oliver geraghty

It is fun to be an animal, but far from fun to be human.

This is because we are living in the wrong context.

The context of the animal is the physical world, and they interact
effortlessly.

We have a mental context of race, religion, country, class etc.

When lab rats are allowed to breed unchecked, with a limited food supply,
the result is cannibalism. Hierarchy is better.

oliver geraghty

It is fun to be an animal, but far from fun to be human.

This is because we are living in the wrong context.

The context of the animal is the physical world, and they interact
effortlessly.

We have a mental context of race, religion, country, class etc.

When lab rats are allowed to breed unchecked, with a limited food supply,
the result is cannibalism. Hierarchy is better.

Our context is having 4 dimensional vision in a 3D world, this makes us
literally supernatural.

albert

"At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling
life, has a mouth, digestive tract, an anus, a skin to keep it
intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence,
for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed -- a
struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit
into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking.
Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory
spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts
fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh
they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming
waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh...Life
cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at
the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the
living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated
in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the
living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even
the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens,
flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of
pigs and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening . To
paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a
field of corpses, smiles into the sun and declares life good."

Ernest Becker, _Escape From Evil_


"The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and the
animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the
same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of
anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the
fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled
days -- that's something else.

"It is only if you let the full weight of this paradox sink down
on your mind and feelings that you can realize what an impossible
situation it is for an animal to be in. I believe that those who
speculate that a full apprehension of man's condition would drive
him insane are right, quite literally right."

Ernest Becker, _The Denial of Death_

--
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the
range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally
impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
-- George Orwell as Syme in "1984"