Interlude Man in a Fur Suit
Interlude
Man in a Fur Suit
Transcribed excerpt from The Debunker podcast archives:
Calvin: Humans have long held complicated feelings toward the darkness.
The darkness of the night, the darkness inside of us.
We need it; some of us even crave it. The darkness serves us in a myriad of ways, but we have a primal fear of it all the same.
Nothing is a better example of that than the story of the werewolf.
Half-human, half-beast, a creature who can’t control the darkness inside themselves.
A person who can’t control their baser instincts.
It’s humanity’s worst fear, and it’s human nature in its freest form.
A beast with the cunning of a human and the strength of a wolf.
A werewolf sheds the mask that is humanity and in return regains the title of mighty apex predator.
The myth of the werewolf evolved right alongside humanity. One of those folkloric tales you’d be hard pressed to find an origin for. It’s had many purposes over the years.
Werewolves are a holdover from the days when our world was wilder and monsters lived at the edges of our maps.
Lycanthropy might have been a tale from the days before we knew about genetic conditions and DNA to explain why the members of one family in the village always grew hair all over their bodies.
Werewolves might be a myth to explain a rash of brutal deaths, because a monster in the woods is less frightening than a monster who lives inside your house.
You can shut the door and keep the forest out, but you can’t hide if the beast is locked in with you.
Werewolves feature in cautionary tales that kept kids out of the woods and safe at home when we lived lower on the food chain and deeper in the wilderness.
But aren’t we better than tall tales these days? Can’t we admit that sometimes the worst monsters are people? That those gruesome murders are the work of a human, that we’ve decimated wolves after demonizing them with stories of werewolves? That makes humans the monsters in this story.
I personally think it’s dangerous to make a mythical creature the scapegoat for humanity’s faults. There’s no room for monsters besides man in the modern world.