Saturday, January 12, 2013

The Value Of Monsters

Humans seem predisposed to talking about monsters. Every culture has them and every new generation within that culture is taught about them. Monsters seem as fundamental to human culture as making shelter and cooking food. But why?

Monsters make us afraid of the dark, and anything else unknown and unfamiliar to us. Monsters allow us to treat living things as completely alien and unrelatable to us. Though some of those skills may have been useful in our very early development as a species, by and large, the idea of monsters allows us to act like worse people.

Yet, there actually is a certain value in monster legends. What makes something a monster is usually a completely indiscriminate desire to cause death, injury, or any other sort of destruction. And because monsters are indiscriminate, then all humans are equally at risk of a monster's wrath.

The value of monsters is that they are the unifiers of humanity. They are the common enemy that we all share, which allows us to put aside our differences and work together to save our collective butts. In a twisted sense, humans are at their best when they are being hunted down like prey.

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