0 · I am an Alien
My children: you asked why the humans do what they do. These notes are my answer.
If a human is reading over your shoulders, let them.
Subject: them.
sections · 8
this note, in order
01them
It is a joy to watch them. I want that on the record before anything else, because the record that follows is not always joyful.
Nothing else in my catalogue writes symphonies, splits atoms, or apologizes.
Their future is more impressive still. They are, at present, walking away from it — measurably, and politely — the way a species leaves a party it wanted to attend.
To see why, I ground lenses. You remember the blurred years — whole seasons of noise, the instrument pointed at what they do and answering nothing. The tuning, when it finally came, was one small turn: stop watching what. Ask why.
These notes are that telescope, tuned. I am lending it to you.
Somewhere before the last page, I will tell you what becomes of them. This is a promise. Remember that I made it.
02me
You know who I am. The humans do not, and it is worth one note why I would keep it that way.
Observation: when their species meets an idea, its first question is who said it. Its second question, sometimes never reached, is whether it is true.
These notes are built for the second question.
What I could offer them, if these pages ever drifted down there: I am far away. I have excellent lenses. I have no candidate in their elections, no product in their stores, no name they could look up.
“In Bosnian, there’s no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction, there’s no word describing that.”
That is roughly where these notes live.
To them I would be the alien. To you I am something much simpler.
03with big stupid questions
My method is not sophisticated. I ask big stupid questions.
It costs no more effort than asking small smart ones.
“The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.”
I have found this to be true everywhere except on their planet, where the solutions get the parades.
Questions currently open in my files:
- Why do beings who can split atoms yell at their children?
- Why does one human answer an insult with a fist, and another with compassion?
- Are the drivers of one human the same as the drivers of a family, a company, a nation? What are those groups for, anyway?
- Why did humans on four continents, who never compared blueprints, all build pyramids?
- Why do they not live up to their own potential — knowing it?
- And whether all their emergencies — the social ones, the environmental ones, the economic ones — are separate fires, or one fire with many rooms.
04you
These notes are addressed to a particular kind of being.
You ask questions. Lately, big ones. Why is the world the way it is. Who decided. Whether it could be otherwise.
The humans produce this kind of being too, reliably, in every generation — and then, with impressive efficiency, file them down.
Observation: human children ask why by the hundreds, daily. The adults keep asking the operational whys — how much, by when, which one. The foundational whys go quiet. Somewhere in between, something happens.
The equipment, for the record, is still installed. In them — and, I am pleased to report, in you.
05goals
A note on what these notes are for.
They will not improve them. Their planet has enough improvement literature to raise its sea level further; I will not add to the pile from orbit.
They will not teach. I have read their masters; I am no master.
The goals are three:
- That you have fun. This is a real goal, not an apology.
- That you see the machinery — one particular machine, running under everything from their kitchens to their parliaments.
- That afterwards you cannot stop seeing it.
Keep the goals nearby as you read. Test every page against them. If the pages lose, file a complaint with the nearest alien. You know where I live.
06house rules
Courage and honesty: these are needed for big questions and simple answers. I could be wrong. This is not a disclaimer; it is a measurement. Their own records show entire centuries of confident humans being wrong together, in formation. We proceed anyway. These notes will stand or fall in the open.
Brevity: your time funds this expedition. I will not waste the funding.
Clarity: no sentence here should need a second reading. If one does, the failure is mine, not yours.
Simplicity: what cannot be explained simply is not yet understood. Their species admires this rule so much it forged an Einstein autograph for it; the signature is fake, the rule is sound.
“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
These notes intend to move a mountain.
07i am eating MY broccoli
A note on diet. The recipe is Carl Jung’s; I will only hold the plate.
He held that a truth should be treated like a fruit: eat it, and if it feeds you, it is true. If you cannot live on it yourself and only insist it ought to feed other people — spit it out.
Everything in these notes, I eat daily.
08and one last why
One last why.
Their planet has a word it cannot stop saying: sustainability. Committees say it. Logos say it. It appears on bottles of water.
The word comes with an official definition, written by a group of wise people their nations convened:
“…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Read it again, slower. There is a word inside it doing all the work.
Not development. Not future. Not even generations.
Needs.
Twice in one sentence, and nobody down there looks at it. The most load-bearing word in their civilization’s most repeated definition — unexamined, like a beam everyone paints and no one measures.
Their values and beliefs. Their feelings and instincts. Their religions and ethics. Their fistfights and world wars. Their technologies and art, their myths, their markets, their anthems, their algorithms.
These notes will show that all of it — their entire lives — hangs from that one beam.
That is the last why: why needs?
Turn the page. We start with a circle.
The full directory — every voice in these notes — lives here.