In the early hours of June 24th 2016, my life changed. I was going to say significantly, but I’m not sure that is an accurate description. My perceptions of it shifted like in one of those sci-fi shows when some anomaly reveals new ways of perceiving reality.
That was the first day I realised there are aliens among us, or at least when it moved to my conscious mind rather than swilling around in my unconscious not impacting my perceptions.
Disclaimer: This is not a post about Brexit, but it is one of the events that peeled back the curtain.
No Internal Dialogue
“I always thought it was something that people just manifested and made up for movies and books and characters just to kind of like explain your inner thought process. I didn’t realize that it was actually that constant for people, that people did actually have a little kind of voice in their head telling them different things and what to do and what to think.”
Alex Soloducha, CBC News – https://bit.ly/3Szatlw
I take offence at the idea my internal monologue tells me what to do and how to think but, that aside, who are these people?
They think so differently that when they see the fictional construct on TV of a protagonist verbalising their thoughts in their head they thought it was just a narrative construct. These people are like body snatchers and I feel the need to point and groan at them so everyone knows these oddities exist and are among us. You can’t tell who they are!
I jest but as someone who has an epic internal monologue which is essential to my very sanity and inner being, outside of extreme examples like certified psychopaths, these people are truly alien.
Listening to this it’s interesting and I suspect the idea of an internal monologue or no internal monologue is probably more subtle than it is often described. I don’t have a constant narrator but I do internalise my reading. Yet one of my adopted sisters never could and she’d have to sub-vocalise everything she was reading. Nothing tells me what to do or think, but unlike the woman in this video, I don’t just say stuff out loud like some sort of Tourette’s syndrome. I do verbalise a lot. I talk to myself a lot. I viewed this as part of my internal monologue, I’m just expressing it in a different way.
Anyway, this means I understand them even less. Aliens.
Serialised Radicalisation of Fandom
Aeons ago I read a book called Weapons of Choice by John Birmingham. It was published in 2005 but the contemporary part of the book was set in 2021. This will be almost prescient. The novel was about a US fleet going back in time to World War II and changing history.
What was interesting about it was the modern world the protagonists came from. In their present, and our future at the time of reading, the world had descended into a horrible place where nations had become less important, terror groups had sprung up with all sorts of agendas and society was just fragmenting due to religious and agenda-based hate. At least that was the impression it left me with and whenever I look at the Internet I can’t help but think about it. A more modern non-fiction alternative would be The Next Civil War: Despatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche.
This has now become part of fandom, this serialised radicalisation. Remember when, even if it was potentially a myth, radicalisation was something that happened in ‘foreign cultures’ and on ‘distant shores’ you just had to stop them from getting in?
a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
Definition of terrorism
Remember when terrorism was special? Now it is the province of anyone with a computer and an axe to grind? Just look at Gencon 2022?
Now everyone gets radicalised about everything and takes up tribal positions and goes on the offensive over the strangest of things resulting in them defining vague enemies looking to ‘take things away’ or stop things that ‘put them in danger’.
So much for not wanting ‘everything to be political’.
The sad thing is you see it happen with people you’re aware of on social media, they serially radicalise across topics. I know of a handful of people where it seemed to start with Brexit. Thanks for that. Then they’ve moved on to misogyny. It’s basically whatever the Internet is spoon-feeding them they should be angry about.
Okay, they’re not going on a terrorism offensive but the way their mind works puts them in the alien category. In truth, if they could step back a bit they’d realise they are just being incredibly stupid. At least those making the content have a financial imperative.
My Home Town
Am I the alien?
Let’s put aside for a moment what you think of Brexit, the big reveal for me was I was the alien. I live in what is apparently a provincial town in the North East of England. I realised this but sort of didn’t at the same time. You see my hometown was one of those North East towns that voted for Brexit. The vast majority of people had different views than me.
When I thought about it a bit this made sense. The Brexit vote made me realise I was an ex-pat or a digital nomad (since I’m not poor I’m allowed to not draw a parallel with a migrant) in the town where I’d be born and grown up in.
I had projected my, apparently liberal elite, values onto the occupants of my home town.
I made a comment to a colleague at work that, at least locally, one correlation (note not causation) was definitely education. He looked at me aghast and said that I couldn’t call people stupid. The thing is I wasn’t calling anyone stupid, I was recognising the impact education had on me. It had given me a life experience that was constantly international and exposed me to ideas and cultures I’d not have experienced otherwise.
As a result, I don’t do highly local thinking.
The scope of how I thought was UK and International, not regional and then home town. It was expansive, not reductive. The truth was it’d changed me so much I may as well have been someone who’d come from a foreign land and set up home ‘with the locals’ despite being born here.
And, Finally…
These can’t be the only source of when people have felt they’re meeting an alien or when you’ve felt that you are the alien? I am sure there are other circumstances people can think of. What are they? It’s weird when you encounter these groups or realise you’ve been the strange one for decades.
Alien. The lot of them.