this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
527 points (98.0% liked)

Memes

45745 readers
2206 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] PunchingBag 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This has been the response to everything that's come out since the Nimitz Incident. Bigger revelations have come out in the last seven years than in the last seventy. We're tired, and we're scared, I think. Aliens are going to need to really shake their cans if they want us to care.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We’re tired, and we’re scared, I think.

Worse, we're used to being tired and scared. We're apathetic to our own anxieties and exhaustion. The only thing to fear is not fear itself. It's complacency toward fear.

[–] PunchingBag 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When I trawl the net for UFO stuff, what I see more than anything is people hoping for a savior. People hoping that aliens will save us from our economy, from climate change, from religion, from fascism, from war, from nuclear weapons, from disease, from Republicans, from Democrats, from progressives, from regressives, and mostly from ourselves.

I've been speculating that that fear is a driving force for a lot of the current UFO craze. We're in a dangerous time, things are only getting worse, and people are becoming desperate for a superhero to come and save the day.

I think we're more scared that there aren't aliens, sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sounds like a half-self-aware version of "Great Man" thinking, just with the caveat that there aren't actually any among humanity.

But actually, I think you're right. It's easier and more palatable to our narrative-hungry minds to believe that we'll get some sort of cinematic climax before the credits roll, history ends, and we walk out of the theater, than to realize that the world can both be unimaginably shitty and also incredibly boring. If the world doesn't end, or if this isn't the end of history (I think a deus ex machina utopia granted by the aliens falls in this category) we might have to confront the grim reality of slow, complicated, and mostly nameless problems. And that's a lot like waking up one day and realizing your parents are real people who don't know everything, and one day they won't be around to deal with things for you.

I've had similar thoughts about other conspiracy-type thinking like the illuminati but yeah, makes sense that it would apply to aliens as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

As the only Libertarian I will ever agree with once said,

A P A T H Y  I S  D E A T H

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would normally agree with you, but I’m not so bad.. 😜

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] PunchingBag 4 points 1 year ago

Depending on who you ask, they already are >_>