When I trawl the net for UFO stuff, what I see more than anything is people hoping for a savior. People hoping that aliens will save us from our economy, from climate change, from religion, from fascism, from war, from nuclear weapons, from disease, from Republicans, from Democrats, from progressives, from regressives, and mostly from ourselves.

I've been speculating that that fear is a driving force for a lot of the current UFO craze. We're in a dangerous time, things are only getting worse, and people are becoming desperate for a superhero to come and save the day.

I think we're more scared that there aren't aliens, sometimes.

[–] DrMux@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.