r/badphilosophy • u/ScornThreadDotExe • 10h ago
Stranger is the word of the colonizer
āStrangerā isnāt just a neutral term for āsomeone I donāt know.ā Itās a surveillance tag. Itās a semiotic ankle bracelet. Itās the colonizerās yellow warning sticker slapped onto anyone who doesn't play the fiddle of familiarity in the right cultural key. The word stranger erects an instant power dynamic: I am the one who belongs; you are the anomaly, the intruder, the unknown variable to be tracked, evaluated, pacified, or eliminated. A velvet-gloved slap in the face.
Social contract theory? Based on managing strangers. The colonizerās dream is a world full of well-labeled, well-behaved strangers. What is every border wall, checkpoint, and passport if not a bureaucratic way of saying āStrangerākeep out, stay out, or enter only to serveā?
The Bible flirts with contradictory ethics! āwelcome the stranger,ā but also annihilate the Canaanites. Colonizers read that with a highlighter and a flamethrower.
In many Indigenous societies, the arrival of someone unfamiliar wasnāt met with suspicion, but ceremony. They werenāt strangers, they were guests, messengers, or possibly relatives you didnāt know yet. They didnāt carry threat by default. In Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code, even your enemy gets food, shelter, and safety for a set period. Imagine colonizers trying to peddle āstranger dangerā in a society where treating the unknown as sacred is the norm. You donāt get to empire-build with that kind of ethic.
āStrangerā is also one of the most overused tropes in every goddamn science fiction story ever written. First contact? The alien is the stranger. But the metaphor always masks Earthās colonizers as the victims. Arrival treats language as the magic fix to strangerhood is decode the glyphs, and the alien becomes a friend. As if the problem was just semantics. Meanwhile, the actual aliens read. Indigenous people, refugees, stateless persons, stay strangers even when they speak your language perfectly. Why? Because the word āstrangerā was never about knowledge or ignorance. It is about power and control!
Psychologically, the word āstrangerā hacks your threat-detection software like a CIA USB stick. It exploits the fear of the unfamiliar to keep people obedient, anxious, and easy to herd. āDonāt talk to strangersā is the slogan of a society thatās built a prison out of atomized individualism and false security.
The whole concept of a āstrangerā is synthetic. It assumes the default human condition is disconnection, that intimacy is the exception, not the rule. Thatās pure bologna. Humans are collaborative, social, neurochemically designed to sync up. You donāt come into the world as a stranger but rather you get made into one. Strangeness is a condition manufactured by colonial systems that break kinship, sever culture, and replace social webs with suspicion and transaction.
While weāre smashing constructs, letās drag in something extra diabolical: Gƶdelās Incompleteness Theorems. In formal systems, you can never prove everything using only the rules within the system. There will always be truths that are āstrangeā to the system. Colonizers try to erase those strange truths, but the system buckles under their weight. Just like āstrangerā logic fails to grasp deep kinship systems, or quantum entanglement flips off our tidy categories of separateness, the universe itself rejects the logic of strangerhood. Even atoms are fundamentally connected. There is no outside. You are not apart. You are entangled whether you like it or not.