Irrational Fear of fhe Self: The Creator and Oikophobia in Science Fiction

Among the more interesting original movies to come out this year was the newest film from Godzilla and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards. It didn’t turn out to be a great movie and mostly struggled at the box office, grossing under $100 million on an $80 million budget in its first month, but, if nothing else, it served as a valuable inflection point for a fascinating and frustrating trend in modern science fiction: the modern cultural tendency of self-loathing and “Oikophobia.”

The Creator is set against a near-future dystopian setting where the United States military is conducting a genocidal war of elimination of sentient artificial intelligence, who were wrongly blamed when an error caused a nuclear bomb to detonate over Los Angeles. The surviving AIs have all fled to a massive Chinese Pan-Asian superpower that offers to let them live as refugees but cannot protect them from a massive orbital space station that scans the planet and fires missiles anywhere it finds them.

The heart of the story comes from an American agent who has successfully infiltrated the AI society and finds himself questioning his allegiances after he discovers the truth about the war, turning coat to protect a young AI with the power to stop the war and who has tenuous connections to his past.

There is a rarely used but valuable term that was coined by philosopher Roger Scruton in his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations. That term is “Oikophobia”, which he defined as an aversion or fear of the familiar, which usually manifests in a tendency to reject one’s own culture in favor of other cultures. It is “the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture, and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’”

“The ‘oik’ repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments,” he continues. “The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation-states of Europe.”

Oikophobia is a fascinating concept as it stands in direct opposition to the concept of Xenophobia, the irrational fear of the other—a concept the cultural elite have long hoisted upon the unwashed masses for being ignorant and reactionary against the concepts of mass migration or Islamic aggression. One could easily argue that both concepts map well onto the respective progressive and conservative outlooks of the world, with the former suffering from an overt tendency to loathe and punch down against intellectual lessers, rednecks, and common peoples who defend their skygod and broomsticks.

Both concepts also have deep histories within popular cinema. Most popular and beloved science fiction requires an uncomplicated cosmic other to serve as the mythical outsider attempting to upend the status quo. For example, there is nothing redeemable about the futuristic robots in The Terminator or the sexual violation implied by the Xenomorphs in Alien. The criminals in vigilante thrillers like Dirty Harry or Death Wish are irredeemable and only benefit from the kindness and mercy of the people they prey upon. They serve as simplistic others that we do not feel bad killing and destroying.

The collected works of H.P. Lovecraft may be the most illustrative example in this regard. The popular and controversial early 20th-century pulp writer is well known for his dozens of science fiction and horror short stories that explore the innate fear of the other—depicting the cosmos as a dark uncaring place full of creatures that either do not care you exist or are actively hostile to you. His stories—infamously peppered with light moments of racism and antisemitism—depict a reactionary world where the unfamiliar is dangerous and evil, and where merely trying to understand these concepts induces madness.

Some progressive filmmakers have bemoaned the reactionary implications behind this kind of objective moralism behind these films and actively rebel against it. Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers actively subverts this dynamic by highlighting the militaristic and fascist tendencies of a society that frames its wars on such simplistic terms. Neill Blomkamp similarly scrutinized this tendency with his home country of South Africa’s history of apartheid in his film District 9, which depicted its alien refugees as victims of a hostile human government’s science experiments.

The culmination of this impulse came with the proliferation of films in the 1990s and 2000s that actively subverted American culture as materialistic, capitalistic, inauthentic, shallow, and soul killing. Films like Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, and Avatar all tell stories where the American-backed military-industrial complex extends its colonial ambitions against the peaceful, honorable, and traditional ways of indigenous peoples, while a central character makes the decision to abandon his people and stand by the oppressed.

In all these examples, the main character is wounded by or otherwise alienated from his society and finds something in these simpler people that resolves a part of his inner turmoil. Their strong cultural bonds, peaceful ways, and Paganistic religious beliefs are innately shown as superior to our own, which is driven by an urge to colonize, destroy, and conquer the world around us.

While I am not the first person in the world who is eager to defend the excesses and decadence of modern liberal democracy and capitalism, the underlying oikophobic instincts of these properties are undeniable and rest upon numerous presuppositions and false arguments. They all affirm Rousseau’s concept of the “Noble Savage”, that civilization is evil and that “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” They assume wrongly that the fallen state of man is non-existent among indigenous peoples, as though they are angels who ought not to be defiled by our sinfulness.

Maybe no recent film more exemplifies this than Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water, which tells a lascivious romance story of a disabled woman living on the margins of society who falls in love with a sentient fish monster and proceeds to kidnap him and initiate a sexual relationship with the creature. The heroes who assist her are fellow travelers unwelcome in 1950s America, namely her gay roommate, a Black coworker, and a communist agent working for the government. And the film’s villain is an uncomplicated, self-serving, and perverted caricature of the working-class, all-American, white Christian male.

The movie’s basic presupposition is that love is a shapeless and beautiful thing that ought not to be oppressed by societal expectations and definitions. Our protagonist’s bestial love for a fish is pure and she is thus fully justified in engaging in a minor coupe against the metaphysical embodiment of her cultural alienation.

The oikophobe will always assume that the familiar—the traditional or commonplace thing—is inferior. In recent years, this has manifested in self-loathing endeavors like The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which attempted to completely rewrite American history in ahistorical terms by claiming that all of American history needed to be understood through the lens of slavery and oppression. But this project was nothing new. Howard Zinn wrote People’s History Of The United States in 1980 and shared many of the same falsehoods.

If the xenophobe is dangerous for his irrational inability to empathize with that which is outside his limited understanding, the oikophobe is dangerous because it selectively dehumanizes ideas that serve as the foundations of civilization itself. An oikophobic society is one in which the foundations of civilization—tradition, religion, families, etc.—are perpetually attacked and eroded. These attacks ultimately prove fruitless. It is impossible to attack the foundations of a society forever and survive off the fumes of the previous civilization.

The Creator is fascinating in this regard given how deeply rooted its oikophobia is rooted in contemporary politics. The film portrays the American military as entirely evil hostile aggressors, while the innocent AIs are mostly portrayed by Asian and Black actors who are living peaceful lives in rural China. The Disney-produced film is clearly capitulating to the politically correct and capitalistic sentiments of our time, given that it is socially acceptable to portray the U.S. military as evil while portraying the Chinese government negatively would result in the film being unable to be released in China.

Despite our national tradition of free speech, the rigid social norms of our day make it impossible for Americans to stand up as confident people with the belief that our civilization is justified in its existence. As a result, movies like The Creator find it all too easy to depict our fears and uncertainties as fascistic, irrational, and evil.

The film serves as a fascinating logical inverse of the prejudices that make a film like The Terminator work. James Cameron’s breakout film assumed that the unknowability of artificial intelligence made it malevolent, untrustworthy, and hostile. The Creator assumed that Americans’ fear of AI would make us malevolent, untrustworthy, and hostile.

The Creator certainly is emblematic of one of the more senseless extremes of this trend, but these ideas are also commonplace. The two most popular films last year were Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick. The former depicts a perfect alien society that is persistently violated and destroyed by greedy humans who want alien resources to improve life on Earth. The latter depicts a military mission where the bad guys are neither named nor are their faces depicted, making them as generic and uncomplicated as possible for Tom Cruise to mercilessly gun down with a fighter jet.

Both xenophobia and oikophobia are complicated and common tendencies in people, so we shouldn’t be surprised when these themes appear in our popular entertainment. That said, it says a lot about how they manifest and why, and to what degree we are willing to entertain them.

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