What would you think about an adult man with the following habits:
- Has absolutely no table manners
- Loves to bully weaker men but runs away from the stronger ones
- Refuses to work and spends his days mostly snoozing
- Eats only meat and despises any kind of vegetables
- Has serious problems accepting authority
- Remembers only facts which concern his own interests, forgets everything else immediately
- Does not ask for consent before sex
- Pees and poops wherever he wants (not in his own house of course)
- Enjoys to kill sometimes for fun (!)
You probably think now something along the lines of „It could not get much worse“.
Now, this is actually not a description of a human but an accurate and quite complete psychogram of my dog Lister.
Interestingly, in spite of all this obvious and serious character flaws he was (he passed away many years ago) actually extremely cute. And on this, 99% of those people who met him agreed.
The question I will try to answer in this blog post is: how can we find a dog with such behavior cute but definitely not a human?
Most people would answer quickly along the lines of „he is an animal, it‘s typical animal behavior and you cannot expect anything else from a dog“. But I think this question ist still interesting.
The reason is: it is reasonable to assume that we don’t find him cute in spite of his flaws but because (!). The reason for this assumption is simple: everything Lister did all day long, was connected to one of the habits listed above. Whatever he did was (to say the least) questionable from a human perspective.
„Cuteness“ is a property which is typically assigned to kids or puppies. Maybe we see in them our own former self. An unfinished self. And it is this unfinishedness - which manifests itself also in selfish behavior - which we find cute. We identify the young not only by their (smaller) size but also from their lack of skills (motoric and intellectual, but - very importantly - also social).
Of course animals can never be finished according to the expectations we have for humans. Therefore they must remain „unfinished“ and cute all life long (which makes them perfect pets).
But we find „unfinished“ adult humans not cute: we believe that humans should learn to understand and apply moral to be able to control their animalistic urges. Failure to do so is considered a serious flaw as the animalistic in us is considered dangerous and must therefore be strictly controlled.
But humans are not dogs! We are a species of deeply social animals and our ancestors were only able to survive thanks to predominantly cooperative behavior. I find it interesting that we start our lives as egoistic kids and become more socially responsible the older we get. I see this as a result of improved consciousness in older age: we slowly discover over the years that helping and supporting others is a deeply fulfilling activity. That there is an invisible bond which connects us to others and that hurting or neglecting others means hurting ourselves.
Therefore I prefer to see antisocial behavior as the result of a poorly developed consciousness. A form of „unfinishedness“ which actually should be perceived as cute!
And maybe it is not our lack of moral which makes us dangerous but our lack of consciousness. Humans are not made to force themselves into renunciation. We all had history in school: moral works only very poorly.
It is probably much more promising to let people learn that they actually enjoy a social lifestyle much more than an antisocial one. That we actually enjoy to be good.
In this sense, our inability to perceive other people as cute, especially those which show antisocial behavior, is a symptom of a problem. Something we should work on if we want the world to improve. Moral people are not fully aware yet of their own (and others!) deep desire and potential to be good and therefore see the need to enforce cooperative behavior with rules. They are scared from dangers they see in themselves. These dangers actually don't really exist but - in a weird way - become real if one is not aware of their inexistence.
The more we become aware of our deepest needs, the less we will need moral. And as a welcome side effect, we could - in a hopefully not too distant future - learn to enjoy the animalistic side in us again. Moral is boring (always was).
Image on top: DALLE-3
Image of Lister: © Author
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