The unhuman is the counter-weight to the human—and for nearly all modern men, the deficit of the former is mutating them into abominations.

Today, 4 out of 5 Americans live in urban areas.

In the 1970s, 1 in 20.

This demographic shift, poorly studied, has been one of the great vectors of modernity’s collective mental illness (1 in 4 Americans currently suffer from a mental illness).

And a vast majority of these deformations of the spirit have a common cause: a deficit of the unhuman.

Consider what the average wage-slave encounters during his day.

He wakes to a few beams of sunlight filtering through his blinds before puttering around his 99% inorganic hovel as he summons the courage to head to work.

His commute offers little respite from the barrage of the artificial: building upon building as far as the eye can see, cars zipping past, street lights, turn signals, the sound and smell of engines, interspersed with a decade-old yews lining the more picturesque sections of his route.

In his office, his senses are assaulted by hard lines, dull colors, and steel.

Upon his return home, he waters the plants on his balcony, orders food in, and devours his meal while listening to Joe Rogan reminiscing about his latest hunting trip in Newfoundland.

Save for the sky peering between the skyscrapers, the human drowns him—its neat myths, its artificial desires, the artificial jockeying for prestige, the edifying stories, and the complex, labyrinthine beliefs that underpin and drive these sprawling urban centers and the equally Byzantine minds of those who dwell within them.

The unhuman pierces through that world and reveals it as the make-believe story that it truly is.

At one level, nothing matters. It’s all so much building of castles in the sand.

My Rhodesian Ridgeback, Kleos, doesn’t care if I drive a BMW, bring back a smoking hot girl every other night, or get promoted to C-level at my corporate job. He doesn’t care about my existential freak-outs over whether it’s ethical to lie to my ruthless boss or if monarchy is the necessary step forward in our fractured and fractious time. He doesn’t care about the great films of Kurosawa or my lamenting of a sloppy translation of The Iliad I picked up at a second-hand book shop.

These concerns, to him, are phantasms of my mind that he cannot fathom.

He has his own worries—the mailman, whether I feed him on time in the morning and evening, when his next walk will be and when he’ll be unleashed and allowed to roam through the woods besides my home, the squirrels that dare violate the airspace above our home via power lines, the semi-stray dog outside my gated neighborhood who takes special joy in annoying him.

These are the bare facts and concerns of his existence, and much of what I cherish most deeply is inaccessible and irrelevant to him.

The post-modernists are right, but they don’t quite go far enough. It is not that everything is socially constructed. That is far too edifying an assessment. It whispers seductively into our ears, “You, human, great god of the universe, are the architect all that is via the power of language and symbol! Rejoice in your might and majesty! Stars ten million light-years away, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, and the sun that rises and sets each day are beholden to the stories we tell ourselves.”

Rather, it’s that this is all an expression of the boundless Oneness, refracted through the prism of our senses and the structures embedded in the mind through which these stories emerge and scaffold themselves.

The papaya trees, the pumpkins creeping across my garden floor, the morning glory sprawling over my fence, and the roses basking in the sun and giving off their fragrance with inexhaustible generosity have even less concern for these human troubles, concepts, and concerns—because they are not invested in and capable of participating in the human world. They are unhuman.

And with that ignorance and indifference, they represent a tiny taste of freedom from the oppressive, silly concepts that so-often suck-up so much of our time, our energy, and our lives in their pursuit.

The un in unhuman reflects an active role. Inhuman is simply the opposite of human. Unhuman is the active resistance of the human. By its sheer presence, it draws us into its orbit and erodes the edifices of our mind.

The world of the jungle or the forest, precincts relatively unspoilt by human presence, are the black holes of the human. These burgeoning scenes, teeming with beetles, serpents, poisonous creepers, and bears, show even less interest in that world. My papaya tree and my dog, at least, depend upon me for regular feeding and care. The jungles beside my home, however, can continue on in perpetuity regardless of me—so long as we don’t tear it down to construct a new housing development or fields of cassava or corn.

And this indifference to the human, to our ethics, our concepts, our rationalizations, our stories, our needs, our longing for prestige and recognition, and the internal dramas and politics that preoccupy so much of our time, is its saving grace.

The unhuman doesn’t care. It reveals in its indifference the fabricated, fantastic nature of these endeavors.

The human world is necessary. Ideals are necessary. Morality is necessary. The careful training and channeling of the human instincts towards pro-social ends is necessary. Without it, we would remain as children, beholden to our every impulse.

Take sexual desire. If it weren’t for the mores, laws, and institutions to enforce expected sexual behaviors, unbridled desire would spell the swift end of any civilization. The population would explode. Fights would break out over mates and vengeance over rapes and other violations. Children would be poorly cared for.

Within a few generations, an entire population would collapse.

We have developed highly sophisticated ways of dealing with this desire, couched in myth and symbols, encoded in laws, executed by a security & judicial apparatus, and pressurized by a citizenry that abhors certain violations.

Yet submerged in our human world with no break or perspective to the increasingly Byzantine values, taboos, and desires that we have carved out for ourselves, we have suffocated ourselves. The fresh air of the forest no longer flows a hundred floors underground and behind doorways and down corridors. We rot away in the stench of our own bodies, huddled together, nodding in unison about how just and righteous we are.

The desire has dried up—and this is a direct consequence of the tenuous connection we maintain to wild tamarind trees and orangutans.

The unhuman world is both alien and elemental. It responds to more basic instincts and intuitions, which, so often, the human works to cover up, channel, repurpose, and divert in more “pro-social” ways. The irrigation of desire is necessary, but when we drift too far from the unhuman, vast swathes of young men end up obsessed with furry porn, demand litter boxes in the bathroom, and are incapable of having sex with other flesh-and-blood humans.

Nearly half of Gen-Z has never had sex, and those who are getting laid increasingly join bizarre, niche communities dedicated to an increasingly depraved sliver of the dirty deed. Midgets. Children. Bestiality. Incest. Pokemon being turned into salami (not a joke). Toasters.

How could sexual desires be diversifying so rapidly whilst they wither away?

The answer: the over-regulation and attenuation of desire.

Immersed in an increasingly solipsistic, inhuman, ideological, and moralistic world, the channels for those desires are diverted through increasingly complex, bloated systems before reaching their end. We have become psychological technocrats, outsourcing our decisions to internal committees and “what would my IG followers think of me for this” PR agents.

The irrigation of desire is necessary, but the distance from impulse to action stretches, the more inefficiencies are introduced to the system.

The aqueducts that carry water from the Colorado River to Los Angeles traverse over a thousand miles, crossing mountains and deserts, before finally streaming out of a tap. Along the way, roughly 90% of that water was lost to the elements, leaky pipes, and illegal taps.

The same inefficiencies now suck dry the souls of countless modern men. We have become too domesticated, too controlled, too thoughtful, too cultured, too managed. Like our bloated governments, we have invited all sorts of vultures into our hearts in the name of morality. In the end, by the time the floodgates of desire reach the final outlet, only a trickle escapes.

Now, you have The Ethical Slut, consent, the complexity of power-relations, the need for gender parity, non-violent communication, protection from sexual disease and unwanted pregnancy, the need to match porn stars and deliver out-of-this world sensual pleasure to the partner, the increasingly niche sexual proclivities that generate a sexual response, the need to be over 6-feet, highly athletic, and with a Scandinavian flare, and an even longer list of shoulds that harry every man as he hunts and devours his prey.

Is it any wonder that people are having so little sex? That desire has become so minutely precise yet fruitless?

Soon, you’ll have to apply for a license from the state to be permitted to engage in the act, with, of course, a mandatory 6-week training course and test, prior to being allowed to engage in the most primal and essential of human activities.
The correction to this sickness is simple: return to nature.

Not in some abstract, go do Ayahuasca with a shaman in the Amazon sense—although this reflex is very much a reaction to the ennui and alienation so broadly felt, but in a concrete and consistent way: invite nature back into your life. Invite the unhuman back into our lives.

Achieving this at scale is currently impossible in most countries, but even if we can’t go full Uncle Ted (which, in fact, I don’t advise), we can take small steps to summon the unhuman and allow its inexorable pull to drag us into its orbit—channeling the sanity & perspective it brings along with it.

Grow a garden. Raise a dog, a few chickens, and a goat. Spend as much time as possible under the stars, the sun, and the canopy. Run in the woods. Lift in the sun. Spend weekends trekking through the mountains that loom on the horizon. Hunt. Fish. Forage for mushrooms.

Escape from your concrete, overly lit cell. Cleave to the wild. Let its loam, its shadows, and its scorching sun fire your nerves, polish the brightness in your eyes, and excite the blood rushing through your extremities, the chambers of your heart, the capillaries in your lungs.

Step outside this overly-curated, ossified world of ideas, mores, expectations, demands, status, and stories. Step outside the human, and let the unhuman air work its magic upon you.