“Fear of ET as invasive colonists presupposes that the aliens have no culture or history of their own — that they are merely an anonymous, imperial horde. Andrea Smith has written of “the racial logic of Orientalism” as marking “certain peoples or nations as inferior and as posing a constant threat to the well-being of empire.” Certain racial and ethnic groups, she writes, will be seen as “civilized,” even as they’re “imagined as permanent foreign threats to empire.” Replace “people” with “aliens” and you start to see Orientalist parallels in the way aliens are conceived.

To many scientists, the idea that an alien civilization would be an imperial capitalist species speaks to the power of capitalism as a social formation. Posing as universal, it imparts certain beliefs about humans (and now aliens): that they are competitive, violent, fundamentally self-interested, aspiring to power at the expense of others — when in fact, these are not even human traits. These are traits assumed by our economic system and the peculiar way it seeks to control people, in order to mold them into compliant laborers and consumers.”

Nice article recently in Jacobin magazine about how (as Herbert Marcuse has also observed) people with elevated statues in oppressive societies unconsciously project their feelings of anxiety and meaninglessness onto all things, even space aliens it seems.

Tags:aliensastronomycapitalismHerbert Marcusespace