The Vanishing Human

Animated storytelling has become quite popular over the decades. The stories are warped in reality and delivered through a series of characters, especially animals, which are given a voice and personality to establish a connection and convey a message.

Starting from an early 70’s character of Robin Hood, a singing fox who makes being an outlaw look like so much fun to the Baloo, a bear in contemporary The Jungle Book, who takes best care of ‘man-cub’ Mowgli, the human traits have constantly been impersonated to suit the ends of the narrative. Such symbolism of animals in visual storytelling is known as anthropomorphism— “the attribution of human form or other human characteristics to any nonhuman object”.

The question pops up: Why is there a need for such an anthropomorphized animal projection, laced with human-like emotions and motivations? If animals are shown as the ones adhering to human attributes, like compassion or altruism, why are humans divorcing the same traits? And that too, very fast?

Of course, there is a general malaise around that puts skepticism on high about the relevance of human attributes. Perhaps the everyday events and situations are throwing up certain surprising lessons that mock the essence of these very traits. It seems like they are losing their value in the fast-paced world.

The growing intolerance, clubbed with gory violence, is the issue that has placed the notion of “humanness” in a controversial crucible. And if it’s just that simple, it’s both about fire of devastation, and then a hail of death. A harrowing account of the damage wrought by the politics of deceit. The minds that dare to question getting castigated to the maximum. The religions that guided being demonized and demeaned to the extent of absurdity.  The stormy evils of doublespeak and manipulation, from men down to their media, that discredit the human traits blatantly.

As a result, average human beings no longer put across a call that can stimulate the possibility of perfectly happy worlds in their ordinary lives. People lose the balance amidst the world’s dichotomy. There is this dull and dreary ride down the heartless trajectory of their existence, which has reduced the human traits to travesty. That’s why, more and more interchanging of humans with animals, the transfer of meaning to nonhuman creatures—Dogs are more faithful than men; cats are more loving than us; lions are more quick than leaders; foxes are more clever than rebels; bears are more generous than individual custodians; and so on.

Whatever, it smacks of pathetic fallacy. A miserable moving into the world that is getting blindly ruthless, utterly malicious and shamelessly inhuman. From soft targeting of persons to bombing of sacred religious places, and claptrap of infamous writers to riotous TV anchors and their ilk—the world has actually gone gaga. Humans are failing to remain human. Perhaps because our conscience has drowned in a sea of malice.

Yes, all human beings are oscillators. Our commitments and convictions are rickety. We vacillate. We waver. Move randomly. Change constantly. And never keep time of our biased alterations. But that constant, complex turn-coating is the process of human debasement itself made visible. There seems absolutely no hope of reclamation—of all that defines a human being as a throbbing, thinking entity.

That’s why there is this crack in all of us, in our souls. It drains out all the goodness and empties our reservoirs of humanness. We are robbed of our ‘own-ness’. And are left broke.

Finally, what we are left with is just “a brutality of thought and mistrust of subtlety”, to quote Frantz Fanon.  This phrase captures a world where nuanced thinking has given way to crude, polarized judgments. In such a space, complex truths are sidelined and simplistic binaries dominate. This perverse brutality stifles empathy, deep understanding and meaningful discourse, whipping up division and reinforcing mistrust across communities and ideas.

What remains is a harshness of thought—rigid, unforgiving—paired with a deep mistrust of nuance and complexity, as Fanon observed. It’s a world where empathy is overshadowed by brutal simplicity.