Animal Drives

Since Americans have given up on their ethics and openly extol living like pigs I wanted to look inside that movement and see if there is a hierarchy there, and substructures and differentiation. Previously, as an outsider to the sty, I had approached it as a monolith, regarding it as an odd, aboriginal, anachronistic alt-culture, something mostly abandoned with the evolutionary growth of a prefrontal cortex, writing, literacy, and all the arts, traditions and technologies usually known as "civilization."

How naïve I was. I never wittingly chose to enter the sty but it has encompassed all of us in a kind of psychological, suburban sprawl of filth. The sprawl is now affecting the physical environment in an unprecedented and bad way, the conundrum of consciousness requiring that human beings be either more or less than animals. We can't choose to be exclusively animals again and exit the territory of the morality of consciousness, the subject of many myths such as the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Anyway, we have tried to deny our humanity and return to an idealized natural state, an impossibility. The first distinction I see among the swine is between determinists and romantics. Determinists argue that our animal nature is inescapable and should therefore be embraced and indulged. Dog eat dog. That, of course, is the inverse of the reality--that our humanity and uniqueness in the animal kingdom is a fact--and the argument is therefore reductive, circular and self-negating. We are singular in our power, if nothing else.

The romantics believe the sty is an appropriate place to inhabit and that it doesn't stink--a tenet and creed belied by a perceptible pungency. They wallow in the muck with abandon, inured to the stench. A romantic outlook can be a beautiful thing if it is rooted in reality. But all the lies, infighting and perversion evident in the shitshow reveal the truth of its squalor. So, the romantics believe that the sty is not inevitable but that it is our due. Evangelical Christians are romantics. Trumpists are among the determinists. 

True Trumpists are greed mavens and money-men--followers, formally or not, of Ayn Rand's hideous doctrines. Nothing in her cynical, incoherent work deserves to be called theoretical. Evangelicals, such as Sarah Sanders, compare creation to some fantasy of godly perfection and therefore expect the sty and roll around in it happily, not realizing it is their degraded creation and not God's. I have to go now and wipe the slime from my eyes. I will be back and report further on the awful mess we have fallen into.