Hybrid Dreams, Alien Invasion

I listen to Seriah Azkath's podcast show Where Did the Road Go?

Listened to the 3/18/2016 show with Cutchin and after hearing the hybrid show of 3/5 mentioned went back and listened to that. I have a general idea that talk in ufology about aliens and hybrids inevitably maps onto discourses of race/ethnicity and power. There’s a few people who have floated that idea before e.g. Christopher Roth. Listening to the hybrid show in the context of my current social/political climate, that idea got reinforced.

I grew up in an all-white area and moved to a very multi-ethnic area later in life. Just by living and working there I ended up learning new social skills and knowledge in order to relate to and interact with people from completely different backgrounds. It’s often struck me that people who live in monocultural settings are at a disadvantage when it comes to interacting with more global or multicultural society because they lack those skills, that knowledge or I guess what sociologists might call social capital. It’s not necessarily bigotry or intolerance but just ignorance due to lack of exposure to social others and developing more social skills and knowledge.

Learning about the Native American Holocaust in grad school, one of the things we read about was how tribes kept their culture intact even when all the leaders of the secret/sacred societies were being killed off. Even after all the designated spokespeople for the supernatural had been killed off, a dream might come to someone who was not a member of a sacred society. If it seemed like a good dream, the remaining community would run with it anyway. Kind of a preservation of old ways and adaptation to new realities.

That’s what I was thinking about listening to the hybrid show. (On the physical level all this hybrid nonsense is bullshit, but on the social-emotional level it’s highly significant.) Specifically around the 43 minute mark where the female guest is speaking. Her words are a pretty good description of what it would take for someone from a monocultural setting to open up and adapt to the fact that people radically different from them are also a part of the world they live in. Was she dreaming a dream meant to teach skills for interacting with an other? (By other I mean anything we consider to be other, either socially or ontologically.)

Then I listened to the Ouellet episode and realized it could be argued that the displaced social tension of a numerically diminishing white majority in a culturally shifting North America and Europe could be a springboard for generating hybrid dreams. From a white point of view, the aliens are definitely invading.

It all makes sense! It's in the data! 19.5