Monster

What brings about the monstrous, or for the purposes of this discussion, mass destruction and suffering? Though many of us prefer to avoid doing so, a careful glimpse within one’s own self and immediate surroundings can provide clues to the long genesis of such phenomena, starting with small acts, at least as they appear to human subjectivity. For starters, careless mistakes, or even regular consequences of seemingly benign or necessary structural processes can lead to the wanton waste of life.

For example, during a period of meditation, I had discovered that within the melted wax of my candles were countless dead fruit flies, or gnats, which had been attracted to the small quivering flames in the darkness. I realized that a large cloud of the creatures had been attracted into my shack, where I had a compost bucket of fruit and vegetable scraps that I had neglected to empty out. And of course the outside swarm had to come from somewhere as well, which is attributable to an array of external conditions. All of this could have been avoided were it not for my ignorance of the surrounding circumstances. But then how could I have known? I had to experience the consequences of a set of circumstances that were outside of my perception, as they came into contact with a benign and routine ritual.  

And the truth of the matter is that one takes in life all around oneself throughout the day, which encourages the harvesting and destruction of living things to incorporate their energy and perpetuate oneself. Further, one’s own quality of taking physical and temporal space necessarily puts oneself in the path of other forms of life as one moves and persists. As one moves within the living field, one is only aware of one’s path of destruction in a limited sense, and so one’s awareness of destruction correlates with an inner resistance one has to the death of life around oneself.

This resistance is modulated in many different ways. The more that something is like us, for example, the more resistance we have to its suffering. For relatively sensitive individuals, it is difficult to kill an animal, or even an insect, because they move and writhe and express fear, which can be picked up on simply by observation. It is much easier to pluck plants out of the ground; they don’t move or complain, however even these forms of resistance change with changes in consciousness.

If one moves closer to the food, one sees things. In a supermarket, lettuce and onions are disembodied objects of consumption, but in the field they are living things which grow other appendages to survive, angle towards the sun, spread roots, and become stressed and go to seed, among other things. One develops a stronger sensibility for their striving and their inner life. This relationship is even more powerful with animals, which already have our general sympathies. To watch one slaughtered is very different than buying ground beef in the store, especially if one is in habitual contact with it throughout the day. The resistance to animal slaughter builds as the actual meat product becomes more abstracted, and one is in constant contact with domesticated animals like dogs and cats, and one becomes more temperamentally sensitive as one persists in a civilized society whose powers of preservation have matured and one is further removed from the death process in daily life.

However one must still eat and perpetuate oneself. One naturally has a resistance to starvation in one’s own self, which must be counterpoised to the resistance to destruction. And so one becomes grateful to lop off a head of lettuce, or eat beef from a recently slaughtered cow, especially if the food is healthy and not only sustains oneself, but causes one’s health to flourish.

There remains a resistance to needless slaughter. Accidental or malignant deaths of plants and animals are distasteful or worse, in various degrees, depending on the form of life. For many, waste produces guilt as well. And so living with dignity means giving dignity to one’s food sources too, and taking only what is necessary, or otherwise leaving other living things to the vagaries and fortunes of nature, to carry their own inner desires to the very end, whatever that may look like. 

Consider the subjective complications that arise when dealing with what we consider to be pests. I ended up killing several mice that invaded my shack, after of course exhausting every possible method of excluding and trapping them, and after having them leave shit everywhere, and even climb on me in my sleep. And still it was a difficult thing to do, there was much resistance, because I had no need of them for survival, only for them to go away. And exhausting every possible method was dependent on my knowledge and perception of the situation, and of the structural reality of having a shelter, furniture, belongings, and food to protect. To put it another way, I had the quality of being extended out in space, and so did they. But eventually a hatred and disgust for the invading mice led me to kill them with great reluctance, using spring traps and peanut butter. But I did it nevertheless, and there still existed the possibility of different tactics or even conditions of living. A decisions that I had to sit with as I pulled their mangled bodies out from the traps and cast them into the ground.

The necessities of that present set of circumstances, and my limited perception and knowledge of a solution, lowered my resistance enough to dispense with the mice. Similarly, I stood out in a field wiping clusters of aphids off of kale leafs. This was of course uncomfortable, but the kale had to be harvested, and there were aphids everywhere. An external set of circumstances, such as respect for my fellow farmers, desires and demands from customers and stores, pressures of the market and maintaining a farming business in a capitalist society, and even the increasing discomfort of harvesting in the cold and in the rain, combined to lower my resistance through force and attrition, a resistance that had to be forged through social and psychological forces peculiar to social and historical circumstances. And now we are getting somewhere with this argument.

For human beings, a resistance to kill peers is perhaps the greatest resistance of all. As social creatures, the communities we exist in extend as organisms in themselves; to kill another is much like lopping off one’s own arm in this sense. And this is in addition to the steep legal and social penalties for doing such things. One can go into the forest and hunt and kill an animal in cold blood, without regard for its subjective experience, but killing another human being seems to be something else entirely. It is as if one destroys a part of oneself, and one’s community in the process.

The average civilized human being has steep subjective resistance to killing another, due in large part to the advanced development of civilized society, which makes killing completely unnecessary in the course of daily survival.

There are exceptions to this resistance. Some very serious exceptions.

The instruments of state violence come to mind immediately. With their monopolies on violence, state institutions like the police and the military cultivate individuals with a profoundly lowered resistance to killing. Indeed, one looks at the US military, or US police forces, and it appears as if the resistance has reversed, and that they unleash their forces of destruction at every opportunity.   

This is monstrous. We don’t talk about it as such in “polite society,” but even history’s greatest monsters – as according to conventional judgments - had some ideological mode of self-justification.  One can’t simply go out and act like a “monster” out of one’s own volition, or at least this doesn’t typically happen. One has to be called a monster. One has to believe that one is doing right, or at least have one’s ideological matrix set free so that one is acting nihilistically. But all of this begs the question, yet again: from whence does the monstrous come?

One has to go very far back in history indeed to trace the chains of violence that beget one another. Who started it?  A story for another time. But one thing that we can establish is that the resistance to kill is lowered in the face of perpetual destruction. Violence begets reactive violence, and killing begets more killing, more vengeance, and much destruction in this sense carries on through history and geography like a tidal wave, a wave which may attempt to balance itself in time as it runs up against reaction. An administrative body may form to manage the path of destruction, but which essentially remains a destructive force in itself.

This brings to mind the archetype of the murderous bureaucrat, completely separated from the population the bureaucrat serves, yet making potentially fatal decisions for the population, insulated from the effects of that decision.

And so through these operations, a culture is generated. Monsters emerge, and a monstrous culture congeals through this accumulated activity. And begets great monsters.

Throughout various historical intervals, the violence temporarily exhausts itself, subjected to environmental constrains, or various processes of social stabilization, like a dying fire.  

We can now come back to my own localized self, an instantiation which carries with it great material power, which is owed to historical developments peculiar to the human species that reach far back. I can only become conscious of my power as I act in this case. What am I to value, what am I to respect, and to preserve or destroy out of respect? What does one do to navigate around the margins of the monstrous, and keep from becoming a monster oneself?