Week #2
Script for an upcoming video. No one will ever know I posted this beforehand.
Since the dawn of time, animals have
been the butt of the joke. It goes without saying that humans have
always toyed with the idea of animals possessing a greater intellect
than they actually do. In this way, it’s always been a great source
of humor to explore the hysterical lack of self-awareness inherent to
animals.
In pre-history – despite the fact that
animals showed no understandable intelligence or communicability –
ancient peoples recognized a method to their instinctive madness,
which compelled them to characterize these creatures with grand roles
in mythology that accentuated their mysterious quality and set them
up as metaphorical representations of forces in the world.
But as human intelligence and knowledge
of the world increased, we slowly realized more and more that the
“intelligence” of animals was merely a projection. We were unable
to interpret any communication because animals were actually just not
capable of communicating with us because most of them are honestly
pretty dumb lol.
But that didn’t stop us. Despite
understanding the nature of animals better, we continued to
characterize them in this way, allowing them to represent new forces
in the world: Political powers, political satires, and of course,
child murder.
Animals themselves started to become
a joke. The age of scientific
discovery fully illuminated the simplicity of their psychology, and
now that we kept them so commonly as pets, and constantly
interacted with them, we could only become more intimately familiar
with their frankly hilarious quirks.
In the first days of photography, the
great innovators of the artform (well ahead of their time) knew that
the finest memetic content could be carved out of their pets (who
couldn’t do anything to stop them for the record, which is awesome).
In particular, the 20th
century was a turning point for animals, as they became a core tenant
of the rising wave of pop culture…
…For it was by this point that humans
understood that we were, in a way, alone in the world. No
other creature would ever be able to compete, and therefore we would
be better off filling in the gaps with our imagination, knowingly
this time. We’d shifted, from giving animals more credit than they
deserve because we didn’t understand them, to giving them more credit
than they deserve because it’s more fun that way.
And yet, dear friends, do not take this
as a disrespect to animals. If anything, our respect for them has
been healed by this slow slow discovery. Our relationships with these
lovely creatures are beautiful. These days, everyone is in on the
joke, and happier than ever to treat animals like kings.
Nowadays, animals
represent less so the grand philosophical concepts of old, and more
so the removal of the human ego. In an age of nearly oppressive,
overwhelming self-awareness, an opportunity to look at the world
through innocent eyes that utterly lack self-awareness is a daily
blessing. We need not feel alone in the world when there are, in
fact, infinite sources of companionship everywhere.
In a way, we have evolved from wearing
their skins as comfort from the crushing cold of the physical world,
to wearing their skins as comfort from the crushing cold of the
universe.