Harambe's death and man's ultimate freedom

The earth is a farm.  We are someone else’s property. – Charles Fort

Goya's The Colossus on the cover

 So, we all want to have control over our lives, right?  To be able to control our destinies.  To have agency.  Each day is a sort of triage where we evaluate the things that we can change – and those we can’t.  The things we can control and can’t control (more about the uncontrollable below).  Like rivers carved into the earth, the paths of change become channeled.  The streams flow fast in these confines; choices become limited.

This idea came to mind recently with the outrage over the death of Harambe, the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla.  The outrage over the killing – to protect a child that had fallen into Harambe’s enclosure – quickly spread.  People were really mad, so much so that a “Justice for Harambe” change.org petition has nearly 500,000 supporters.  Not to get into the aspects of this incident – the mom and the zoo have been roundly criticized.  What interests me is the virulence of the criticism.

This is a perfect issue to provoke a quick response.  It falls into the category of things that people can take action on – the outrage occurring on an individual level but among many people.  What about this got people all fired up?  It is kind of wildcard – a gorilla getting shot in a zoo to (purportedly, some would say) save a child.  Outrage felt – and acted upon.  Petitions signed.

So is this what it takes to get interested in something?  Why aren’t people protesting the very existence of zoos, the existence of which allowed for Harambe’s demise in the first place?  Why do people not rally against factory farming?  Why aren’t people more actively critical of domestic and foreign policies?

What is right and just and moral comes down to the individual in many cases.  But, more importantly and interestingly, those carved-out river canyons come into play.  Some things are so, well, entrenched in our society they don’t get constantly criticized.  They become part of the background noise.  Object to Harambe’s death: sure.  Object to the farm sector that is worth tens of billions of dollars: not so easy.

A detail from Goya's painting: the reaction of crowds

The poet Robert Bly has written A Little Book on the Human Shadow, which “concisely describes the most powerful human decision making engine, which our culture refuses to acknowledge, the shadow”.  In it he portrays the shadow as a bag into which we place all those suppressed needs/desires/drives.  We keep this shadow-bag with us though we pretend we don’t.  Yet it affects all of our decisions.  It controls how we expect people to behave.  Think of Freud’s id or even Jung’s collective unconscious.  All the spoken and unspoken things that take place in human encounters.

All those uncontrollable things – those desires we have to change the course of our life but are unable to scale the canyon walls – need to be acted upon in some way.  You see where I’m going with this?  We feel bad that we don’t actively try and subvert the system so we act out on things that we feel we can have some control over.  Pressure release valves for those crushed and hidden shadows.

The image of a gorilla in a zoo pulling around a child is so ripe for this type of interpretation. The gorilla represents the animal world which we have brought into our protective custody, the zoo.  We want to control the animal world which, in its animal, non-language way, represents the shadows that we all lug around.  In a controlled setting. 

We have outrage when our ward is harmed or killed.  That ward is us, the zoo is our world.  Our world is a prison and we take action on the things we can.  We change the shades of color that the prison walls are painted.  We cry out for better treatment when outrageous incidents occur.  But we shy away from trying to change the prison itself or even ask fundamental questions about it.  (Steps down from soapbox.)