666. Reading Praise Of Animality Makes Me Cringe
"In addition to humans' place in the animal kingdom at a scientific level, Lestel also highlights our essential, existential animality in his opening comments with fellow editor, Hollis Taylor. "A key question now is to know how the human of the 21st century can reactivate his animality and animalize himself anew when all Western thought since the Greeks tells him that he is human precisely because of this rupture with animality," Lestel suggests, building on his critique of the very philosophical foundations of the ethological tradition. "To be human does not mean to have fled animality, but on the contrary to live within it and to let it live within us…we are animals and animals are us.""
Where animality is not only allowed but made the basis of politics, we get Nazis, Fascists and the like. Animality means the acceptance, facilitation and enhancement of instincts without any consideration for the victims.
Recent German history is a good example for the political animality of the Nazis.
- Under the ingroup-outgroup instinct, members of outgroups were murdered, exploited and driven from their territory.
- Under the hierarchy instinct, the most stupid men cultivated their physical fitness and fought by aggression to the top, while the intellectual elite was killed and driven away. Those at the top were ruthless in keeping their position of power.
- Under the procreation instinct, women were reduced to be wombs, abused for breeding as if they were rabbits.
- Under the gregarious instinct, people willingly merged with the obedient masses.
We need a better world, where humanity is prevalent, and where animality is restricted and controlled by cognition and rationality.
