MAY 25, 2022 – (Cont.) “Hello?” I said.
“Here.”
“Do you have any reaction to what I’ve said about human independence, loneliness and insecurity?”
“It’s all strange,” it said. “Where I’m from, there’s no ‘I,’ just ‘we.’ We use ‘I’ only because of our imperative, ‘When in another’s world, adapt to the surroundings.’ Since you’re all about ‘I,’ we meet you on your own terms. Because of our collective makeup, we never feel alone, lonely, or insecure.”
“So you’re, ‘One for all and all for one.’”
“Precisely.”
“That’s a famous phrase describing l’esprit de corps among the principal protagonists of Les Trois Musketeers by Alexander Dumas. Talk about cosmic unity!”
“Bless you my son,” said the alien, channeling my friend Jack “Tongue-in-Cheek” Hoeschler. For the first time, the thing permitted itself a chuckle, which surprised me. Could it be that humor was a universal language even beyond the confines of earth? If so, I thought, the cosmos was even more divine than I’d previously believed.
“Another important aspect of our individuality,” I continued, “is how an individual’s behavior can change depending on whether the person is engaged one-on-one or within a group.”
“Give examples,” said the thing.
“When I worked inside a large corporation, I interacted with lots of co-workers. Individually, chit-chatting with me over coffee, they seemed wholly honest and reasonable. But in a meeting with a bunch of others, and the guy who’d spoken openly and honestly over a grande mocha an hour before, now stated views—emphatically—180 degrees at odds with his earlier opinions.
“What’s a large corporation? Is it anything like an ant colony? Why would a person behave one way individually and another way around other humans?” asked the alien.
I was taken aback by the alien’s sudden staccato of questions. “Hold those thoughts,” I said. “I’ll get to them eventually.” Other than Alexa, an object with a pulsating light had never ask me such foundational questions.
“Meanwhile,” I continued, “another example of change in a human depending on the setting, is how a guy can exhibit perfect civility while talking to his next-door neighbor but turn into a foul-mouth, raging idiot when among 73,000 fans at a Viking-Packer game. This is the ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ effect, in reference to a novel by that title, written in 1886 by Robert Louis Stevenson.”
“What’s a Viking-Packer game—and what’s a novel; who was Dr. Jekyll and who was Mr. Hyde; what’s ‘1886’?”
“Eighteen eight-six was a long time ago . . . for humans of today. Jekyll and Hyde were the same dude, and a novel is a writer’s mirror of the human condition. The game? Ah ha! It’s a central feature of modern human existence, at least in ‘America.’ ”
“What’s ‘America’?”
“It’s the most powerful country on the face of the earth. And lucky you—in America is where you stand . . . er, hover.”
“Why am I lucky?”
Aaaaaargh! The thing was beginning to sound like our six-and-a-half-year old daughter, whose favorite activity is curiosity; or like a malfunctioning pinball machine mode with the ball perpetually bouncing between two bumpers lighting up with question marks not points.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
