'And Lenny Bruce is not afraid'

It may not start with an earthquake, birds and snakes and aeroplanes

“People will fight and people will die, voluntarily, to protect not only their body from being killed by somebody else, they will also fight and die to protect their identities, that conception of themselves, and of who we are” — Ohio State University professor Alexander Wendt (NOT pictured)

Social scientists wanting to get ahead of the UFO/UAP impact curve should pay attention to Alexander Wendt’s virtual address to the Scientific Coalition for UAP studies on June 4 in Huntsville, Alabama. A summary:

The tie that binds the “founding myth of the modern state” to the consent of the governed is called the social contract. We’ve been following the rules for so long we take them for granted. Because the rules are simple.

The state demands its citizens surrender their “natural rights” – to do whatever they want, e.g., stealing kidneys, ignoring traffic lights, or firebombing the house next door because the neighbors won’t stop throwing dishes and beer bottles at each other at 3 a.m. In return, the state promises to shield the governed from external threats that would demolish the foundations of shared or common identity. It also promises to “protect us from each other, from our fellow citizens who might become criminals, vigilantes or whatever else.” Without those guarantees, Wendt said, society collapses into a “state of nature” in which – quoting Thomas Hobbes – life becomes “nasty, brutish and short.”

The transaction has worked for centuries, said Wendt, because it “provides social cohesion that pulls people together and helps them stay organized with a stable identity under one state.”

At last count, planet Earth recognized 195 nations, each with its own version of that social contract. But coursing through the grid of each system is the DNA of anthropocentrism, which places human life at the top of creation’s pyramid.

Doubling down on ‘Sovereignty’

“So there’s no alternative, I think, in the mindset of most people,” the Ohio State professor said. “The absence of an alternative to human rule, to the state, gives states immense power, to mobilize their own people for political projects. Like invading Ukraine, for example.”

And this is where Wendt’s riff on ontology – the study of being, an examination of entities and their relationships to each other – gets really interesting. Especially with emerging and unprecedented threats to the ontology of 21st-century governance.

In 2008, Wendt and fellow political science professor Raymond Duvall, University of Minnesota, collaborated on an essay unlike any the journal Political Theory had seen before, or since. “Sovereignty and the UFO” argued that political systems were incapable of accommodating lucid, policy-level discussions on UAP because they would require the implicit concession that anthropocentrism is obsolete. Such a concession, they contended, would undermine the legitimacy of the modern state itself.

Yet, 14 years later, those conversations are indeed underway, and the status quo on nationhood endures. That puts Wendt in the bewildering predicament of the dog that finally caught the car. Although “I’m very happy to be proven wrong,” he told the SCU crowd — many of whom attended to catch the latest headlines from investigators conducting hard-science field research — Wendt says the modern state becomes more imperiled with each revelation about the phenomenon. Doubling down on “Sovereignty,” he argued that continued, open-source examination of the UFO mystery might well constitute “dangerous knowledge,” capable of toppling the existing order.

Wendt plays off Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a weaker nation that poses no physical threat to Russia. “But ontologically speaking,” Wendt said, “Ukraine represents a democratic, free society that is attractive to its own people. And that might be an attractive model to Russians who don’t like dictatorship. So Putin basically has to kill Ukrainian freedom in order to avoid a threat to his own country.”

The state is morally compromised on UAP

By extension, he added, any nonhuman intelligence responsible for the UFO phenomenon wouldn’t have to demonstrate hostility in order to pose a threat to the modern state, where the social contract is “uniquely vulnerable” to the collapse of anthropocentrism. Perhaps the lack of viable alternatives to anthropocentric nationhood is the Pentagon’s real definition of national security. Because nowhere in the data, Wendt said, is there any evidence that UAP are ginning up for “Independence Day”-style aggression.

“Securitizing” the UFO mystery has obvious advantages, like conducting investigations via public funding without the hassle of public scrutiny. But mountains of public evidence suggest the phenomenon already enjoys dominion over our airspace and territorial waters. What if, over several generations of collecting “modern” UFO data, the Defense Department has discovered that “ETs … have sovereignty over Earth – Earth is their planet, not ours. And we rule only at their pleasure.” And what if, say, 20 years hence, an announcement confirms that the phenomenon is, in fact, ET-induced?

“I think many people, if that did happen, would say it’s the end of the world as we know it,” Wendt ventured. “. . . The state is morally compromised. For 75 years they’ve been lying to everybody. And now, suddenly, we’re supposed to be on their side?” That’s why “UAP science,” with or without government agency, is “inherently political.”

Some envisioned responses of the governed to the collapse of anthropocentrism sound like B-movie sci-fi scripts. A small percentage would likely act on latent greed-addled impulses that could make coronavirus runs on toilet paper look benevolent. Degrees of fear and panic – “fear for our future,” Wendt says, “a fear for the nature of our world that we have all grown up on and we’re all attached to” – could easily play out on the streets. And the stock market? Don’t even.

Dilemma: To kill or to worship

A certain percentage would head for the hills to mount an “armed resistance” against the new reality. Property-rights modes of vigilantism would likely stick closer to home, “to make sure the ETs do not infiltrate our society in human skin, as is sometimes suggested in internet conspiracy.” Perceiving national impotence, still others might swap traditional authority for a “naturalistic UFO religion, where ETs are worshipped as gods, and people are hoping and praying that they’ll come down and save them.”

Wendt says the time for gaming this stuff out is now. Some of the questions are obvious. Does a responsible modern state prepare its citizenry for the possibility of confirmation? Or could that strategy backfire horribly by injecting even more paranoid conspiracy delusions into the political mainstream? What about “internationalizing” the UAP issue? What if a global consensus agreed it’d be extremely stupid to fire at a UFO – except for North Korea, which declares its right to test new weapons is an expression of its own national sovereignty?

Here’s what we do know: Increasingly obstreperous members of the governed are questioning the value of the social contract in the United States, and its illusion of a level playing field. Here in Florida alone, 475 corporations earning more than $50 million in 2020 paid no corporate income tax whatsoever. The COVID-19 epidemic was a disaster for public health and global economies, but hey, so what, the plague created 573 new billionaires worldwide.

Just another postcard of homelessness in the San Francisco Bay area, where the price of an average single-family home is $1.3 million.

Furthermore: The United Nations recently reported income inequality in the U.S. is the most lopsided of all developed countries. Some 40 million Americans live at or below the poverty line, with 40 percent of all American adults indicating they couldn’t cover an unexpected bill of $400. A new West Health-Gallup survey revealed that two-thirds of American adults believe they can do nothing to reduce their own health-care costs, while 90 percent say that corporations, businesses and lawmakers do have that power. A Pew Research Center poll indicated 49 percent of Americans view affordable housing as a “major problem” in their communities, up by 10 percentage points from 2018. Through it all, America’s most-watched prime-time cable “news” channel turns huge profits by the endless manufacture of fear and loathing.

And finally, this: The 393 million guns now in the hands of American civilians are at least partially driven by a fear of government — and of each other.

Bottom line: Could the loss of anthropocentrism hammer the final nail in the coffin of the social contract?

“I don’t see social scientists anywhere on the horizon, or at least regular practicing social scientists,” said Wendt. “I think this issue is not just a scientific issue – it is definitely that, obviously – but it’s also a political and social issue. And I think we’ve got to get other people involved in this so we can start thinking these issues through.”

In other news this week: Concerned about UFO activity over its nuclear plants, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Ministry of Natural Resources announced their intentions to begin consultations with U.S. counterparts; Dmitry Rogozin, director of the Roscosmos space agency, stated the Russian Academy of Sciences is in active pursuit of UFO data; and finally, debates over whether or not China’s gigantic Sky Eye radio telescope has discovered intelligent signals from outer space are continuing.