He rarely spoke with such strength. It made me cautious. He paused to face me, waiting for a question, but none came.
He went on. “There is something basic about hatred, in all its forms, which your people do not understand. There is barely any human awareness of what I will now say. This is the second law. In the strongest and simplest terms: All hatred is envy.”
“. . . All of it?”
“All of it.”
“That’s . . . hard to believe.”
“It’s not obvious, nor easy to believe, but you must understand—”
“But what does that mean?”
“It means . . . however angry or annoyed you are with someone, a deeper part of you wants to become them. In fact, the stronger the hate, the stronger the desire, the need, is.”
I was about to ask a question, but Ralph anticipated.
“Of course, most of the time, you’re not aware of this desire to become what you hate, but the desire is there, lurking unconsciously. It will satisfy itself one way or another.”
This claim, the second law, has bothered me deeply. If there is one claim that has haunted me, it is this: All hatred is envy. When Ralph first said it, I laughed.
“Ralph . . . This is getting too abstract.”
“Look, let’s say someone attacks you, hits you—what is your natural response?”
“To hit back, to retaliate,” I said.
“Exactly. You are attacked, you hate it, and so you attack back, thereby becoming what you hate. Revenge is mainly a desire for symmetry. Let me ask you: when a child is a bully and attacks his peers on the playground, what’s the most likely explanation?”
“Probably being bullied at home.”
“Right. The child is bullied at home, hates it, then repeats the behavior with his peers. He’s becoming what he hates. It’s the second law in action.”
“All right . . . but that’s a small amount of evidence for an extraordinary claim. Hate and envy are just too different.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It just doesn’t feel right,” I said. “I mean, hate just feels different than envy.”
“It just doesn’t feel right,” Ralph said, whining in a squeaky little girl’s voice. “I mean, hate just feels different than envy.”
“Why are you being an ass?”
“Markus, I am being an ass, but you’re being slow. Don’t you get it? Do you see what just happened?”
“. . . Oh,” I said, embarrassed.
“Mockery—more specifically, parody—is a phenomena present in all intelligent life in the universe. It’s also obvious evidence for the second law. Someone says something that annoys you, so you repeat it. Someone angers you, and so you imitate them. When you mock someone you hate, you satisfy, to a degree, this desire to become what you hate.”
“That’s superficial,” I said. “You’re not really becoming what you hate. You’re just acting. It’s only imitation.”
“On my planet, there is a saying: ‘imitation is the sincerest form of hate.’”
I smiled. “So anything we hate . . . We also want to become?”
“Yes. Think about it like this: Whatever you resist in one context, you must embrace in another. Ask yourself: What do you hate?”
“Okay, I hate . . . untruth. I hate lies, lying, being wrong. As a scientist, I prefer truth. I think humans, in general, are becoming more truthful, or at least, more scientific.”
“Of course, you still lie sometimes,” Ralph said.
“Of course, but, you need to tell me how my disdain for lying . . . is really some sort of envy. That I have some deeper desire for lies that I don’t recognize. I don’t see it.”
“You don’t see it . . . so . . . have you seen any good movies lately? Read any good books lately?”
“Oh . . .”
“Exactly. As much as humans try to avoid falsehood, you embrace it in the fiction of novels and movies. As much as you hate being wrong and being lied to, you love to immerse yourselves in good fiction, to believe the story you know is false.”
“I feel like an idiot,” I said.
“Well . . . maybe you are,” he said with a laugh.
“Thanks . . .”
“Markus, it was just a friendly insult.”
“Oh well, fuck you too then.”
“Sorry, bad joke, but humor is a good source of fiction. Just like your movies and books, your humor will also progress.”
“Is that another joke?”
“No. Advanced civilizations require advanced forms of humor.”
“. . . Have your people ever encountered a more advanced alien civilization?”
“Only once.”
“So . . . What happened?”
“We were lucky they didn’t cause more damage. It is not a pleasant story, and there are more important things to discuss.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“. . . Very well, then,” Ralph said, flashing golden for a tiny moment. “We discovered them by accident. They were studying us, but in secret. Obviously, we wanted to learn something from them, so what do you think we did?”
“You asked them about their technology or answers to difficult scientific questions.”
“No. We knew the dangers of receiving advanced knowledge. Instead, we humbly asked if they could share some humor with us.”
“You asked them for jokes . . .”
“Yes, and we were scared, because we knew their jokes must be extremely advanced. But, we were polite, and we begged them for just one great joke. After much deliberation on their part, they agreed to tell a joke to one, and only one, of our people. They demanded our greatest expert in the field of comedy, and they told him a single joke. The joke took over two Earth years to communicate . . .”
“Two . . . years . . .”
“It was the largest joke any of my people ever dared comprehend.”
“. . . What happened?”
“Sadly, the joke was not safe. Our expert was unable to communicate it, as he was unable to stop laughing. The more advanced beings apologized profusely, while laughing hysterically, and vanished. We later calculated that by the time he stops laughing, we will have caught up to the level of civilization of those who told him the joke.”
“That’s unbelievable,” I said, astonished.
“It should be, because I’m completely fucking with you. Ha!”
With my red face, I watched Ralph’s glow grow golden.
“How long have you been waiting to tell that joke?” I said.
“Since before you were born . . . but, we really need to get back on track,” he said. “Now, do you understand the second law?”
“Well, I understand it, but I don’t really believe it.”
“Then ask me a question,” he said, and I thought for a minute.
“Does the second law imply that becoming what you hate is . . . inevitable?”
“In the long term, one way or another: yes. Humans fail to recognize it, because your lives are so short. But as you figure out your genetics and prolong your lives, what I’m saying will become glaringly obvious.”
“Well . . . That’s probably the most awful thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Don’t overinterpret this. You don’t become exactly what you hate. It’s more complicated than that. There are ways to mitigate this.”
“Maybe, but still—”
“Don’t be pessimistic. Obviously, you can also become what you love. It happens every day: people fulfill their dreams. This is no secret.”
“Of course . . . but . . . If becoming what you hate is inevitable, how is becoming what you want even possible? I’m sorry, Ralph . . . This is too much.”
“Then why are you asking all the right questions?” he said.
“My mind is a swamp of questions.”
“There is a special answer to your concern. In fact, it is the third law.”
I hadn’t yet wrapped my mind around the second law, but he told me nonethel
ess.
“Simply put,” Ralph said, “you must become what you hate, in order to become what you love. In order to become what you want to, you have to become what you don’t. It is simple.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“No. This should be obvious. How can you not see this?”
“This is too abstract . . . If you could give me some examples—”
“There’s no shortage of examples. You know who Tony Hawk is, right?”
“Yes. He’s some extreme roller skater.”
“No. He’s a skateboarder, one of the best on your planet. How do you not know this? Anyway, when he was younger, learning to skateboard, he had so many bruises and went to the hospital so many times, the doctors suspected his parents of child abuse.”
I got the point, but Ralph made it explicit.
“Clearly, typically, when you want to become something, you are going to have to fail, numerous times, in order to accomplish the goal. Typically, the greater the goal, the more failure you will suffer in attaining the goal. Thus, you must become what you hate, in order to become what you love.”
“Oh, OK. If that is what you are saying, that sounds reasonable.”
“Good. But do you understand why this is true?”
I looked at him with a blank face.
He said, “The ego must constantly keep itself in check, to prevent itself from getting too big. If you suddenly attained some goal, without failing beforehand, your ego would be oversized. It is all the failure, beforehand, which allows your ego to accept the accomplishment without blowing out of proportion and making you . . . well, an obnoxious douche bag.”
I nodded.
He went on, “What often happens, when you have a big success, as a human?”
“You celebrate?”
“Exactly, and what happens at these celebrations?”
“Well . . . you have a party, people loosen up, they drink, dance . . .”
“That is what I mean. You loosen up, and you get drunk. The function of alcohol is to help you to become what you hate. To help you become what you normally resist.”
“Well, okay, when we drink, we give in to urges we normally resist. That’s no secret,” I said, flexing my sore knuckles.
“Your urge to embarrass yourself is like your urge for sex. Humans are only starting to cope with both. It is both hilarious and horrifying that you can’t show a pretty boob on prime-time TV, and yet violence is allowed.”
“You really find it horrifying?”
“. . . Are you really asking or joking?” Ralph said with a shiver.
“I’m asking.”
Ralph quickly looked over at the barracks, looked away, and burst out a second-long scream, the kind he blared in the Oval Office. No doubt, Lieutenant Barber heard it at his post.
“YES, YES, YES, YES, YES,” Ralph yelled in repetition while my hearing returned.
“Ralph, stop. I heard you. Don’t fucking do that. I can barely hear.”
Ralph paused and said, “I’m sorry. I thought you understood, but I assumed too much. My people have zero inhibitions about sex. We’re like Bonobos. But violence . . . that is where humans are more . . . psychologically mature.”
I was soothed to hear this.
He continued, “Just talking about violence is embarrassing for us. We talk about it in private sometimes, but talking about it in public . . . That just doesn’t happen. I’ve heard that on the Internet—the Internet on my planet—there are perverted websites where people can watch violent movies—”
“How are your people so nonviolent? You never get violent urges during angry disagreements?”
“No. The most mature thing we can do is scream,” Ralph said shyly. “Sometimes we just freeze up and black out. The first time I learned about violence—it was awful. My parents gave me the talk.”
“The talk?”
“I mean, just as human parents have to explain sex, our parents have to tell us what the Kardashians did to our planet . . .”
He started to tremble. I reached out to steady him.
“Maybe there is something else we should talk about,” I said.
“No. This is important. Because the Kardashians gained our technology too early, it ruined their development as a species. They didn’t fail enough to earn this technology, and now they are failing all over the galaxy to make up for it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s like . . . so many of your child actors. They are way too young, have barely suffered or failed at all, and suddenly they are millionaires because of some popular movie. Their ego blows up, and the mind must compensate, so they begin to fail—hard. They get involved with drugs, risky sex, all sorts of failures, and it is because they gained something they barely worked for, barely failed for.”
“So that’s why many rich kids end up spoiled. But they don’t all end up spoiled . . . Why is that?”
“Good parenting,” Ralph said coldly.
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
I expected Ralph to respond, but he paused and looked up at the sky. While I stared at Ralph in the silence, my mind wandered back to the second law. The claim that all hatred is envy still bothered me. I wanted to find a counterexample.
“What about death?”
“Go on,” he said, glowing brighter.
“Death is ugly, undesirable, something we want to distance ourselves from. And so, if all hatred is really envy, then I should secretly have some desire to become dead, right?”
“That’s right.”
“But where’s the evidence? I mean, how are we satisfying this desire to become dead? By doing risky things with our lives—risking death? People don’t risk their lives that often. That’s way too weak. I don’t buy it.”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“It is astonishing,” he said. “You really don’t see it, do you?”
“Just tell me.”
Instead of responding, Ralph made a long, drawn-out noise. It sounded like a lion slowly roaring or a motorboat sinking under water.
“What are you doing?” I asked, annoyed.
“I’m trying to imitate the sound of snoring.”
“I’m boring you?”
“Dear Lord. Markus, you make me wish I had a face and a palm. You are so unreceptive. Is it that mysterious?”
“Oh . . .”
Ralph laughed.
“Sleep is a way to satisfy the desire to become like death?” I asked.
“Exactly. The resemblance between sleep and death is obvious.”
“Wait,” I said, realizing a basic concern, “infants sleep. Are newborns afraid of death? They don’t know about it. Death isn’t even a thought in their heads.”
“Of course, but eventually, they grow and fear death. They will grow up and learn to fear and hate death just like everyone else, and sleep will already be there for them. Evolution has already chosen this mechanism, this mechanic of sleep, to satisfy this deeper need. You will never understand genetics until you understand how you inherit methods to become what you hate.”
“That just sounds . . . That’s crazy,” I said. Ralph sensed I was overwhelmed and let me rest for a minute.
“Did you know that humans are actually paralyzed for a period of time while they sleep? Your muscles freeze up during REM sleep, much like rigor mortis,” Ralph said.
“You’re unbelievable. There’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for that. It’s to prevent us from moving our limbs when we dream. I mean, if I’m dreaming about swimming, I don’t want to be waving my arms around in my bed. I could hurt myself.”
Ralph’s glow went red. “How about once, just once, you respect the fact that I’m from an advanced civilization? And that maybe—just maybe—I know a hell of a lot more than you?”
Our argument ended when my phone vibrated. I only had to look at my watch to know what Francis was calling for.
00:02:01
00:02:00
00:01:59
“Go,” Ralph said.
“You’re not coming?”
“It would be too painful to watch.”
Ralph lay down in the grass and looked up at the night.
Within the hour, members of SETI would sip nervous glasses of champagne at their headquarters in Mountain View, California. But before the bottles were dry, a distraught director of SETI research, whom I never met, would send me an e-mail with a single sentence.
‘You were right,’ he wrote, then went home and put a gun in his mouth.
XXX
TRANSMISSION
I left Ralph alone and answered my phone as I moved swiftly back to the barracks.
A door slammed on Francis’s end of the line.
“Tell Ralph I don’t want any more fucking surprises.”
“Ralph’s not with me. He stayed outside.”
“You just tell Ralph. Any more surprises and I will completely reevaluate our relationship. And tell him to answer his goddamn phone when I call.”
I stepped to the upper floor of the barracks and looked at the countdown on the TV.
00:00:10
00:00:09
00:00:08
“And why is Ralph not with you?”
“He said it would be disturbing.”
00:00:02
00:00:01
00:00:00
The numbers on the screen faded, and an empty white room appeared. Shadows in the room vanished when focused upon, and the overbearing light hid features one tried to discern.
Then I saw something I was not prepared for, something I had never imagined. What I saw made me doubt every warning given in the Oval Office. Every prejudice I ever had about aliens was already shattered, but what I saw on that screen swept up the shards and threw them out the window.
It was the queen. And she was beautiful.
When those dark purple eyes fluttered open, there was no doubt.
“Hello.”
Her greeting was so compelling I had to resist the urge to respond. I put my hand over my mouth and closed my eyes, questioning my mental control.
The Book of Ralph Page 16