You remember DuckTales, right? The Disney TV show set in Duckburg, a town populated by talking animals. My name is Vijendra Mohanty and this is Radio Vimo, a podcast that wants to make you think. Today's episode, even though it seems to be about talking animals, has more to do with the human condition.

It's about how we, as human beings, perceive the world around us through glasses that are human coloured. Ask yourself this, what was the big idea behind DuckTales? Was it, what if ducks had been people? Or was it, what if people were ducks? It seems like an unimportant thing, but if you pay some attention, you might find that it makes all the difference in the world. If you ask the first question, what if ducks had been people? You are basically assigning human qualities to ducks.

You are removing from humanity all its qualities and slapping them on a duck. Qualities like clothes, houses, cities, businesses, languages, etc. You are taking all these and assigning them to ducks and ending up with a talking animal character.

However, if you apply the second what if, if you ask, what if people had been ducks? You are just replacing the likeness of a human being with the likeness of a duck. Nothing serious happens. The shift is only synthetic.

In this scenario, DuckTales would work fine if the entire cast had been human. Nothing would change. There is nothing intrinsically ducky about DuckTales.

The question that drives it is not, what if ducks had been people? It is, what if people had been ducks? Because the first question violates a truth that we lose sight of too often. You can't separate the human condition from the human being. The human condition is as much a result of the human being as the human being is a result of the human condition.

The things we have, clothes, houses, cities, businesses, and languages are not extra add-ons. They are an inevitable result of what we are. If ducks had cities, they wouldn't be anything like human cities.

If ducks were to wear clothes, they would look nothing like the clothes we wear. Every aspect of human culture and society owes its existence to the kind of animal that we are, to the ways in which we have evolved to behave. It is not possible to remove these aspects of us and transpose them whole onto another species of animal.

This is why all the stories we tell and listen to that have talking animals in them are not explorations of what if animals were people. They are about our need to project ourselves onto the world that surrounds us. But why am I making an entire episode out of this tiny thing? Is this really such an important matter? Is this something we need to spend time thinking about? I believe we do.

I think that the human need to project the human condition onto the universe is behind a number of cultural practices, both religious and secular. For example, we do this exact same thing when dealing with gods, aliens and even real non-talking animals. But we'll get to that in a minute.

One of the lasting criticisms of Star Trek has been that the alien species depicted in it are mostly humanoid, human-like. They usually are more or less the same height as us.

They have heads, two arms and two legs. They even have two eyes and one mouth. They communicate by using sounds that are similar enough to be translated by Starfleet translation devices.

The alien species of Star Trek even usually breathe the same air as us and are comfortable with the gravitational pull that we are used to. On one level, this is the result of budgetary constraints. It's simply easier to put makeup on a human actor and pretend that they are beings from another planet.

On another level, this is the result of a lack of imagination. And Star Trek is definitely not the only one responsible for it. The number of stories where aliens have appearances as well as motivations similar to human beings is very large.

They not only look like us, they act like us. They invade, they use guns, they often have two genders, they have similar social hierarchies like they have parliaments, senates or kings and queens etc. What we have done here in creating these alien characters is that we have taken aspects of our own, things that make us human, the trappings of the human condition that I mentioned earlier, and we have applied them to the idea of an alien.

In the case of animals at least, there is something tangible. The duck for example, to apply human standards too. With aliens, there is nothing there.

We don't know if aliens exist or if they do what they are like. So the question here is not what if aliens existed. No, it is instead what if we were aliens.

We aren't imagining aliens in front of us. We are imagining ourselves as aliens. Again, it is important that we remember this.

Because to not remember would be to unwittingly fall for the stories we tell ourselves and each other. We do this all the time without realizing it. We fail to make a distinction between fact and fiction.

That's where religion came from. I have spoken in previous episodes about how it was important for human culture to believe the stories it made up, to console itself and to cement the notion of our separateness from nature. But these same stories also became, over long periods of time, cultural structures that society finds difficult to escape.

We build a structure using our subjective interpretation of the world, but then we forget that it is a subjective interpretation and start thinking of it as an objective, unchanging reality. And we resist any change that might come. The human perspective is not some kind of default value.

It is exactly what the description says, the human perspective. Something unique to the human animal and something that no other quantity in the universe has any kind of obligation towards. So even though we may imagine gods and spirits and aliens to be entities that can be readily comprehended and assimilate into our understanding of the universe, the universe itself may refuse to do so.

Our gods quarrel. They get angry, feel happiness and lust and fear just as we do. Our stories about them are not answers to the question, what are gods like? They are answers to the question, what if the gods were like us? I think that is an important distinction to keep in mind.

We frequently project our humanity on the world around us, unaware that what we are really doing is storytelling.