Pavel Vlasov THE MEANING OF THE APPEARANCE AND BEHAVIOR OF THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL HUMANOID http://resist.gothic.ru/english/alien.html The typical appearance of a humanoid extraterrestrial - that is, the image usually portrayed by the writers of tabloids and comic books, the designers of nightclubs and T-shirts, and popular filmmakers - represents the self-image of mass society.
The slenderness and suggested delicacy of the humanoid's physical form expresses the anticipation of humanity's liberation from the need for manual labor. Under capitalism, this condition is available only to the children of the bourgeois and the lumpen elements of society, and not to the middle class, which is the primary consumer of commercial UFO mythology. The arrival of the humanoid, who long ago surpassed the need for physical effort, suggests that freedom from work is a genuine possibility for everyone, and is thus being eagerly anticipated by the consumers of the spectacle. Along with this positive feeling, however, is their fear of the alien, which is the result of an association of the delicate humanoid form with their dislike of feminity, womanhood, intellectuals, bohemians and others who, according to the majority, "shirk useful work", and who are perceived as being physically weak. What is frightening and jaundicing the majority in artistic and literary Bohemian, the same - but with regard to UFOs pilots "who are ahead of us in evolution" is equal to subconscious self identification, to the status of an unattainable but still - an ideal.
The reduced, almost nonexistent lower jaw of the humanoid symbolizes the resolution of the problem of sustenance. Although the price of food is not the costliest element in the household budget of the average citizen in our time of mondialism (the expense of taxes and legal services usually costing much more), food still remains the metaphor for self-sufficiency, and hunger is the primary metaphor for an individual's economic failure. This notion is clearly inherited by urban society from its roots in agrarian times. By examining the masses' attitude toward food and the individual's ability to acquire it, we can see to what extent we are removed from the norms of the traditional world, in which food was tied to an eternal sense of law, custom, and ritual, which in turn maintained the relationship of society to its sacred calendar, and the allegory of the cosmic cycle.
Thus, the lack of a jaw in the humanoid is evidence of a liberation from the burden of physical nourishment. The details of this liberation are left unknown to us. Often we are told that the humanoids feed themselves through some sort of injection or concentrate - in other words, through particularly terrestrial methods of food substitution. The humanoid, then, has completely destroyed any connection it once had to the rhythms and structure of traditional life.
The large eyes of the humanoid, equal in size to spectacles, convey the idea that this ideal being is all-seeing. The eyes suggest the acquisition of vast amounts of information, while their nearly complete lack of ears indicates that other means of communication besides sound have been developed. One can make the association between this and the fact that more than half of the inhabitants of cities in the United States are subject to chronic and neurotic disorders and depression, resulting from the massive amount of chaotic noise to which they are continually exposed, literally haunting these people in the streets, in their offices or at home.
The enormous skull of the humanoid reflects the middle classes' superficial concept of the intellect as something situated in the brain - that is, the evolution of the humanoid literally "deflated the body and inflated the brain." Opposing this is the traditional doctrine of the genuine intellect, which is closer to intuition than reason, and is embodied in the heart rather than the head. By association are those treated and imprisoned in special clinics, the mega- and hydrocephals, who should be seen as the closest relatives of the large-headed extraterrestrials.
The three fingers of the humanoid refer to the modern world's love affair with automation, with the three fingers bing ideally suited to operate the computer "mouse" and other such instruments.
The asexuality of the humanoids parodies the androgyny of the overman, and relieves the humanoid from the customary responsibility of an individual to his sexual instincts, which drives our motion not only along the horizontal plane of society, but also along the vertical plane of metaphysics, in which the sexual act parallels and prepares one for the reconciliation of opposing concepts. It was certainly the appeal of the humanoid ideal among fashion designers of the 1980s which brought into fashion the unisex form. The recognition of one's sex as a part of defining oneself is no longer necessary in the "more perfect" civilization of the slender, colorless, dwarf-like humanoids.
>From the perspective of the class struggle, the humanoids have been begotten
by a social paradox: capitalist relations can only exist provided that the
majority (which, in the economic sense, is not the bourgeois) sees itself
and the world in a bourgeois fashion; i.e., it must perceive the extrinsical
world using the same rules which also govern society's dissemination of
information. Even in such a zombified state, people cannot but feel the gap
between the ideals implanted into them and the real character of their
social life. Therefore, the humanoids have become the religion of the
manipulated masses. Therefore, the humanoids have become the religion of the
manipulated masses but not the elite, the humanoids - are a perverted
projection of their own self-image, "an ideal one" and a simultaneous
ascertaining/verification of Utopism, impossibility to implement this idea
in class society.
The geography of the spread of the humanoid ideal is extremely interesting. The leaders in this sphere are, as one can easily guess, the United States, then the English-speaking nations, then the Germanic nations (including Scandinavia), and, finally, Eastern Europe. UFOs almost never land in the Third World - only in the most westernized, americanized zones. They never appear where the native, authentic, traditional symbols and customs are practiced, and where the people are still in touch with their healthy collective unconscious. They have no need for the substitutes prepared by the agents of the mass media, Hollywood and the psychoanalytic section of the CIA. In Russia, as well as in other countries with a socialist past, the arrival of the humanoid occurs simultaneously with the peak of cultural westernization; i.e., with the moment when the mondialist standards of behavior and world-view are most popular. The great popularity of UFOs and extraterrestrials occurred during the period of 1987-92, which corresponds precisely to the period of general americanomania.
The expectation of meeting the aliens, or "contact," and of receiving gifts from them takes the place of the desire to plan changes in personal, as well as social life. There exists also the negative side of the aliens: they kidnap us, put us into trances, implant strange devices in the body, artificially impregnate women, and leave scars on people's bodies while their victims are completely oblivious to the contact. In these stories, we see the releasing of the zombified mass man's repressed sadism and sexual pathology, which occurs as a result of the betrayal of sexual, national and religious archetypes. Accordingly, the humanoids assume the function of retribution and punishment once occupied by God. Their inhuman, sterile, and scientific atrocity is a kind of confession by the law-abiding Philistines of their guilt of complicity in the legitimization of a sterile way of life, supported by their exploitation of the Earth and their fellow men, their betrayal of the old truths, and their sinful ways of life. This means that the laboratory and the accompanying cold cruelty of the humanoids in modern commercial mythology can be seen as a form of mass penitence, and a latent admission of their own comfort-obsessed transgressions.
However, this imaginary civilization is not completely lodged in modern times, for antiquity, together with its majestic memorials (the pyramids of Palenke and Giza, Stonehenge, the idols of Easter Island, and the calendars in the Naska desert) is also appropriated by the extraterrestrials. Due to the feverish activity of Erich von Daniken, the German popularizer of ancient UFO visits, it has become common in mass culture to consider our inability to rationalize the achievements of antiquity as evidence of "contact." Thus, the humanoid becomes not only the unachievable ideal, the instrument of divine vengeance and of a cosmopolitan, ersatz brand of mysticism, but is also a being who explains and incarnates the various nations' sense of the greatness of their ancient past, in some cases even becoming a "common ancestor" who makes its skeptical descendants answer for their crimes.
In cartoons, films, comics, computer games, and in the headlines of the tabloids, the use of the humanoid as a therapeutic agent - as the judge and as a source of knowledge - is mixed with the idea of the happy patient cured from the maladies of modernity. The humanoid becomes a place for modern man to transfer and redeem his sense of shame at what exists around him, his sense of failure to become a full-fledged bourgeois, and his secret wish for punishment as he imagines the humanoids punishing his neighbors and co-workers, so much like himself, and who also serve as reminders of his own insignificance, nominalism, and absurdity.
Thousands of patients who appear outwardly to be quite normal in daily life will confess, under hypnosis, to have had experiments performed on them by the humanoids, causing them to fall completely under the aliens' control. This can hardly be anything else but a projection of their knowledge that they are living a marionette's existence, and that they are being subjected to total victimization by a conspiracy of manipulators; i.e., those who really meet the parameters of the humanoid - asexuality, cold rationality, slenderness of form, automation, omniscience and cruelty - those who do not use them as cheap myths, but who actually live these qualities as their self-willed identity.
The most hopeless cases, who end up in psychiatric clinics, lying on beds in the dimly-lit private offices of well-paid analysts, will recite the markings on their spacecraft, the names of the constellations they come from, and their plans for the forthcoming occupation of Silicon Valley. These unfortunate wretches identify themselves completely with the "higher type" of humanoids. They no longer recognize the distance between the ideal and the real, and stop desiring to escape from the boundaries of spectacular society, and thus become actors in their own lives.
When man stopped working toward his own self-deification, stopped striving for the attainment of greater wisdom, and ceased to think of himself as something divine, he gradually gave up on the organic realities of sex, class, nation, language and so forth, embarking on the path toward mass culture's idea of himself as a mere cog in a machine. These lower types of people did not appear in our world until the crowds contused by television had not filled it with cold blood of "belief". Becoming like it, they bring it into existence, and consequently, when the day finally arrives that they will not be able to distinguish an image from reality, we will see a real landing of humanoids in the streets by the cinemas, tabloids and corporate offices. It is then that the Last Ones - those who did not surrender, who instead became guerilla warriors - will at last taste the meat of the humanoids.
Translation: Vladislav Ivanov Proof-reading: Berney Manson
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