“Bring the coon-skin home and hang it on the wall” LBJ

[coberst]

“Bring the coon-skin home and hang it on the wall” LBJ

This West Texas home spun hunting language brings us clarity as to our human propensities dressed in the animal motivations driving human viciousness.

We have an animal nature that drives us to aggress on the world in order to gain the energy-power to conquer our inner most unconscious motivations. Basically power is derived from food; as we study more primitive societies we see that power is derived not from food alone but also from the sacrificial meal.

Being a meat-eating hunter, man has naturally incorporated the power of other animals within him self. Being a particularly weak animal, humans have become very sensitive to the nature and source of power: we are the only animal conscious of death and thus are sensitive to our great need of power for self-perpetuation.

We became aware of the two sources of power: physical and symbolic. Trophy taking, as LBJ alludes to, was part of power acquisition. We humans have always taken and proudly displayed animal parts that were killed in the hunt as a manifestation of our bravery and skill. These displays provided social honor and created in others fear and respect.

The animal skins gave comfort and power; the scalps of the enemy is, I guess, all a part of this motivation; it was all “powerful medicine”, “which contained the spiritual powers of the object they belonged to…so trophies were a major source of protective power: they shielded one from harm, and could also use them to conjure up evil spirits and exorcise them.”

An additional and very important aspect of this activity was the visible proof of survivorship, i.e. by winning the contest I manifested proof that the gods favored me above other. Therein we can glimpse just why trophy hunting and display was an obsession among more primitive peoples as well as our modern society. Therein I display power over life and death.

“The ability to wage war and to impose collective human sacrifice has remained the identifying mark of all sovereign power throughout history…Why has mankind remained locked into such a demonism of power throughout history?. It is based on a continuation of the anxiety of primitive man in the face of his overwhelming world; the megamachine tries to generate enough power to overcome basic human helplessness…Once you start an arms race, you are consumed by it. This is the tragic fallacy of power that it leads to a fundamental distortion of reality.”

In our human quest to safe guard our self and our megamachine we are willing to sacrifice almost anything. “This is why the megamachine represents the major historical challenge facing western man; to see through it and get control of it is the focal problem of human survival in our time.”