Ritual and the Subversion of Choice
I like to hunt big game. While there are many youtube personalities and exhibitionists who advocate a return to some arbitrary level of savagery, the reader may rest assured this essay has little to do with any of that noise. Nor will I romanticize or wax poetic about an activity that is only occasionally romantic and devoid of poetry entirely (if that fact is not obvious already it will obtrude itself the first time you spend five still hours in the cold wind or are elbow-deep in congealed blood), nor is it a treatise on the philosophy of the sport. There are many people who say many things about it, but this essay is about a singular element of the sport that I've never read or heard about from others, at least not precisely in these terms. I've never been on a professionally-guided hunt. After achieving what I'd call a certain level of competence I've only hunted locally and either solo or occasionally in a cooperative, spread-out group. The idea of a guided hunt has never appealed to me. It is not that I resent the exclusivity of it or any such thing (though if I'm honest I don't have the money for a safari), but rather I think it spoils perhaps the best element of the sport. Namely, the fact that it is not ritualized, choreographed or some contrived derivative of the hero's journey. It lacks ritual and contrivance entirely: you are guaranteed no outcome, there is no predictable climax, no buildup, no story structure, no roads or buildings that others have set down for you to follow, and it is by and large wholly unpredictable. Most striking of all though, you have a full continuum of choice and a definite objective that does not involve any third party. How often does one truly experience this in any significant context? One's set of choices in modern day-to-day life is nearly always discretized, often deliberately by someone else. Your choices of employer, political party, bank, auto loan, college, major, minor, appliances, consumer elecronics, entertainment, the route you take from point A to point B, so on and so forth. All represent a finite array of choices that have been set before you with the implication that you must make a choice from one of them.
The curious thing is, one is never apprehensive about making choices while hunting. It comes naturally. I have to laugh when I hear terms like "decision fatigue." There is no such thing. People aren't fatigued by making choices, they are fatigued by being so often forced to choose from a set of terrible choices and having to accept responsibility for whatever they pick. In effect, we are presented with a finite set of decisions, all favorable not to ourselves but whoever set them before us, and finally cadged or gaslighted to accept responsibility for the whole thing. Any residual anxiety is explained away as mental illness e.g. "decision fatigue" and possibly medicated with SSRIs or benzos which blunt one's senses further. We are then placated with pomp and ritual that lends the whole show a veneer of significance and importance. How often do people consider just how domesticated humanity has become? I'm not necessarily asking the reader to go hunt. In fact, I prefer they don't, as the game gets harder in direct proportion to hunting pressure. If you do though, then you'll be most welcome in this ancient fraternity. In terms of diversity and inclusion, it puts any college or tech company to absolute shame, though you'll rarely hear anyone making a song and dance about it. Go figure. Rather, if you only have one choice put before you, then your lack of agency is quite apparent. Put two choices before someone and they are much less suspicious. Three or four, one feels the gravity of this cut-the-blue-wire situation and starts to take themselves very seriously, yet one feels something quite wrong about it all the same. I'm sure this is a basic principle of some such area of psychology and that I'm not saying anything new. Yet it's not the illusion of choice itself, but an illusion that subverts choice, constraining one's attention to an inferior simulacrum thereof by sheer grandiosity alone. It encourages complacence and undermines purpose, agency and liberty.
A nature walk or hike is nothing whatsoever like hunting. When you go on a hike, you are simply a tourist in nature, not a participant. Sometimes one gets the sense that wildlife can recognize this difference in intent. It's the difference between observing and moving with laser-like focus and a deliberate purpose, and on the other hand simply plodding along a trail cut by someone else, like a wide-eyed sightseer. It's amusing to observe that even platitudes like "the road less traveled" presume choosing between two paths. I certainly don't mind just walking along a hiking trail, but it's also not so very different from passively consuming what is put before you. You'd be stopped dead in your tracks if the way were completely blocked by thick briars. What does this imply except that the whole endeavor is barely worthwhile in the first place? On the other hand you might have to follow a blood trail anywhere, straight through any such obstacle if not around it. But turning around, going home, and forgetting about it would never even cross your mind. It would be unthinkable. It is precisely this difference in purpose and determination that makes the sport worthwhile.
Notes:
- This essay is a bit fanciful and hopefully not too trite, but I feel that society would be more rather than less civilized if people acted on instinct rather than simply attempting to satisfy perceived social expectations a bit more often. That's all I'm trying to say here. It's often so tiresome to see people act as though they're on a pair of rails. I don't know if anyone will relate to what I've written, but this is how I view it.
- I don't mean to suggest that anyone who does enjoy guided hunts is a phillistine or anything like that. As far as I understand, hiring a PH + native trackers is standard practice for hunters visiting africa, and certainly you'd have a hard time packing out a cape buffalo all by yourself. In a sense though, it seems like another form of nature tourism, like hiking. Similar to the example with the hiker above, I can only imagine it's the job of the native tracker to wade through a briar patch if need be, but correct me if I'm wrong. From what I've seen on youtube, the demographic for the african safari is precisely the same crowd as you'd see in a high-end steakhouse. That is to say, retired, well-off, and corpulent.