Believing the Strangest Things, Loving the Alien

Given free time, do we choose to spend it in real reality or virtual reality?

(photo: Pixabay/CC0)

Look out at your children
See their faces in golden rays
Don't kid yourself they belong to you
They're the start of a coming race …
Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use
All the strangers came today
And it looks as though they're here to stay …
Let me make it plain
You gotta make way for the Homo Superior

Is your neighbor an alien? If we are to believe a UK-based scientist, an alien-hybrid community is surreptitiously colonizing the earth by secretly implanting extraterrestrial DNA into pregnant women. According to Miguel Mendonca, a green energy expert based in the British city of Bristol, this alien-hybrid presence in our midst is vital to the future of humanity because they are helping us “evolve into higher beings.”

For those raised on the music of David Bowie, such a revelation resonates with the Bowie songs Loving the Alien and Oh You Pretty Things, the latter of which proclaims that “homo sapiens have outgrown their use” and that we need to “make way for the homo superior,” connecting the “start of a coming race” with the arrival of “strangers” who look “as though there here to stay.” All of us will find such a revelation weird; most of us will think it creepy; and many of us will consider it crazy.

Whether mere humans, the untermenschen or undermen, are meant to make way for the coming alien-hybrid Master Race, the untermenschen or overmen, the Homo Superior, there is no doubt that we are all living with aliens. They are not, however, the aliens of which the “scientist” writes or the rock star sings. They are the alienated souls who surround us every day, those aliens who live in a world of virtual reality and who are unable to form real relationships with their neighbors. These isolated souls, unable to break out of their alienated selves into the cosmos that lies beyond their egos, are the aliens in our midst. They are everywhere. They are taking over.

The person living next door might be an alien. The person sitting next to you, even as you read this article, might be an alien. Those with whom we work are aliens, or at least some of them are. And how are we to know who is and who isn’t an alien? And, most creepy of all, how do we know if we might be aliens ourselves?

Perhaps, in order to answer these questions, we should design an “alien-identification test,” or a sort of “alien-spotting for dummies.” It might ask the following questions.

Given free time, do we choose to spend it in real reality or virtual reality? Do we meet our friends face-to-face in real space or do we meet them via social media in cyberspace? Do we befriend people in our neighborhoods or do we “friend” them on Facebook? Is having a chat something that happens in a café or a pub or is it something that happens in a box on a computer screen? Do we value every human life because of its inherent dignity, or do we sanction the killing of human beings if they are weak, disabled or unwanted? Do we really love our neighbors, even if they disagree with us, or do we loathe our neighbors because they disagree with us? Do we form relationships that last because we sacrifice our own selfish desires for the good of the other person, or do we fail to form such relationships because we expect other people to sacrifice their selfish desires for us?

At the end of the day, and when all is said and done, we are all living with aliens but we are not all loving them.