We Were Always Afraid

This is not gonna be an AI piece. This blog has been all about AI music for the most part , yes, but the actual reason I made all this was to give me some room to expand on some of the topics that bother me and to give me another outlet to write about the topics I write lyrics about.  And this...this has been bothering me for a long time. So strap on, because if you've ever wondered why I wrote the song "Aliens", your gonna understand in a few minutes.

Now...There is a question that appears in the news, on the borders of every continent really, in the language politicians use when they talk about people crossing lines on maps...and... It's not really a political question, although politics has claimed it. It's older than that. It's the question of what we do when someone arrives who isn't like us - who comes from somewhere else, for reasons we don't fully understand, needing things we may not want to give.

The answers humanity keeps giving aren't random. They follow a pattern so consistent across time and geography that it starts to feel less like a series of choices and more like a default setting. Fences. Labels. Camps. Dehumanizing language. Fear, served warm and daily by those who profit from it. And then, eventually, history's verdict - usually delivered after the people who were afraid are dead - that the fear was wrong.

There is a movie I often recall when I think about this. Neil Blomkamp's District 9 - shot in Johannesburg in 2009, the same year a real wave of xenophobic violence was convulsing South Africa as Zimbabwean refugees arrived by the thousands. Blomkamp didn't invent the metaphor. He just made it impossible to look away from. In the film, stranded extraterrestrials are forced into a slum, dehumanized with a slur - "Prawns" - and eventually subjected to forced relocation by a corporation that sees them as a resource problem to be managed. The alien refugees ask for almost nothing. What they receive is everything we've historically given the people we fear.

Now...what I want to do here isn't just make a political argument. I want to trace why this pattern exists, where it comes from, whether any of it is by deliberate design, and what it would actually look like if the premise of District 9 became real. Because I think if you follow those threads closely, you arrive somewhere uncomfortable about what we are as a society - and what we've been taught to be.

Your Brain Is 200,000 Years Old

Soooo...The instinct to fear the outsider didn't start with governments or propaganda. It is actually encoded in the architecture of the human brain - a product of evolutionary pressure so ancient it predates writing, agriculture, and the concept of a border by roughly 195,000 years. Understanding that isn't an excuse for what that instinct produces in the modern world, but...It's the necessary starting point for understanding why the instinct is so durable, and why it gets weaponized so easily.

Evolutionary psychologists Tooby and Cosmides argue that humans carry behavioral traits calibrated for a world that no longer exists - our deep preference for sugar, our startle reflex, and our in-group bias all made sense 200,000 years ago. Strangers in that world weren't immigrants seeking asylum. They were potential threats who carried unfamiliar pathogens, competed for scarce resources, and might raid your camp. The cost of trusting the wrong outsider was catastrophic. The cost of mistrusting a harmless one was social awkwardness. Evolution, cold and uninterested in fairness, selected for the reflex that made us ...yeah, survive essentially.

But here is the critical caveat - one that gets buried when politicians weaponize any evolutionary argument: the existence of this wiring doesn't mean we're helpless against it. Sociologists Peterie and Neil, writing in the Journal of Sociology, point out that xenophobic attitudes vary wildly across time and culture - they intensify during crises and when political and media discourse actively stokes fear. If xenophobia were a hard biological constant, you'd expect it everywhere, equally, always. You don't get that. You get something that surges in predictable conditions. Which is intresting because this also means that someone/ something is pulling levers.

Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford biologist and neurologist, documented something particularly revealing: when subjects watched a hand being poked with a needle, they showed stronger sensorimotor responses when the hand belonged to someone they perceived as in their group. The brain literally processes out-group pain differently. Less. And critically - the stronger the in-group bias, the more pronounced the effect. This is not metaphorical. It is measurable, neurological, and scalable. If you can persuade someone that a group of people are sufficiently "other," you can reduce the physiological empathy response their brain generates. That's not a political strategy. That's a feature of human neurology that political strategy has learned to exploit.

The Script Doesn't Change

If the biology is ancient, the political exploitation of it has a remarkably consistent paper trail. You can read the same structure - a destabilized economy, an out-group designated as the cause, a leader who profits from the designation - in centuries of history with only the names replaced. The mechanism is that stable.

Fear Is a Market

There is a point where the question "why are humans like this?" has to give way to a harder question: who benefits from humans staying like this? Because the evolutionary explanation - that in-group bias is ancient hardwiring - doesn't fully account for the modern infrastructure that exists specifically to activate, amplify, and monetize it.

Political scientist Corey Robin, in his intellectual history Fear: The History of a Political Idea, traces a consistent argument across Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Arendt: fear, when systematically deployed, allows governments to justify policies that the population would otherwise reject. You don't need people to agree that a policy is good. You just need them to believe that the alternative is catastrophic. The fear comes first. The policy is sold as the solution. I'm sure you've seen this in action.

Academic research on European and American migration politics identifies three primary mechanisms used to manufacture anti-immigrant sentiment: cultural erosion (they're changing who we are), economic threat (they're taking what's ours), and security risk (they're dangerous). Researchers note that political figures including Trump, Orbán, and Le Pen have deployed all three consistently, despite their lack of evidential support. The narratives are not primarily descriptive. They are strategic. They exist because they work - electorally, economically, and in the media.

Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine provides the structural complement to Robin's political history: crises - real or manufactured - create conditions where populations in a state of collective shock accept policies they would otherwise reject. Klein argues that this is not incidental to political strategy; ... it actually IS the strategy. A border "crisis" - even one that the data shows is smaller than advertised, driven by people fleeing wars partially created by the countries now closing their doors - creates the preconditions for hardened policy, expanded security spending, and the consolidation of political power around whoever positions themselves as the protector. Client of mine was visiting the office the other day. He's Italian and had a story that sort of struck me, since i was writing this piece. He said that per capita Italy has one of the lowest murder rates in Europe ...worldwide even, yet....watching the news. You would be forgiven to think, that the country imagens itself to be in a state of constant civil war.

District 9 Isn't Science Fiction

Back to Neil Blomkamp! He shot District 9 in Johannesburg in 2008. While filming, I mentioned in the beginning of this piece there as real xenophobic violence erupting across the city. Zimbabweans arriving by the thousands were being attacked by South Africans who blamed them for unemployment and crime. The same people whose parents or grandparents had been the designated out-group under apartheid were now doing the designating. The logic had transferred, not ended and yeah let's leave it at that... before someone even mentions Israel/Palestine.

Academic analyses of the film published in the IAPSS Journal of Political Science describe how Blomkamp uses Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" concept to explain the behavior of his bureaucratic villain Wikus van de Merwe - an eviction officer who does not consider himself cruel. He files paperwork. He follows procedure. He does not ask whether the procedure is moral. Arendt's original argument, made in response to Adolf Eichmann's trial, was that atrocity does not require monsters. It requires ordinary people doing their jobs without thinking about what their jobs are doing.

One scholar at Project MUSE summarizes it sharply: "xenophobia transcends eras, borders, and races in District 9, as an ultimate lesson from Blomkamp to avoid errors of the past." The film isn't about aliens. It is, as multiple academic sources confirm, about the consistent human architecture of othering - the same architecture that produced apartheid, the same that produced the 2008 Johannesburg attacks, the same that produces the migration politics of contemporary Europe and America. Blomkamp just made it legible by making it literal. I tried to do something similar in my track Aliens (attached to this post).

What If They Actually Landed

Okay, so I want to do something here that I think is....maybe useful: Let's take the District 9 premise seriously as a thought experiment. Not as satire. Not as allegory. As a real scenario - and ask, rigorously, what would actually happen. Because I think the answer is more honest and more sobering than most people want to sit with.

Imagine: tomorrow, a ship of extraterrestrial origin enters Earth's atmosphere. It doesn't fire. It doesn't transmit threatening communications. It stalls - systems failing - and comes to rest over a major city. Eventually, we get inside. The inhabitants are alive. They are not like us. They are clearly intelligent. And they are clearly, by every indicator we can read, in distress. They didn't come to conquer. They came because they had no other option.

The thought experiment is uncomfortable because it reveals that the problem isn't the unknowability of the alien. It's the consistency of the human response to anything classified as radically other. The Prawns in District 9 are ultimately a stand-in for every population that has ever arrived somewhere desperate and been processed by the machinery of fear rather than the machinery of humanity. The extraterrestrial framing just strips away the ability to use racial, cultural, or national familiarity as a partial exemption from the logic.

The Monster Was Always Inside

There's a line from my own song - one I keep coming back to - that puts the whole thing in the simplest terms I've found: what if the real invaders were we? It's not a rhetorical question. It's an analytical one. When you trace the history of what happens at borders, at camps, at the edges of belonging, the primary source of violence is almost never the arriving population. It is the system the arrived-at population built to process them.

This doesn't make the fear unreal. The evolutionary roots are real. The economic anxiety that gets redirected toward migrants is real. The sense of cultural change is real. Psychologists confirm that xenophobia is not a personality defect limited to bad people - it's a distributed vulnerability that operates across a spectrum in almost everyone, activated by conditions of insecurity and amplified by consistent messaging. That's not a defense of it. It's the thing you need to know if you want to counter it rather than just condemn it.

What is less excusable and what moves from evolutionary artifact into moral territory, is the deliberate cultivation of that fear by people who understand exactly what they're activating. The politician who knows that the "invasion" framing is false but uses it because it works. The media system that treats fear as a reliable engagement driver. The corporate interest that profits from the detention infrastructure built to manage the people that fear has been persuaded to reject. The evolutionary predisposition is old and dumb. The system built on top of it is modern and intentional.

District 9 ends... as it must, being honest and without resolution. The Prawns are still in the camp. Wikus van de Merwe is somewhere in the ruins, having become what he feared, having been stripped of everything he was by a system that treated both him and the beings he once evicted as expendable. Blomkamp doesn't offer a solution because there isn't a clean one. There is only the question, held up to the audience at the end of two hours: knowing what you now know about how this works, about what the fear produces and who profits from it ... what will you do with it?

I don't think the answer is simple. But I do think the question has to be asked. Not with the comfort of blaming the people who are afraid - many of whom have real reasons for insecurity that just happen to have been pointed at the wrong target. But with the clarity to recognize a mechanism when it's operating, and to ask whose interests it serves when you can't think clearly about the person who just crossed a line on a map, desperate, carrying nothing, asking for somewhere to land.