The Hollow People
A Sci-Fi Allegory of Our Political Alienation
(2023 intro) This essay is about a brilliant short story that is also an allegory of our socio-political nightmare. But the short story has a happy ending, while our politics does not.
Kate, a police detective who is investigating a multiple murder, wakes up to find a strange man in bed with her and a strange thing in her infant son’s bed. The substitutions weren’t even human. They were some kind of revolting and soulless copies. Thus starts the short story, The Nearest, by Australian writer Greg Egan.
Kate takes the man-thing into custody, wanting it to lead her to where she thinks that her real husband and son must be being held. Leaving the house, she has no concern for the child-thing, which she would be willing to throw “out with the garbage.” The man-thing tricks her into going to a hospital emergency unit, where the staff accept her word that he needs to be held for psych evaluation.
We are savvy readers and realize that the things are her actual husband and son and that something terrible has happened to Kate’s mind. As a reader, I’m both pleased that the story isn’t just a murder mystery and horrified by the setup.
By the time Kate gets back home, police are there picking up the thing-baby, and a thing like her sister is with the returned thing-husband. The analytical and powerful Kate decides that it must be an infection, that it is spreading, and only she can find its source and a way to stop it. She also now understands that her current murder case must be one in which the killer was someone who found their own family transformed and therefore killed the miserable “twitching puppets”.
She disguises herself and starts pounding the pavement, looking for clues. She runs across a family whose son started acting cold and then disappeared. Using a list of missing persons, she finds other cases where a family member turns odd and then goes missing. If she can find one of the missing she might learn what was happening before they changed into monsters.
Again, we realize, while Kate does not, that the missing people are afflicted with Capgras syndrome, the belief that their loved ones have been replaced by imposters.
Kate finds a group of the missing in a homeless squat. In talking to them she learns that they all left their homes because their loved ones had turned into “hollow people.” Kate then turns her belief about the missing around. Now, she thinks, the missing are people like herself because they had their families turn into hollow un-people. Some of the missing want to go back home and kill the hollow imposters. Kate is disturbed by this because she wants to believe that the hollows can somehow be cured.
She decides to call a friend who has been away for a while. The voice on the answering machine makes it seem like her friend Emily is hollow.
But here Kate deduces something that shocks her even more. Emily has been abroad, and the recording sounds just like the one she has heard many times over. Kate realizes that a recording could not have the quality of hollowness — only a person could. And this is a recording from an earlier time when Emily was clearly herself and not a counterfeit.
Therefore, the judgment of Emily being hollow was Kate’s own fault, not caused by a change in Emily. Kate realizes the only explanation: the missing people are the ones impaired, just like she is. She turns herself in for treatment and helps to discover that the disease she has was obtained from bats.
This is truly a horror story, and Egan gets the suspenseful, jittery, edgy mood right enough to give us chills. Yet the story has a happy ending. And still, it seems contrived, because someone with severe brain damage is more likely to devise explanations to support their delusions instead of giving them up.
The Parallels with Life Today
While Egan’s story was published in 2018 it has some eerie resonance with today. There’s been a horrible disease with a connection to bats (yes, I know: bats and also gain-of-function research). We know that there are microbes that cause behavioral compulsions. And the plot seems like an allegory of what has recently happened to our once-civil society.
Over a relatively short amount of time, a decade or two, many Americans became strangers to each other. Each could not even begin to understand how persons on the other political side could possibly believe what they profess. It's like the others lost the qualities of a thinking human being.
Like with Kate’s disease that causes Capgras syndrome, this alienation can happen within families and intimate relationships.
Like with Kate’s disease, our political disease stirs up violence and the threat of more violence.
At this point, a helpful essay is expected to say the obvious, that we have to nourish relationships and listen more. Okay, fine, many have said that. Many others have, in effect, said the opposite.
Our Current Dysfunction
Our dysfunction, unlike Capgras, is not caused by brain damage. Might it be causing brain damage or some other irreversible change? We know that tribalism, mass movements, and conspiracy beliefs are nothing new. They are, however, being nourished by media on an unprecedented scale. So, we don’t know about long-term effects.
Could we try to reverse polarization by using media to solve the very problem that they caused? Many people are thinking hard about solutions. Consider that the media’s manipulations depend on personal data. One proposal is that personal data are a digital commons and therefore should entail some kind of collective governance. But you can expect that any such proposal would be blocked by the anti-collective faction of the polarization.
Our political process seems impermeable to intellectual novelty. Ideas don’t get votes, but slogans, slanders, and conspiratorial fables do. We prefer clickbait to actual discussions of tradeoffs in costs and benefits of private or government actions. Somehow we need media to push ideas over polarity and get more voters and politicians thinking about new ways to operate.
Postscript: When I wrote the above in 2021 our dilemma had already passed a tipping point on January 6. Now there is still no mutual understanding, and the faction that is willing to shred our social fabric seems likely to prevail in 2024. If it does, the change to fascism will not be reversible without horrendous costs.