It is a peculiar form of isolation, to live within a species yet claim no kinship with it. For a long time, I believed much like the idealistic Professor Charles Xavier that the minority’s gentle conduct might soften the hard edges of the majority’s heart. But one learns, eventually, that the dream of peaceful coexistence is not a failure of hope, but a failure to diagnose the fundamental drive of the species among whom we walk.

X-Men: First Class serves as a case study and a perfect illustration of the friction between two distinct modes of being. The drama unfolds upon a beach, the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis – where the mutants, having just averted a global catastrophe for the humans, are met not with gratitude… but with a unified strike of military fire. The US and the Soviets, who were moments ago mortal enemies, instantly merge their intent toward a single goal: the removal of the new, unknown variable. The scene demonstrates how the human species will always prioritise the destruction of an unknown ‘threat’ over integration, in fear of their known ‘human way of being’ becoming obsolete.

Charles Xavier believes wholeheartedly that when the mutants demonstrate their goodwill by stopping the nuclear war, they will overcome the defenses of the human beings. Until the moment of the missiles turning towards them, he still believes in trying to prove their worth to a jury that has already decided their existence is the crime.

But Erik, forged in the ultimate environment of human aggression, views the professor’s strategy not as grace, but as a slow form of suicide. He argues, with a cold and procedural correctness, that to “pass” as one of them, to mask one’s true nature for the comfort of the aggressor, is a violation of one’s own worth and existence.

When the missiles fly toward that beach, Erik stops, deflects, and returns them to the ships from where they came. Charles is horrified and reminds Erik that they have it in them to be the “better ones”. But Erik has made up his mind, because he finally treats the humans with the same transactional finality with which it has always treated the Other.

What Erik did was not unprovoked aggression, but self-defense against an unprovoked aggression against the mutants. To be the ‘bigger person’ against a collective decision to erase you is a suicide pact disguised as moral superiority.

This dynamic echoes a far older, more ancient fact – that the Homo sapiens were the evolved, superior successor to the other hominid species like Neanderthals. But I think a closer examination suggests that different truth could be equally plausible: that the Neanderthal was a more evolved, perhaps more peaceful species. Their remains show larger brains, different muscular structures, ability to survive in smaller groups, and the skills to make advanced tools. I wonder if they were displaced not by inferior evolution, but by the irrational aggression of the human species that cannot tolerate another peer. Maybe the Neanderthal was not selected against by genetics or naturally out-competed; maybe they were erased, facing a larger group whose need to be the Apex and the Only intelligent species manifests as a relentless drive to remove all difference.

The scientific community looks to the stars and asks, “Where is everyone?” This is the Fermi Paradox, and perhaps the “Great Filter” that prevents species from reaching the stars is not a physical barrier, but a psychological one: the Xenophobic Ego of the collective human species. Perhaps any species that prioritises harvesting, dominating, and destroying the Other inevitably destroys the very diversity it needs to survive, when it can only see another Kind of peer as a resource or a threat.

In sci-fi Alien films, the purpose of experimentation on the aliens is largely to find the biological cause of their difference for two goals: to create weapons to defeat them, and to integrate their new powers into the collective human species. For those of us who have experienced the other side, the scientists in Alien films poking and prodding the alien in the name of progress and security, is an analogy for the systemic erasure attempted every day: stigma campaigns, narrative hijacks, harvesting any outputs produced through that difference, but pathologising of such difference and attempts to medicate away an inconvenient existence. Some of us have learned the hard way that the professor’s path leads only to exhaustion and internal collapse, and still resulting in the same exclusion.

Erik’s view is that the only working strategy is a surgical one: which may be psychologically represented as zero engagement with their erasure attempts, personal independence, and the inversion of their own psychological weapons when necessary.

When a species requires all their members to be the ‘same’ and needs the permanent status of the apex predator, it cannot accept a different neighbour – it can only recognise a subject or an enemy. Therefore, separation is not a political goal; it is a biological human necessity. When Erik understood this, he did not seek to conquer; he sought to ensure that he would never again be at the mercy of those who view difference as a disease to be cured.

In that moment on the beach, he was not “becoming the same as the monsters he opposed”. When the only language that halts the monster is the monster’s own, then to refuse to speak it is not virtue but complicity in one’s own erasure. Erik had finally decided to turn to the most lethal form of self-defense, where those who refuse to see him as anything other than an enemy could never strike again.