One common claim made in the world of pseudoscience is that the government and mainstream science have incentives to ignore or hide evidence of aliens, nephilim, or non-human intelligences of whatever kind. These incentives include a desire to prevent mass panic, maintain control, or retain the illusion that humans are the only intelligent species in the universe.
But the military, academia, mainstream science, and the state overall have no incentive to hide any of this. In fact, finding aliens, or orcas with laptops, or buildings on the other side of the moon would confirm everything they already proclaim: that humans are just insignificant specks of dust in the universe. That we’re just animals, despite all evidence to the contrary. That we’re just amoeba. They would love nothing more than to prove this with whatever evidence they can acquire.
My ROBA Hypothesis makes a straightforward claim: human combat is mechanically different from animal combat due to its ability to utilize any weapon beyond our natural, bodily weapons, a trait I’ve coined ROBA for reciprocal, object-based aggression. Animals are firewalled from this, being forced to use their natural weapons during combat, even if they can use tools for everything else. However, humans have ROBA, meaning we lack no such firewall.
The sciences, academies, and military all seem blind to this simple mechanical difference between humans and animals, instead choosing to highlight discrepancies that have analogues in both humans and animals. They constantly undermine the idea of humans being different. The military sciences are especially complicit, claiming that human combat is just an extension of animal combat. Or worse, they believe human combat doesn’t begin until the Iron Age1, as though stones weren’t the first weapons of war. This can only be because they assume, incorrectly, that primates use them in combat, despite no evidence of this. They push a psychology that states that violence is all hormones, behavioral responses, and status-seeking, just like chimps. This ideology of the unspecial human has taken myriad forms in history: the animalitarianism of the Greeks, the unworthiness of the lowly human of the Church, the Copernican one-upsmanship of the Renaissance—when every astronomer and his mother accused his contemporaries of being “egotistical” or “haughty” for assuming earth was special, since there must be intelligent lifeforms on Mars and other planets—to the Darwinism of the 19th century—how dare we think we’re above animals—and now to the Pale Blue Dot-ism of Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson—how dare we think the earth is special?
It turns out these unspecial human ideologies are efficient at manufacturing soldiers and pushing the war effort. It makes it easy to dehumanize the enemy as an animal, as a barbarian, as less evolved. They’re good at producing monks for the sciences. All this plays on our sensitivity, just as it did with the Church: we want to be loved for being humble. Nothing worse than an egotistical man.
They add that all human culture stems from analogous animal behavior. Religion from ritual movement, language from animal calls, kinship from raw animal sex, gossip from grooming2. They try to make this connection with violence, but it’s always a messy connection, because there’s no feasible transition from animal combat to ROBA. It’s like evolving from a closed circuit to an open circuit. Without something closing the circuit—and we can’t assume it simply closes itself automatically—the circuit remains open. What’s more difficult to explain is that, if the Darwinist timeline is correct, it happened once, producing something—ROBA—which was useful enough to survive the environment and be passed on to humanity’s progeny.
And yet ROBA does not help us survive the environment. ROBA has no connection to the environment whatsoever, because ROBA is an apocalyptic relationship with all humans. How can that be useful? Its only resolution is culture: language, religion, kinship, the whole gamut. These cultural modalities are useful for surviving the environment, but they’re specifically for surviving ourselves.
And why evolve ROBA only to produce culture? Naturally, there’s no way to answer this for the sciences. It just makes no sense. So, they ignore violence. They ignore the very idea that human combat is mechanically different from animal combat. Otherwise, we humans would be too special. For some reason, they can’t fathom this. So, there’s absolutely no incentive to hide aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence of any kind.
Therefore, they maintain the lie that we’re not special, which is a very productive lie. Good for empire-building, and good cockblocking at parties, because who doesn’t love a humble scientist? Who takes only a modest amount of public money or donations, and lives by the creed that humans are just amoeba, animals, space dust? At their peril, they ignore the fact that humans universally have the capacity for ROBA, and no animal does. Animals can lean on combat to establish the pecking order, but no human society can do this sustainably. All human society is always desperately converting ROBA into culture, its mirror opposite, which can escalate to extremes so that ROBA doesn’t. The two operate off the same system of plumbing. All culture is simply an inverse of the apocalyptic human relationship.
I don’t believe this is a conspiracy, although it would be a very good one. It would make war-making very profitable and, when paired with democratic politics and mass media, practically sustainable. However, today we are far removed from ancient religion, and we’re inundated by technological society. We are naturally alienated now, atomized. We often don’t know our neighbors, and sometimes we don’t even know our own family members. This produces developmental wounds, which are no longer addressed through ancient wisdom, forcing the wounded ones to fall into the Humans Suck school of thought. They latch onto high-minded scientific doctrines—Copernicanism, Darwinism—with their scions who Peter Pan the sad children away. They have no idea what they’re talking about with violence—that violence is “animalistic” or “unspeakable”. This is a fundamentally anti-human doctrine. To them, I offer a straightforward challenge: if you believe we evolved from animals, then how did we acquire ROBA?
I don’t believe in a conspiracy to hide ROBA. But I do believe in a conspiracy to convince the world that humans are not special. It’s like a conspiracy to jump the kid with glasses: a collective wounding caused by distant fathers, manipulative mothers, and conditional love in the home, which finds its outlet in a scapegoat. These people attack those who believe humans are different, that we require a different measuring stick than planets and animals, that we need a different level of care beyond retribution, imprisonment, and silencing. The sciences, academies, and military personnel would love to see one bona fide anecdote of extra-human intelligence. Just one. They might even be conspiring to find one, or create one. Then they would have everything they need, because if they’re going to be destroyed by technological society, then you sure as hell are going down with them.
I discuss this and much more in my book If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence, which you can find on Amazon in paperback and ebook format. Also, please take some time to review it if you’ve bought it, it really helps!
