this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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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.