In a world that’s always trying to collar and sanitize us, this a blog about the importance of embracing our innate wildness — and understanding when to express it appropriately.
Let’s start with some interesting facts about pigs and the great state of Texas. And not because “all men are pigs” but because nature, in all its wisdom, offers some of the best metaphors. So, yes, pigs are cute when they’re the size of Babe. Typically, they are domesticated farm animals residing in notoriously disgusting dwellings and either get turned into half of a breakfast or an addition to a cheeseburger. Yet, should they escape captivity and this comestible destiny, they grow longer hair, longer tusks, and become feral, ferocious while fucking and reproducing at an astonishing rate.
Much like us, pigs’ ancestors are wild, and it appears that a fence, food, and a farmer are all that stand between them and freedom, endless sex, and ravaging crops while foraging for food. No place in the world is more affected than Texas, where the majority of America’s 6.5 million wild pigs live and cause approximately $2.5 billion in damages each year.
Now, part of the reason for this is a genetic phenomenon called neoteny, in which creatures retain juvenile characteristics depending on their environment, and will quickly mature given certain conditions. In other words, the environment plays a role in the pig’s phenotype (physical appearance).
When a pig no longer has the nurturing hand of farmer Joe feeding it a steady and balanced diet, and it’s out in the wild facing predators and struggling for everything, stress levels increase their testosterone and they become amped-up versions of themselves, ready to survive and thrive!
Now, maybe it’s the mood I’m in these days, feeling a little caged up in the dead and dark of winter, but doesn’t this sound at least a bit like our own lives?
Good ol’ government provides the security and systems that keep us safe. Mom and Dad are doing the child-rearing and hovering over to ensure we don’t get our hands too dirty. Schools tether us to tiny desks to keep us out of trouble and wet behind the ears. All systems work in concert to position us on our society’s conveyor belt — that eradicates our personal agency and shapes us into worker bees and “model citizens.”
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of good in understanding and living by the rules of civility and society (which I’ll get into momentarily), but what good might also come from continuing to empower our wilder side?
What super strengths do we deny ourselves by not testing our physical limits more regularly?
What sharp instincts are dulled when we outsource our faculties to institutions?
What limits to our courage, opportunity and self-reliance do we lose when we’re afraid of the hardship of failure and instead choose the security encouraged to us by parents and government bureaucrats?
What confidence and empowerment do we deny ourselves when we’re afraid to bite the hands that feed us so we keep our mouths shut and fall in line?
And what self-awareness do we never discover when we protect ourselves vulnerability?
What is lost if we remain dependent on the creature comforts and conveniences of modern life? Are the upper limits of our true potential not, in a way, trapped by them? Trapped by archaic systems that are compromised, corroded, and arguably collapsing.
What sharp instincts are dulled when we outsource our faculties to institutions?
My argument here is that yes, to a very real extent, they are, and we need to be more like domesticated pigs that become wild again.
We need to not be among, as Thoreau says, “the mass of men [that] lead lives of quiet desperation,” and as Oliver Wendell Holmes concludes, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘and go to the grave with the song still in them.’
But instead, explore the thresholds of our wildness in a domesticated world. To do this is an intentional, and even spiritual and metaphysical, practice that empowers us to open and know ourselves better (the outer limits of our human psyche and potential). It is by going beyond the palisades of daily routines and habits that keep us in a society-shaped box that we find a connection with our wildness, and the entire texture of our life can be transformed.
To suffer, test ourselves, and learn what is and what can be is the bedrock of personal growth. In fact, it is the true testament to your love and trust in life that you’re willing to freefall into the unknown and untamed wilderness of yourself and the world around you. To live in this way is to honour the gift of life itself.
Run fast and hard every now and again. Sleep on the forest floor. Plunge into icy river water. Challenge your emotions, mental biases and blind spots with a therapist or life coach. Bare your soul around a fire with comrades. Bare your soul to your partner. Eat with your hands outside (all food tastes better outside anyway). Go on a trip spontaneously. Start a mini garden. Talk to people who don’t share your views and try to learn something new. Climb a mountain barefoot. Dance. In fact, dance your ass off every now and again. Eat fresh and wild food from a farmers’ market. Ask someone who hunts to take you with them, even just once. If you don’t eat meat, then forage for mushrooms and vegetables, even just once. Respond to someone in a way that’s unexpected — saying the things up front and out loud instead of wishing you had said them — after the fact. Be naked in a natural hot spring or hot tub. Scream. Scream into a large valley or just into a pillow. Let your partner tie you to your bed and play with you, interrogation style. Okay, that one’s optional (but highly recommended).
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
- Henry David Thoreau
But too much wildness is also not a good thing either. It calls in the law of diminishing returns. As we know, unchecked in their wildness, pigs have ransacked the forests and farms of Texas, spreading disease and destruction. Unchecked, our own wildness can spiral into a life so totally out of control that our empowerment becomes disempowerment. Unhinged, our wild sexual desire can turn exhibitionist and injurious, our survival instinct can turn barbaric and tribal, and our nourishment can turn to gluttony.
This is why we should also aspire to be gentlemen.
What do we love about gentlemen? Gentlemen portray a quiet yet strong presence. A presence that is cultivated through their poise and humility. We feel respect from them. The respect and value a gentleman commands of himself, he shares equally among all. They are reliable and trustworthy. Hence the ‘a gentleman’s agreement.’ In fact there is even ‘gentleman’s rules’ in war.
A gentleman will never force someone to share their beliefs, conform, or bend to his will. He can hold the space for others to be themselves while remaining steadfast and true to who he is. In such a manner, gentlemen are honest and feel safe to be around.
We also love the composure and grace of gentlemen.
A gentleman may feel the urgency to get somewhere, but will still take the time to open the door for his passenger.
He may feel the force of lust for a woman but maintain self-control. Although epicurean, he is not ravenous in his pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment of the delicious fruits of life.
A gentleman can embody his shadow self and integrate it into his life — tapping into it when necessary. He achieves freedom through disciplined action. Gentlemanly behaviour provides the social architecture of a functioning and equanimous relationship between people, situations, and the environment.
It’s not binary but, instead, a circular relationship. A gentleman knows when to push back and use his hand to tap into the wildness!
This is why we idolize the fearless, yet disciplined, warrior and honour the strong, yet stoic, king. We idolize the well-mannered hitman and both civil and heated discourse of the powerful statesmen. They all represent the actions and expressions of wildness and self-mastery we crave ourselves.
As teenagers and adults, we have so few avenues to express our wildness and hone our understanding of, and relationship with, it. Sports is one avenue where we can be aggressive and sportsmanlike, almost simultaneously. That diminishes over time as life commitments take precedence and we cage ourselves in suburbia, routines, imbalanced power dynamics (especially in work and finances), and safety nets. Still, we yearn for this dichotomy of wildness and embodied willpower.
“I tell you: One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” Friedrich Nietzsche – Last Man
If we do not learn to embody these opposites powers, we’ll vicariously live them through societal vices. These vices, however, are ultimately pacifiers, designed to make us “perceive” the sensations associated with instinctual wildness and self-control while not actually teaching us how to experience them. This is a distortion of our innate cognitive capabilities that has metastasized across our cultural in a seeming attempt to control.
When we learn to channel our wildness, through our poised and gentlemanly behaviour, it becomes a superpower — one that will enable us to survive and thrive in the real world.
By and large, western society will not teach us to tap into this wildness, nor will it guide us in the conduct of gentlemanly behaviours. Instead, it generally teaches us to fall in line, socially engineering us to be placid and ultimately submissive. There is something larger and pernicious in the realization that social systems are designed to disconnect us from the real world under the notion that we can’t handle it and therefore must be protected from it. I, for one, reject that notion. Like the pigs, we are innately capable to do what we must. We can handle what we are taught to handle. We can rise to any occasion.
It is in this spirit that we must rewire ourselves back to personal sovereign power — where we live and embrace a healthy balance of freedom and wildness, discipline, and self-control. Harness both our ability to survive and thrive as well as coexist, collaborate and comply.
We must seek these lessons for ourselves if they are not offered to us. Learn from those who are wild and learn from those who are gentlemanly.
When we learn to channel our wildness, through our poised and gentlemanly behaviour, it becomes a superpower — one that will enable us to survive and thrive in the real world.
I fear that even writing about tapping into your wildness cheapens it and tames it. It’s a personal experience. But the point is to let go and free yourself from the weighty shackles of conformity and security and dip your beautiful big toe in the waves of freedom and wildness. The safety of the pig pen is, after all, a delusion. Pigs get butchered in the end.
Taste the wildness. See if that dormant gene that connects you all the way back to your wild ancestors can be sparked back alive.
We must become feral gentlemen.
