I read a remark on Twitter earlier that the Millennials are the first generation to be demanding that their freedom be taken away.
That startled me because it is apparently true, and because that is exactly what the Cs predicted would happen once "the programming is complete". And, not too long ago, they noted that the programming WAS complete.
So, here we are: a whole generation of people who simply have no idea of what they are asking for and what the results will be; but we know.
This reminded me of a paragraph I'd read in Yann Martel's
"The Life of Pi" which stuck with me. (What a strange book! I never did work out what the author's intent was in writing it.) The quote itself, anyway, has to do with cages and why animals like being in them.
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If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, "Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go!" -do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've just evicted would sputter, "With what right do you throw us out? This is our home. We own it. We have lived here for years. We're calling the police, you scoundrel."
Don't we say, "There's no place like home"? That's certainly what animals feel. Animals are territorial. That is the key to their minds. Only a familiar territory will allow them to fulfill the two relentless imperatives of the wild: the avoidance of enemies and the getting of food and water. A biologically sound zoo enclosure-whether cage, pit, moated island, corral, terrarium, aviary or aquarium-is just another territory, peculiar only in its size and in its proximity to human territory. That it is so much smaller than what it would be in nature stands to reason. Territories in the wild are large not as a matter of taste but of necessity. In a zoo, we do for animals what we have done for ourselves with houses: we bring together in a small space what in the wild is spread out. Whereas before for us the cave was here, the river over there, the hunting grounds a mile that way, the lookout next to it, the berries somewhere else-all of them infested with lions, snakes, ants, leeches and poison ivy-now the river flows through taps at hand's reach and we can wash next to where we sleep, we can eat where we have cooked, and we can surround the whole with a protective wall and keep it clean and warm. A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely. A sound zoo enclosure is the equivalent for an animal (with the noteworthy absence of a fireplace or the like, present in every human habitation). Finding within it all the places it needs-a lookout, a place for resting, for eating and drinking, for bathing, for grooming, etc.-and finding that there is no need to go hunting, food appearing six days a week, an animal will take possession of its zoo space in the same way it would lay claim to a new space in the wild, exploring it and marking it out in the normal ways of its species, with sprays of urine perhaps. Once this moving-in ritual is done and the animal has settled, it will not feel like a nervous tenant, and even less like a prisoner, but rather like a landholder, and it will behave in the same way within its enclosure as it would in its territory in the wild, including defending it tooth and nail should it be invaded. Such an enclosure is subjectively neither better nor worse for an animal than its condition in the wild; so long as it fulfills the animal's needs, a territory, natural or constructed, simply is, without judgment, a given, like the spots on a leopard. One might even argue that if an animal could choose with intelligence, it would opt for living in a zoo, since the major difference between a zoo and the wild is the absence of parasites and enemies and the abundance of food in the first, and their respective abundance and scarcity in the second. Think about it yourself. Would you rather be put up at the Ritz with free room service and unlimited access to a doctor or be homeless without a soul to care for you? But animals are incapable of such discernment. Within the limits of their nature, they make do with what they have.
A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence: exactly where an animal says to us, "Stay out!" with its urine or other secretion, we say to it, "Stay in!" with our barriers. Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other.
In the literature can be found legions of examples of animals that could escape but did not, or did and returned. There is the case of the chimpanzee whose cage door was left unlocked and had swung open. Increasingly anxious, the chimp began to shriek and to slam the door shut repeatedly-with a deafening clang each time-until the keeper, notified by a visitor, hurried over to remedy the situation. A herd of roe-deer in a European zoo stepped out of their corral when the gate was left open. Frightened by visitors, the deer bolted for the nearby forest, which had its own herd of wild roe-deer and could support more. Nonetheless, the zoo roe-deer quickly returned to their corral. In another zoo a worker was walking to his work site at an early hour, carrying planks of wood, when, to his horror, a bear emerged from the morning mist, heading straight for him at a confident pace. The man dropped the planks and ran for his life. The zoo staff immediately started searching for the escaped bear. They found it back in its enclosure, having climbed down into its pit the way it had climbed out by way of a tree that had fallen over. It was thought that the noise of the planks of wood falling to the ground had frightened it.
But I don't insist. I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.
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Does that sound like an argument for or against captivity? Or just a series of observations with no bias? It's been a long time since I read that book, but I might have another go at it to work out what the author was trying to say, if anything. Did I miss the point, or is the author just a wishy-washy character, full of contradictory wisdom?
I think as a reader, I am somewhat like the chimp described above. I like to know exactly what the beliefs of the author are. It's rarely just a story! Authors are describing by default their belief structures as they type out reality as they see it. A confused or wishy-washy author doesn't know what they believe, are just pulled about by currents. I find myself annoyed and impatient when I read people like that. Tell me what you think, let me learn, agree or lecture you in my head! I want to know where the walls are, so I can decide where to stand in relation to them.
In this context, I am also reminded of David M. Jacob's book,
"Walking Among Us", (can't find the quote now), describing how the UFO hubrid population was extremely anxious about the concept of violence when visiting earth, and brought with them extensive over-kill amounts of security. The description paralleled somewhat my own feelings of heightened concern when visiting a new city and walking through areas I don't know anything about but which had been reported as being bad neighborhoods; the fear is based on an abstraction of a reported reality I don't have any experience with.
I can see how the fragile, untested millennial would lean toward wanting the state take care of everything and being perfectly willing to surrender freedom to that end. Who wants freedom? You might get hurt or be made to feel bad!
I conflate such people with Apple products, where the software and devices are polished and safe and you can be happy and even snooty in your choice of 'superior' laptop, so long as you want
exactly what you are given and are able to turn a blind eye to the lies and contradictions and inflated costs. (The range of choice is extremely low within the Apple ecosystem and the restrictions often take on Kafka-esque proportions if you try to do anything outside the prescribed formula. -You pay more, and are gently sheered, milked and made to lie to yourself about the abusive services provided by soft-seeming, watchful and likely insane authority figures. Their insanity and evil being too horrible a concept to hold in mind, the users work overtime to explain it away. -The outside observer suspects that the abusive parent deliberately and regularly contradicts and does counterproductive things precisely to exert this power and make the victim squirm.)
