Years ago, when I was a university student, a woman approached me at a bus stop one night.
“I’m not possessed, I’m possessive,” she said, which I took for a funny way of saying she was highly-strung but self-aware. Turning towards her, however, I saw by her appearance that she was probably homeless and, making eye contact, gave her an opening to follow up with a more disconcerting “I’m not a [expletive] possessed, I’m the thing she’s possessed by. No one took me up, love. I got sent down. And it won’t be long before I’m gone back up again.”
As it happened, I had a copy of one of Mohr Siebeck’s excellent anthologies, titled Revelation, Literature, and Community in Late Antiquity. Not strictly related to my coursework, I had been making my way through it, and that very night opened the book up to professor Gregory Shaw’s chapter, “The Soul’s Innate Gnosis of the Gods.”
Shaw begins his (spiritually flawed) discussion of neo-Platonism with an anecdote that was to shed light on what the homeless woman had just said.
In the spring of 1992, the scholar of late antique religion was teaching a course on dreams and divination and, presumably wanting to show his students that the phenomena they were studying were still current, albeit in new guises, he decided to bring in a guest speaker.
The speaker was an alleged alien abductee, who described her experiences and concluded by disclosing what had apparently been revealed to her: that the human form presently in front of the assembly was, in fact, not her only aspect. That she was not one of us, at least not entirely, but rather one of them:
She recalled being on board an alien ship in a lab where she agreed to ‘come down’ and to enter a human being. ‘At that point,’ she said, ‘I realized I was one of them.’ … As to how she made sense of being an ‘alien’ while, at the same time, obviously human, she replied that she was a ‘dual reference’: on the one hand she is entirely human while, at the same time, an alien presence lives within her.
That was it, I thought. Not only was this what the homeless woman had meant by “No one sent me up, I got sent down,” but this was, I now felt, the whole crux of our current spiritual and political crisis.
The powers that be—the political class, Big Tech oligarchs, establishment academics—want us to detach from the human condition. To view it with repulsion. To yearn for a less human future, enjoying the fruits of a more technologically advanced existence.
They want us to adopt a “dual reference,” to put our hope for fulfillment in some imagined, inhuman version of ourselves. What could be better for convincing people to hold true, to believe in progress, in the virtue of vegan, non-binary, open-border, metaverse, turbo-communism even in spite of their declining material conditions?
It may not be great for your all-too-human skyrocketing energy bill and neighborhood insecurity, but the “dual reference,” the faith in some post-human existence, keeps you wondering whether the DMT-addled overclass doesn’t know something you don’t after all.
We’ve all heard talk of human beings being a plague on the earth or whatever else. In fact, it’s an empirically verifiable fact that exposing a Gen-Xer to marihuana will invariably cause him/her to wax poetic about how ‘if you look at the earth from space, human cities are, like, a fungus, you know?’
In fact, the gray alien is a good cultural archetype for representing how globalist, materialist technocrats must view transcendence: a nationless, genderless, characterless, highly advanced future.
No timeless principles, but progress in time; no realizing of particular conditions as harmonious expressions of transcendent unity, but the relentless stripping away of all particularity for the sake of a technological singularity; no taking up and baptizing the lower layers of reality, but letting the body atrophy.
Of course, to reject one’s particularity, to accept one’s lack of identity or humanity, is to become a resource for others to mold according to their needs. People without attachment to place will accept being moved around according to the dictates of a global oligarch-dominated market in a world without borders.
I was reminded of all this recently while watching Jordan Peele’s film Nope.
In it, the protagonists face off against a UFO that keeps appearing around their property, finally discovering that it isn’t a technologically advanced aircraft, but an animal of some kind, a flying organism that sucks up and eats land-dwelling animals, together with the occasional human.
This is a good metaphor for the realization that all social critique must reach: predatory systems are not smarter than you, their appearance does not bespeak greater refinement, and they aren’t shepherding you into a bountiful future.
The month before graduating, some friends and I took a break from studying to get drinks at a bar that mostly played Punk/Rock. A local band whose name I don’t remember were playing a song whose name I do: “I’m hungry, but food is for humans.”
It used to be fashionable for “post-rock” or emo-adjacent bands to have long prosaic names and song titles, so I didn’t think much about it, until the lead singer finished off the song saying something like:
That’s actually what they found on a note that a dead homeless woman had scribbled down right here in Bath. It was in the locals—local newspapers—when we wrote this song. So you think about that when you’re warm in bed tonight, yeah?
Of course, I could never confirm it, but I was sure that it was the homeless woman that talked to me that night at the bus stop a year before. She’d starved herself thinking she wasn’t human.
UFO cults like Heaven’s Gate exacted similar conditions on their members, even to the point of castration, as an ordeal to transcend the human condition.
Tyranny always justifies itself by claiming to be shepherding its slaves to something great, even as it tests how far we can be conditioned into giving up everything that poses an obstacle to total control—every economically wasteful, politically inexpedient scrap of our humanity.
And if, ultimately, full-spectrum automation and AI mean that the future doesn’t need us, well, this homeless woman had blazed the trail for the rest of her disowned species.
I had a few classes in common with the girlfriend of the band’s drummer, who I had met at a house party some time before. I asked him if he had the article his bandmate had been talking about, and he got it for me.
It was actually a student-run paper with very limited circulation. The aspiring journalist had taken a photograph of the note found on the dead woman and printed a scan of it. I imagine that sort of thing isn’t usually allowed, but I suppose that, since there was no investigation—no questions concerning the cause of death—no one had made any fuss, or else no one with the authority to make a fuss had noticed.
The note had a little flying saucer doodle on it with what looked like sharp teeth on its underside where the abduction ray is usually drawn.
“Hey, that’s not a spaceship, that’s a mouth,” said the drummer, who was leaning over me, apparently just now developing some curiosity about his band’s lyrics.
“Wait a bit—there’s our next song title!” he said, quickly rushing over to the rest of the band.
It was also a good summation of how the rapacious political class mystifies its predations with the aura of messianic progress.
That’s not a spaceship, it’s a mouth.
