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> the wolf’s violent predation can never be eradicated, for this is a repressed behavior of humans, too, waiting to emerge cyclically... There are times I feel
by vintagedave 2y ago
> the wolf’s violent predation can never be eradicated, for this is a repressed behavior of humans, too, waiting to emerge cyclically...
There are times I feel despair for where the world may be going now: are we heading towards new repressions, new violence, new wars? Was the post-WW2 period a brief moment of peace, and have the generations passed so that the visceral memory has faded, and fascism, war, violence and otherness return?
A quote like this makes me think the stories of werewolves and other human monsters is the way those in the past dealt with the returning cycle of human awfulness.
- atomicnumber3 2y agoI don't think we've really had worldwide peace since WWII, just the wars have mostly been proxy and out of sight of lots of the nations we hear from.
- stronglikedan 2y agoNothing new under the sun. What is old is new again. Just to solace in the fact that we have less wars and more peace decade after decade on a global scale, even if it doesn't feel like it locally.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- whythre 2y agoIt isn’t a return. Baring-Goulds werewolves are thin metaphors for behaviors that we would associate with serial killers, rapists, cannibals. People that have succumbed to the worst impulses of their nature. Those have always been with us. And most of those destructive impulses are uniquely helpful in the short term for the individuals engaging in them. The werewolf has always been the malignant outsider or hidden threat. A few decades of comfort does not negate a long lineage of behaviors that are maladaptive for a group but potentially positive for the self-serving individual. The shortlived Pax Americana is not evidence that we have somehow altered millions of years of human nature.