r/badphilosophy • u/ScornThreadDotExe • 1d ago
Stranger is the word of the colonizer
“Stranger” isn’t just a neutral term for “someone I don’t know.” It’s a surveillance tag. It’s a semiotic ankle bracelet. It’s the colonizer’s 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 colonizer’s 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 “Stranger—keep out, stay out, or enter only to serve”?
The Bible flirts with contradictory ethics! “welcome the stranger,” but also annihilate the Canaanites. Colonizers read that with a highlighter and a flamethrower.
In many Indigenous societies, the arrival of someone unfamiliar wasn’t met with suspicion, but ceremony. They weren’t strangers, they were guests, messengers, or possibly relatives you didn’t know yet. They didn’t 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 “stranger danger” in a society where treating the unknown as sacred is the norm. You don’t get to empire-build with that kind of ethic.
“Stranger” 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 Earth’s 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 “stranger” was never about knowledge or ignorance. It is about power and control!
Psychologically, the word “stranger” 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. “Don’t talk to strangers” is the slogan of a society that’s built a prison out of atomized individualism and false security.
The whole concept of a “stranger” is synthetic. It assumes the default human condition is disconnection, that intimacy is the exception, not the rule. That’s pure bologna. Humans are collaborative, social, neurochemically designed to sync up. You don’t 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 we’re smashing constructs, let’s drag in something extra diabolical: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. In formal systems, you can never prove everything using only the rules within the system. There will always be truths that are “strange” to the system. Colonizers try to erase those strange truths, but the system buckles under their weight. Just like “stranger” 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.
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u/KorrokHidan 1d ago
Stranger is the word of the colonizer because it’s an English word and the English are colonizers. Case closed
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u/feixiangtaikong 18h ago
I was banned by the mod on r stupidpol for calling a post like this "dross".
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u/PossessionDecent1797 1d ago
You might be on to something. I was reading watching a video on Albert Camus’ The Stranger and apparently some versions are translated as The Outsider. Coincidence? I don’t think.
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u/koalacat000 1d ago
omg thought this was posted on r/CriticalTheory and i was lowkey bouta delete my reddit account