Metahuman

Francisco Goya’s immortal print, “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos,” would — in the language of today’s young — translate to: “The sleep of reason produces metahumans.” Metahumans are an odd mixture of disparate, incongruous, and contradictory characteristics blended into a single living entity. These characteristics go to the genetic core and put to question what the word “human” now means.

The collective world view has morphed into a new unprecedented mindset. But it is wrong to think this mindset affects only the young or derives from them. The most obvious metahumans among us are not even young. They are mostly sick and elderly, but also, rich and powerful. They are certainly not millennials. To blame what we have become to the young is metaBS. The metamindset is new. But young people did not invent it. We did. And we may understand this new world view only by comparing it to times past. The old modernist world view aspired for intellectual and moralist consistency. One was either good or evil. That doesn’t work anymore. One was either conservative or radical. One was either Marxist or Capitalist, left or right, right or wrong, male or female, innocent or guilty. One either believed in God or did not. We are long past that age of dichotomies, that age of ideological purity. Nothing works like that anymore. We have all become metahumans, surviving inside meta-narratives of our disparate multi-layered and discontinuous metaverses.

My own children love DC’s The Joker. The Joker is a mental mess with green hair and bad teeth, but better than mine for their completeness. The Joker does evil acts. But he is not really evil, just unpredictable, impossible to define — different. And indeed, we can understand him only by contrast to his nemesis — The Bat — who is himself just as mentally messed-up. It might be this mental mess-up that the kids find so believable and charming, even lovable.

Where else can this metamindset occur but inside the cinematic, digital, fantasy-lands, the metaverses, our used-to-be single-world universe has become? For instance, how in the old world would it be possible for respectable humans to believe this particular hypothesis of a movie script?

Let there be the war on drugs. Let the drug problem be the country’s biggest problem, not poverty, not injustice, not inequality, not the economy, not anything else. Let this be a war like all wars. It cannot be fought unless by killing many and indiscriminately. There will be inevitable “collateral damage.” Not to worry. There will be so many deaths they will be impossible to account for and investigate. And even if they could be investigated, how could they be tried by proper courts already overheating from having too many cases to try. If anyone raises questions against this war, they must be held suspect. They must be guilty of something, all manner of perversions. Or they must be gay.

The power elite — soon to include here even the Communist Party of the Philippines — have starring roles to play. They are like all of us, metahumans.

Our role is simpler: Look the other away and do nothing; even as “our enemies” fall like so many extras under Godzilla’s humongous webbed feet, or decapitated in their thousands like so many zombies, unnamed, anonymous. Stay silent. Do not complain. Cheer if you like. After all, this meta-reality play is supposed to have a happy Hollywood ending. After we are rid of the drug problem, we will all be highly disciplined metahumans. All our problems will be solved.

And if you find this rather hard to believe, then only remember: Inside this metareality play where we now reside, nothing is impossible, nothing is real that is not delivered right at our doorsteps, wrapped in packing tape, and properly labelled.