One thing that makes people uncomfortable about hyenas is how much their females look like males and how much their males look like females. It seems to me like it would be the same mental mechanisms that would react when people are uncomfortable about other human beings like transfolk/the intersexed/bisexuals/asexuals who in some way exist outside of traditional gender assumptions. People don't like to have those boundaries blurred, because they want to be able to rely on them for stability and security, but they don't always think about at whose expense. I know not everyone who disliked hyenas is a heterosexist bastard, but at the same time, if people can get comfortable with hermaphroditic traits of hyenas, maybe they won't seem to "unnatural" to people when they run into them in other humans.
Hyenas were often reviled by religious authorities, and presented as having demonic associations, because said authorities loved scapegoats that couldn't realistically fight back. That the same religious authorities also presented other human beings as having demonic associations, again, doesn't prove that someone who dislikes hyenas is even religious. But if someone is willing to go to the trouble to understand that hyenas play an important role in their ecosystem and that a lot of myths about them based on superficial criteria don't check out from up close, they've developed the same mechanisms that are required to understand that some of the human beings those authorities also demonized may have also played a relevant role in human society, in their own way.
Now for the goosestepping, there's the common misconception that the events leading up to WW2 happened because of something specific to the German character. After all, they had to have all been sadists or fools unlike any of the rest of us here and now could ever be, even as our society continues to march right back toward fascism today. It's been demonstrated that human beings can have the same failings in other countries and many decades later. More than ever, I think it's important for people to understand how far the downtrodden can't be pushed, and how easy it is for the powerful to take advantage of people's unconscious and desperation to manipulate their motivations, no matter when or where they were born.
Which brings us all the way back to the 99% protesters of OWS. One of the reasons for which RL hyenas are reviled is that they're supposed to be "scavengers", which people find "disgusting" because they eat meat that someone else has already killed before, even though that's what everyone who eats meat and doesn't hunt does. Not only did the lion already commit the most violent act in those cases by killing the prey in question, and not only do they (unlike hyenas) throw their own children off cliffs so they only have to raise the strongest (now *that's* some Randian pragmatism right there for you!). But by eating part of an animal that's already been killed, the hyena doesn't have to kill another animal that day, so that animal gets to live, and isn't that one of the 3 Rs, waste not want not, as Quark so well in The Ascent? Then, there's the fact that in actuality lions do their share of scavenging and hyenas do their share of hunting, and the ways in which human morality can't be applied to animals in the first place. Naturally the movie demands a certain level of suspension of disbelief, as many movies do.
But when you get into how many of the kind of people who showed up at OWS were, and that a lot more of the people they were representing by being there, were *also* reviled for their "filthy" low class occupations or lack thereof - in a word, for *scavenging*. In that context I feel like the devaluation of the hyenas's plight risks coming at the cost of dehumanizing the 99%, already out there protesting because it's been dehumanized enough in the first place, and whose lives I believe are also more noble they receive credit for, in the context of how brave the people who live them have to be to get up and continue to face obstacles for their "pack". As for the greater cruelty of the "lions"...
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-12-12 07:45 pm (UTC)It seems to me like it would be the same mental mechanisms that would react when people are uncomfortable about other human beings like transfolk/the intersexed/bisexuals/asexuals who in some way exist outside of traditional gender assumptions.
People don't like to have those boundaries blurred, because they want to be able to rely on them for stability and security, but they don't always think about at whose expense.
I know not everyone who disliked hyenas is a heterosexist bastard, but at the same time, if people can get comfortable with hermaphroditic traits of hyenas, maybe they won't seem to "unnatural" to people when they run into them in other humans.
Hyenas were often reviled by religious authorities, and presented as having demonic associations, because said authorities loved scapegoats that couldn't realistically fight back.
That the same religious authorities also presented other human beings as having demonic associations, again, doesn't prove that someone who dislikes hyenas is even religious.
But if someone is willing to go to the trouble to understand that hyenas play an important role in their ecosystem and that a lot of myths about them based on superficial criteria don't check out from up close, they've developed the same mechanisms that are required to understand that some of the human beings those authorities also demonized may have also played a relevant role in human society, in their own way.
Now for the goosestepping, there's the common misconception that the events leading up to WW2 happened because of something specific to the German character.
After all, they had to have all been sadists or fools unlike any of the rest of us here and now could ever be, even as our society continues to march right back toward fascism today.
It's been demonstrated that human beings can have the same failings in other countries and many decades later.
More than ever, I think it's important for people to understand how far the downtrodden can't be pushed, and how easy it is for the powerful to take advantage of people's unconscious and desperation to manipulate their motivations, no matter when or where they were born.
Which brings us all the way back to the 99% protesters of OWS.
One of the reasons for which RL hyenas are reviled is that they're supposed to be "scavengers", which people find "disgusting" because they eat meat that someone else has already killed before, even though that's what everyone who eats meat and doesn't hunt does.
Not only did the lion already commit the most violent act in those cases by killing the prey in question, and not only do they (unlike hyenas) throw their own children off cliffs so they only have to raise the strongest (now *that's* some Randian pragmatism right there for you!).
But by eating part of an animal that's already been killed, the hyena doesn't have to kill another animal that day, so that animal gets to live, and isn't that one of the 3 Rs, waste not want not, as Quark so well in The Ascent?
Then, there's the fact that in actuality lions do their share of scavenging and hyenas do their share of hunting, and the ways in which human morality can't be applied to animals in the first place.
Naturally the movie demands a certain level of suspension of disbelief, as many movies do.
But when you get into how many of the kind of people who showed up at OWS were, and that a lot more of the people they were representing by being there, were *also* reviled for their "filthy" low class occupations or lack thereof - in a word, for *scavenging*.
In that context I feel like the devaluation of the hyenas's plight risks coming at the cost of dehumanizing the 99%, already out there protesting because it's been dehumanized enough in the first place, and whose lives I believe are also more noble they receive credit for, in the context of how brave the people who live them have to be to get up and continue to face obstacles for their "pack". As for the greater cruelty of the "lions"...