was not only weaker but objectively worse than that of the occupiers.
Because humans are essentially great apes (with an overgrown brain and more neuroses) we’re not made JUST of genes, but also of the environment we grow up in. It is, therefore, possible for invaders to take over the genetic product of another culture and turn them essentially into the invaders.
This has been done with greater and lesser success throughout history. Some cultures, like the Christian cultures in Africa invaded by Muslims, were obliterated; the cultures in India invaded by… well, everybody, tended to take what they were handed and meld it into their crazy quilt; and Greece and others managed to infect their invaders with their culture.
However, most of the time this takeover succeeds and the extent to which it succeeds relies on the seizing not just of government but the cultural portals: education, entertainment, intellectual culture (which includes news and opinion and other non-fiction analysis of the culture and its problems.)
Look around you – if we in the West and we humans, in general, had been invaded by aliens, what would be different?
- Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively…very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
- Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
- Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
- Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
- As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
- As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
- Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.
If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?
The sad thing is that it’s not even aliens – at least, Marx was probably not an alien, though his hair could, after all, be a tentacle creature from Alpha Centauri – doing this to us, but our own people.
Because of our successes in material science, in the late 19th century it seemed like we should be able to create a paradise on Earth if we were only able to control the bad qualities of humans that caused war, poverty, and disease.
Enter Marx and his “scientific socialism.” It wasn’t. And frankly, anyone who looked into Marx — who not only didn’t know science from a hole in the ground, and who had many of the things he wrote about already wrong as judged by his contemporary economists — would have known it wasn’t scientific.
But people wanted to believe it was possible, all the more so after WWI turned Europe into an abattoir and planted doubts about Western civilization.
This doubt of the feasibility of industrial society wasn’t new. Before Marx there were the followers of Jean Jacques Rousseau, enamored of the idea of the noble savage, protected from savagery by the wealth of the West, which allowed them to live in illusion.
With this idea of paradise in their minds, every real advance and all real progress of the west was disparaged. Marxism provided them with a timeline of “progress” combined with the certainty there was an arrow to history and that the future (pardon the joke) belonged to them.
As all the attempts at communist (or to be fair even socialist, though the collapse there was slower) governance failed, and the horrors unfolded for all to see, all these “progressives” turned, with hatred and disgust not against the philosophy that destroyed formerly prosperous countries but against the entities who were, somehow, responsible for their dream not working: the U.S., Western civilization and, ultimately, humanity.
That hatred of humanity became more obvious – unavoidable, really – after what they thought was the one successful example of communism and Marxist governance fell and (to the extent Western media condescended to report it) its horrible reality behind its glittery façade was exposed.
Until then, “progressives” enamored of communist utopia could pretend that all the things we kept pointing out were horrible about the regime — purges, prison camps, attempts to keep in people who badly wanted to escape, punishment of thought-crimes — were all “capitalist lies.” They could ignore the imperialistic ways of the Soviet Union, sweeping them under “liberation.” And they could point to the fictions of universal employment, universal health, universal welfare as superior to anything in the West. (I was recently reading an unrelated biography written in the nineties, where someone talked about the free vitamins and life-extension pills that the USSR distributed to all their population as superior to anything we had here. Yes, the true believers were that dumb, and this wasn’t even a committed communist, just a soft-left sheep.)
When the horror that was the USSR stood revealed for all to see, the left went on a screaming, raging tantrum and focused its hatred like a laser on humanity itself, which kept their utopia from coming about.
And since they had hold of the institutions of learning, culture, and entertainment, they’ve raised at least one generation in this hatred.
So – we are invaded by aliens who hate humanity.
What now?
Fortunately, we have the new media, the internet, the ability to homeschool our children. We also have, more and more, the ability to contest and speak out against the preaching of the left.
To the extent of your ability, question one of those cherished shibboleths of the left today: at work or in school, on Facebook or on Twitter, in a comment section or at a family reunion. Ask them why they hate humans. Ask them whom it serves to bring down civilization. Maybe it will cause some of them to think and eventually to stop being enemy agents.
And then roll up your sleeves and build. The left is – ultimately, and perhaps unwittingly, at least for most of them – destroying civilization. Our only choice is to build parallel institutions to take the weight when the ones they’re undermining collapse.
Build under, build over, build around.
Be not afraid. Humans have got this.