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If I had lived in a less civilized era, I would have become a killer and conqueror.

In a more savage society, men took what they wanted in ways that seem vicious and cruel by our standards. If a man wanted more material goods, he would lead his tribe to raid the territory of rivals and take whatever he could get away with. If a man wanted a woman, he would take her by force. If he wanted a woman who belonged to another man, he would kill the man and take her.

It was a world in which the strong competed with the strong for resources and mating rights. Those who weren’t strong accepted whatever was left after the winners took what they wanted.

This is antithetical to all of our modern values. We know not to kill. We know not to steal. We know not to take women against their will.

I’m a modern, civilized man — with modern values and a modern ethical code. I have made a conscious decision to try to love others and do what I consider to be right. Even so, I wrestle with the savagery in my DNA. There is a part of me — a part which frequently tries to bubble to the surface — which wants nothing more than to be that savage warrior king of the past. More than anything, this part of me wants to win — to kill and plunder and take exactly what I want.

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I have always felt like an alien among human beings. Or maybe I thought I was the human and almost everybody else was an alien. I’m not certain.

I’ve never hated the creatures among whom I walked. I just felt disconnected. I felt as if I was in the wrong place. I felt as if I was looking for something — someone? some place? — where I would find my own kind. Somewhere I would feel loved and understood. Somewhere I would feel at home. With someone I could trust. No longer the strange alien who didn’t fit.

I’ve recently found a line from an old song playing over and over in my head when I encounter things which make me feel this way. It happened again tonight. When I feel detached and troubled about what’s all around me, I feel myself withdrawing emotionally and I hear David Bowie singing bits and pieces of a song — and I always hear, over and over — the line which goes, “Is there life on Mars?”

And I feel like an alien who’s spent years looking for what he needs on Earth and he turns away in hurt and sorrow, asking whether there might be love and life for him on Mars instead.

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