The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris

“…In little more than a single century from 1820 to 1945, no less than fifty-nine million human animals were killed in inter-group clashes of one sort or another…. We describe these killings as men behaving “like animals,” but if we could find a wild animal that showed signs of acting this way, it would be more precise to describe it as behaving like men.”

In the book The Human Zoo, Desmond Morris compares the human inhabitants of a city to the animal inhabitants of a zoo, which have their survival needs provided for, but at the cost of living in an unnatural environment.

He shines the light on the problems of living in a city and how it affects our health, social life, feelings of boredom, isolation and so much more. It is truly a fascinating book, and one that is sure to change your perspective on how we are meant to be living. I highly advise everyone to read this book so that you get a better understanding of what a more peaceful and calmer life could look like.

You should by all means read this book for yourself. Below, I have written out my book notes, but I couldn’t cover hundreds of pages in just a couple of bullet points. That is why I highly encourage you to create your notes whilst going through the book, and for the time being use mine as a guide on what this book is about.

For more books check out Best Self-Improvement Books or Best Classic Books, and for a full self-improvement guide, you can also take a look at my Roadmap to Overman.

Book Notes

• Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from obesity, from homosexual pair-bonds, or commit murder.
• There are benefits to living in a zoo. The zoo world, like a gigantic parent, protects its inmates: food, drink, shelter, hygiene and medical care are provided; the basic problems of survival are reduced to a minimum. As a human, having an essentially exploratory, inventive brain, you will not be able to relax for very long without doing anything.

Tribes and Super-tribes:

• One of the biggest breakthroughs for human kind is farming. For the first time there was constant and reliable food surplus. The creation of this surplus was the key that was to unlock the gateway to civilization. At last, the human tribe could support more members than were required to find food.
• Reconsidering the idea that ‘the law forbids men to do only what their instincts incline them to do’, we might re-word it to the effect that ‘the law forbids men to do only what the artificial conditions of civilization drive them to do’.
• There is an intrinsic, biological property of the human animal that obtains deep satisfaction from being thrown into the urban chaos of a super-tribe. That quality is man’s insatiable curiosity, his inventiveness, his intellectual athleticism. Human animal is intellectually aroused by massing in dense urban communities. They are breeding colonies of ideas. It keeps the system going despite its many disadvantages.
• In a village all the neighbours are personal friends or, at worst, personal enemies; none are strangers. In a large city many people do not even know the names of their neighbours.

Status and Super-status:

• The only solutions is to find a brilliant, rational, balanced, deep-thinking, brain housed in a glamorous, flamboyant, self-assertive, colorful personality for a leader. The size of the super-tribe, which causes the problem in the first place, also offers literally millions of potential candidates.
• True friendship can only be fully expressed between members of roughly the same status level.
• A good tribal leader knows exactly what is happening in every corner of his group. A super-tribal leader, hopelessly isolated by his lofty position of super=status, and totally preoccupied by the machinery of power, rapidly becomes cut off.
• The male status-seeker who indulges in an excess of dominance mimicry is often driven to neglect his family. This forces his mate to take over the masculine parental role in the home. Taking such a step provides a psychologically damaging atmosphere for the children, which can easily warp their own sexual identities when they mature.
• The early hunter had a kinship with animals. He respect them. But the moment that urban populations began to develop, large groups of human beings became cut off from direct contact with animals, and the respect was lost. As civilizations grew, so did man’s arrogance. He shut his eyes to the fact that he was just as much as animal as any other species. A great gulf appeared: now only he had a soul and other animals did not.
• But even the least experienced zoo director would never contemplate crowding and cramping a group of animas to the extent that man has crowded and cramped himself in his modern cities and towns.

Sex and Super-sex

The ten functional categories are these:

1. Procreation Sex
2. Pair-formation Sex

The pair-formation function of sexual behavior is so important for our species that nowhere outside the pairing phase do sexual activities regularly reach such a high intensity. It is because of this that casual copulations frequently create so many problems.

3. Pair-maintenance Sex

This distinction between the pair-forming and pair-maintenance functions of sexual activity is clearly illustrated whenever the members of a long-established mated pair are separated from one another for a period of time by war, business, or some other external demand.

These first three categories together make up the primary reproductive function of human sexual behavior.

4. Physiological Sex
5. Exploratory Sex

There is one drawback. The urge for novelty can be satisfied not only by exploring new patterns but also by exploring new partners.

6. Self-rewarding Sex

Extreme cases of sexual athleticism can prove so exhausting that there is little energy left for anything else, and the pattern of living becomes unbalanced, just as extreme indulgence in feeding can cause serious obesity and loss of physical health, and extreme obsession with aesthetic problems can lead to a damaging disregard for other aspects of social life. In humans this means an urban society, with food supplied, enemies eliminated, and it is there, not surprisingly, that we find the examples of animal hyper-sexuality.

7. Occupational Sex

Savage and prolonged masturbation is typical of this phenomenon, perhaps involving tearing of the skin, or the insertion of sharp objects into the genital tracts. But driven to extremes of boredom, they may resort to Occupations Sex of a drastic kind. Some male monkeys become obsessional masturbators.

8. Tranquillizing Sex

Instead of being anti-boredom, it is anti-turmoil. When faced with an overdose of strange, conflicting, unfamiliar or frightening stimuli, the individual seeks escape in the performance of friendly old familiar patterns that serve to calm his shattered nerves. Trivial actions such as smoking a cigarette, chewing gum, or taking a drink, help to pacify the anxious. Tranquilizing Sex operates in the same way.

9. Commercial Sex

It is a straightforward commercial transaction.

10. Status Sex

The actions performed are still sexual actions, but they are no longer sexually motivated. Dominance has made a take-over bid for them. Status Sex has, in fact, evolved as a bloodless substitute for the bloody violence of direct domination and aggression. It is only in our overgrown super-tribes, where the status ladder stretches right up into the clouds and the pressures of maintaining or improving a position in the social hierarchy have become so immense, that Status Sex has got out of hand and gone to lengths that are so bloody as pure aggression itself.

We could indulge in lengthy erotic escapades with anyone, at any time, without the slightest repercussions. As it is, it seems as if our basic animal nature will always stand in the way of this development, or will at least discourage it until such time as we have undergone some radical genetical change.

In-groups and Out-groups

• Wild animals in their natural environment do not habitually slaughter large numbers of their own kind. The status struggles between established members of over-crowded groups of zoo animals are bad enough, but, as every zoo-man knows, the situation is even worse when one tries to introduce newcomers to such a group.

Imprinting and Mal-imprinting

• Whereas traumas are concerned with painful, negative, experiences, imprinting is a positive process. Becoming attached to a mother, a child, or a mate are three of the most vital bits of learning that we can undergo in our entire lives and it is these that have been singled out for the special assistance that the phenomenon of imprinting gives.
• They young baby cannot keep close to the mother by following her like a duckling, but it can achieve the same end by the use of the smiling pattern. Smiling is attractive to the mother and encourages her to stay with the infant and play with it. Infants that are well fed and cleaned, but are deprived of the ‘loving’ of early imprinting, can suffer anxieties that stay with them for the rest of their lives.
• The act of falling in love has all the properties of an imprinting process.
• There are many examples of this kind, clearly linking the adult fetish to the first sexual experience.

The Stimulus Struggle

• Like the human zoo, the animal zoo provides its occupants with the security or regular food and water, protection from the elements and freedom from natural predators. In this highly artificial condition, zoo animals, too, are forced to switch from the struggle for survival to the Stimulus Struggle.

The Childlike Adult

• Two basic kinds of exploration: panic exploration and security exploration. During the chaos and upheaval of war, a human community may be driven to inventiveness to surmount the disasters it faces. Alternatively, a successful, thriving community may be highly exploratory, striking out from its strong position of increased security. It is the community that is just managing to scrape along that will show little or no urge to explore.
• The politicians, the administrators and the other super-tribal leaders are good social mathematicians, but his is not enough. In what promises to be the ever more crowded world of the future, they must become good biologists as well, because somewhere in all that mass of wire, cables, plastics, concrete, bricks, metal and glass which they control, there is an animal, a human animal, a primitive tribal hunter, masquerading as civilized, super-tribal citizen and desperately struggling to match his ancient inherited qualities with his extraordinary new situation.