When I saw this video, it immediately reminded me of the following excerpt from the introduction to Ernest Beckers Escape From Evil entitled: The Human Condition: Between Appetite and Ingenuity. Of course, theres more to it than this excerpt; a lot more but I think the video goes to show how identified many have become with the animal side of humans. You may not enjoy this video. Youre not meant to. Its meant to make you think ;) youtube/watch?v=gBAV4IgjUVQ At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and 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. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons Darwin so shocked his time - and still bothers ours - is that he showed this bone-crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each persons life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all 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
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:23:48 +0000
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