"The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear- fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable, what he wants above everything else is safety." -Henry Louis Mencken
In the Land crab by Margaret Atwood the characteristics of fear and aggression are imaged as "soft gut" and "hard bone" of a land crab to represent our defensive and vulnerable sides as humans. We extinguish the fact that we have this fight or flight instinct in ourselves because we refuse to believe that underneath our language, morals, and conscience that we are animals. Our fear is emphasized with this refusal of being an animal by having this hard shell we refuse to look underneath, Margaret Atwood represents this with the allusion of a "nightmare" symbolizing what we don't want to see in ourselves.
"When we're afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators repression." -Marjane Satrapi
Does this make us the "dictators" of ourselves? Our fear causes us to repress the fact that we are mammals, we are animals on this earth. With dictating this quality we have, does this cause our fear and aggression characteristics? If we accepted both sides of ourselves as humans would our decision making be altered?
Even though we have this "nightmare" that terrifies us, we have to remember that a nightmare is short term, it's not always there. Which is like our animal instincts, it's not constantly activated. We have more qualities than this, we think about the future rather than just the present, we think about the consequences of our actions, and even if we react to things without our conscious awareness we remember how it affected others so that we can fix it if it wasn't the way we wanted it to be.
The Land crab in the poem represents the negative connotations of a human, we try to extinguish this parallelism but our harsh environment causes us to have this "hard shell" as well.
Fear can only control you if you let it to be. What makes us different is that we can control this instinct. We can choose to be fearful or choose to overcome and realize our hard shell can push us through the barrier we had. We have the knowledge to realize if the situation is worth being fearful about, and realize that we are capable of changing the outcome.
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