Alien Clay

The base unit of life is all life.

We could have obliterated the very mind of the world in our search for builders who were just like us.

I want to tell him it’s not alien mind control. That you can still be yourself, even as you become a part of something greater.

The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.

Empathy is a hole that lets the rain in. That’s how they get us.

That kind of game-theory thinking only works if you treat the people around you as resources and dead weight. If you assume the natural unit of survival is one individual, and not the group.

Having someone else to lean on isn’t a thing anyone should be ashamed of.

You hear “survival of the fittest” and imagine evolution like a boxing match, where the last champ left in the ring takes the belt. What makes you “fittest” isn’t being bigger and stronger than everything else. It isn’t even necessarily being better at any given thing than everything else. Because you need everything else. That’s how biology works.

Sometimes you go through your whole life not rocking the boat and they throw you over the side anyway. Any oppressive system needs an element of arbitrary punishment just to keep people properly on their toes.