Monsters Are Useful

What makes people feel the need to call something a monster? Fundamentally, we humans are afraid of things we can't understand. But monster is a fairly broad, open-ended term. For instance, we sometimes use the word monster to describe something like bigfoot, a massive humanoid creature, but also to describe microscopic organisms that terrorize their prey in a much different way than the brute force of bigfoot. Sometimes, we even call other humans monsters for their actions. So what then, defines a monster? Essentially, a monster is any thing that looks or behaves in a way we find frightening or don't understand. For the purpose of this paper, I will stick to discussing two types of monsters: mythical and natural.

Mythical monsters always make for a great discussion. Bigfoot, Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, are names we are all familiar with and always seem to pop up in this field. These mythical creatures share a few things in common; they are large, solitary animals that plenty of people claim to have seen, yet there is no real proof that any of them exist , or ever did. So where did these come from? Well, creating this type of monster may actually be quite easy. In fact, you only need one person to confirm the existence of a monster. They can give a general description of its size and other physical characteristics, that other people then hear and visualize themselves. While trying to decide what exactly I defined a monster as, I read a National Geographic article, which had a section discussing that we as humans are “notoriously bad witnesses”. Basically, this means that not only does our vision often play tricks on us, but our memory can also distort what we thought we saw. These two in combination with us can turn a questionable grizzly bear sighting into a confirmed Sasquatch spotting. Again, this ties in to our human nature to want to rationalize things so we go from “I have no clue what that rustling noise outside my tent is” to “it must be bigfoot!” In reality, the jump isn't quite that drastic (hopefully), but the underlying principle holds true. So, based on these human tendencies, combined with a lack of solid evidence of these creatures, we can pretty much rule out any real possibility of their existence.

When we think about monsters, we are naturally inclined to think of the big bad ones, but some natural monsters here on our own earth can be just as interesting, if not more. Our world is teeming with natural monsters: parasites, viruses, and many other crazy plants, animals, and fungi. But we have certainly proven these things to exist, so does that mean they aren't monsters? Quite the opposite actually, they just take on a different meaning to the word. Although we can observe them in everyday life, their actions are what really creep us out. For example, in class, we discussed monsters that would essentially take over a host organism, such as the wasp and the cockroach, and use its body to promote its own survival. Again, this fear comes from our own human nature, because this kind of parasitic relationship isn't a concept that is familiar to humans, so we look as disturbing and grotesque. However, these creatures behave in this way because it is instinctive to them; everything they do is because of pre-encoded instructions in their DNA. Still, they do create some pretty bizarre situations, like rats that aren't afraid of cats, or caterpillars that protect the maggots that just devoured and crawled out of its own body. So, we can assume that these “monsters” are in fact real and living among us.

So what can we take away from this? How is it possible that imaginary beasts and real organisms can both be called monsters? Quite simply, it is because the term monster is a very abstract one. The common theme here is one of fear: mythical monsters are scary because of their size and brutish actions, whereas natural monsters are more fearsome for the way they manipulate their prey to carry out their will. Monsters can help us learn more about ourselves, such as what makes us feel fear. They can also peak our curiosity in hunting for them. Overall, Monsters Are Useful!

Link to Article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/09/130907-cryptid-crytozoology-bigfoot-loch-yeti-monster-abominable-science/