The true monsters

I was just looking through my phone pictures from last semester, and I happened to find a picture of this baby rabbit starring at me. In my memory, me and my friends were trying to get closer to this rabbit for a better picture, but the rabbit ended up running away from our presence. Reminiscing back to that day, and other similar incidences, I came to a thought related to Oedipus. Have you realized that we are afraid of non-human creatures, such as mosquitoes, cockroaches, rats, tigers, and even the harmless creatures such as pigeons and cats on the streets? We believe that the monsters are the creatures that are not us, but it might be the other way around.

In one point of the discussion last Tuesday, Professor Baldwin looked at my face, and asked me, what the third monster of Oedipus Trilogy was, after the dragon that fought Cadmus, and Sphinx. I came up with the correct answer: Oedipus. The more monsters that the characters encountered, the more it became like a human. In the end, it took a stature of a human being. I am sure that I am not the only individual that established this thought, or I have probably even read or heard it somewhere, yet “Oedipus Trilogy” implies that human beings are the ugliest monsters, because we are so sophisticated and cultured. Without sophistication and civilization, we behave based on our instincts. Look at the animals that we consider as ‘monsters’ for example. Mosquitoes only suck our bloods, because they have to survive. Rats dig through garbage, because they have to survive. Same with other creatures, they have to survive. Now, look at how mankind has changed over time. When mankind was only Neanderthal, or even older, we based our lives on instincts, hunting animals for survival and cutting plants and fruits, for survival. Yet, with the invention of fire, language, money and other simple ones, civilization is placed in our cultures, and we formed formal societies. The problem rooted here. Civilization taught us comfort, and divided us in social classes. People naturally developed greed, and THAT developed as our instincts. Like Oedipus’s desire to walk around fate, our greed is to succeed and deny what we were in the beginning; one that is not as great as what we are born as. This desire makes us destroy and take away from others, and makes us the real monsters, like how Oedipus walked right into his fate. Now we destroy what the original ‘monsters’, such as the animals and insects had in the beginning; the survival instinct. We do not let them be themselves anymore. In fact, we do not even let the others be themselves anymore, for our own sake of comfort, not survival. Despite the fact that we could think about this reality and criticize it, it seems like that is something that’s too late to be changed in our society.