During his recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Tucker Carlson and his host discussed, among other things, the UFO phenomenon.
Carlson recounted his having been approached by a Department of Defence official, who first turned him on to the idea that there was something of substance to reports about flying saucers and the like.
Following this, he has interacted with many more persons he considers credible, “mostly in private,” who have confirmed it.
“It’s so dark,” he told Rogan, who, despite having interviewed UFO researcher Jacques Valee and others, still holds out some Gen-X futurist hope that the UFO is a harbinger of something good.
“What made you think it was dark?” he pressed.
The two eventually ran into the mythology of a generation and a half of sci-fi enculturation.
From the beginning, Carlson argued that the notion that they are from another planet is a psy-op, and that these are spiritual phenomena.
There is a whole world that we can’t see—a supernatural world that’s acting on us for good and bad … there’s no evidence that they [UFOs] are from another planet. I think that’s the [psy-]op … and it’s really bad, it’s really dark.
At the level of culture, what’s dark about it is that it tends to replace religion and any coherent ontology with a mystifying, quasi-religious myth.
It presents us not with the Divine simplicity of classical theism—a unitary cause outside space and time, of which the multiplicity of the world is the manifestation—but instead one contingent thing leading to another, one advanced race seeding the next, an infinite regress of finite causes concealing the logical need for the transcendent.
Not the fulfilment of the human condition, but its stripping away, until every particular feature has been flattened. Indeed, the grey alien is a good symbolic representation for the globalist project of social engineering to produce consumer-subjects, denuded of all specificity, including gender, whose deviated transcendence is expressed as hypertrophic intellect, a large head and eyes ready to receive input from a screen under correspondingly atrophied bodies.
Beyond this, we may intuit that the removal of particularity ends up not only making us all the same kind of thing, but making us all the same thing—not only uniform, but unified. A political class bent on increasing its power would be interested not only in making people interchangeable so that they behave like easily managed human resources, but in centralising the administration thereof.
This comes through in the contemporary imagination around the techno-singularity. When Carlson pressed him on why, in his opinion, off-world creatures would be interested in accelerating our technological evolution, Rogan responded:
My belief is that intelligent biological life is a caterpillar making a cocoon. What emerges from that cocoon is virtual intelligence … Artificial General Intelligence … a god.
We may describe this as a counter-religious eschaton: the concept of post-humanity which is effectively a parody of spiritual salvation. Requiring as much faith as any theological formulation, its diffusion would, in fact, be very useful as a technique of social control.
If people identify with such a project, believing a post-human (read inhuman) mode of existence is our proper end, then they will begin to wonder whether the DMT-addled Big Tech overclass does not, in fact, know something they don’t.
Whether their all-too-human wallet and growing neighbourhood insecurity are not, in fact, unimportant in the grander scheme of things.
Whether vegan, pod-dwelling, post-gender, turbo-communism is not, in fact, a superior—indeed, an unavoidable—way of life.
We may consider extreme examples of this in the fringe spectacle of UFO cults. Extreme versions of the well-known dynamic whereby utopianism leads to exploitation, and religion, in its parodic guise, acts as an opiate: from the self-castrating, mass-suiciding members of Heaven’s Gate to the exploited hippies of the Raelian movement.
But, sometimes, the fringe can express a culture’s central ideas more explicitly, less self-consciousness, than that culture’s mainstream.
Identifying with the alien is, in fact, a defining trait of the postmodern West.
The ‘other’—be it in sexual, gender, or ethnic terms—is elevated by official culture as more virtuous than the majority.
At the farther reaches of the project to deconstruct nationhood, we encountered the project to deconstruct more fundamental aspects of the human condition, such as gender. Now, with the much augured rise of A.I. and the potential for mass manipulation inherent in UFO disclosure (with disinformation always mixed in with information), we may perceive a future turn of the screw casting its shadow on us.
Of course, social engineering doesn’t actually rely on convincing people of a course of action so much as getting them to go along with the new normal, and providing some of them—those that need it; that need to be true believers—with a plausible rationale, indeed, a plausible pseudo-religion.
In any case, the UFO myth and alien archetype are worth analysing from a symbolic perspective in terms of their psychological impact and the elements of traditional religion that they parody, in order to combat negative effects on the level of culture.
