Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Let’s be honest: few things make us squirm faster than talking about the two drives that prove we’re animals: sex and, yes, pooping. Today’s topic penetrates our good graces and forces us to flush away our ignorance on the duality of humans as to whether we are animals or angels. We’ll then weave those insights together to help solve the social, moral, and political challenges we face today.
Most people are familiar with Freud’s fixation on poop and sex. To the novice, it doesn’t make any sense at all, and he describes it in such blunt terms that it offends our sensibilities. The thing is, he was onto something that Ernest Becker brings into practical application.
In The Denial of Death, Becker draws on Freud and later psychoanalysts Otto Rank and Norman O. Brown, emphasizing that humans are both godlike (symbol-creating, meaning-making) and pure animals (creatures who eat, procreate, excrete, and die). In short, the contradiction between animal and angel. He writes in The Denial of Death:
“man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness…and yet he goes back to the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”
And nothing quite highlights this cognitive, spiritual, and psychological split quite like our course animality of anality and sexuality.1
Anality
Anality symbolizes this duality where, on the one hand, humans strive for purity, transcendence, and control. On the other hand, we cannot escape the grotesque reality that we defecate and ultimately decay. For Becker, the anal function becomes a metaphor for our mortality and our difficulty reconciling the lofty self-image of “immortal soul” with the undeniable evidence of being a “worm-infested body.”
The most blatant example of the lengths we go to avoid this reality is how Kim Jong-il was famously described in North Korean official biographies as someone who “did not defecate or urinate.” This was to differentiate him from ordinary human animals and to present him as godlike, perfect, and above base bodily functions, like an angel.
Another case exists among the Chagga of Tanzania, where, during male initiation rituals, young men had their anuses “plugged” or “stitched” to temporarily block elimination, supposedly to signify transformation or control of bodily processes. While the practice is not actively followed, it remains a narrative artifact in the ritual, signifying the separation from our base, animal tendencies.
Even in our modern Western Societies, pooping is weird. We laugh that when a girl actually farts around her boyfriend, we know the relationship is really serious. We also use words like shit and crap to describe negatives. Even the term ‘anal’ is used to describe behavior. We make fun of people who think they’re too angelic when we accuse them of thinking their shit doesn’t stink.
Yet, one of the fastest ways to get a child (or adult) to laugh is to tell a poop joke. Heck, we teasingly call my son a ‘turd bucket’ when he’s being a pain in the ass… No matter how we look at it, the contradiction between the animal and the angel is firmly embedded across cultures in our focus on anality.
Nothing quite summarizes this dualism better than Jonathan Swift’s poem “Cassinus and Peter” in which two men wrestle with the angel of young, romantic love running smack dab into the animal of reality:
Nor wonder how I lost my wits:
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!’
Sexuality
Like poop, sex is a closely related reminder of our animal reality. Fundamentally, the act of sex disrupts the heroic image we craft of ourselves as pure, rational, and immortal and rudely thrusts us back into the mess of fluids, instincts, and decay. Becker explains this as:
“Sex is of the body, and the body is the province of death. The body with its smells and fluids cannot be denied, and yet it has to be transfigured if man is to live with it at all.”
As such, cultures elevate sex into sanctity or repress it into taboo because it cannot be ignored. Our angelic aspirations strive to ignore the animal instincts within us, which creates tension between men and women. As we explored in both Rediscovering the Goddess and Chaos and Order:
The feminine is both goddess and chaos: the source of creation, fertility, and transcendence, yet also bound to blood, pain, and mortality.
The masculine impulse seeks to contain, structure, and elevate this force into order—transforming the rawness of sex and birth into lineage, law, and cultural immortality projects.
When we venerate the feminine, we seek to embrace the eternal; however, if we try to ignore the chaos, if we recoil from our animal selves, we see a lot of tension and misunderstanding, as best evidenced by #MeToo.
My biggest frustration with #MeToo is that, in its attempt to correct the behavior of malignant men, it ignores the reality of human sexuality and the depths of how it’s more animal than angel. To really bring this to ground, the human penis is unlike any other primate in both shape, size, and persistence. The head, specifically, is uniquely shaped in a manner that can expunge ‘competitor’ semen… and it only gets weirder.
Human women not only have persistent mammary glands signalling sexual capability2, but also a hidden ovulation, so that even they aren’t typically aware of their full cycle. Add in that this cycle is monthly versus the more typical seasonality, and you have a sexual capacity and drive that is vastly greater than other animals.
This culminates in a situation that many want to absolutely ignore about our animal evolution: A woman is biologically wired to act more like a cat in heat3 than a monogamous maiden, and men who proposition and compete have a higher chance of reproductive success over the white knight.4
To fully appreciate our baser tendencies, you need only study the styles and types of pornography that we consume en masse, and this includes both video and written pornography like romance novels. The duality of animal and angel regarding sex can be best demonstrated in how 50 Shades of Grey was trending at the same time as #MeToo… A dark romance rape fantasy involving a powerful man was the blockbuster book and movie for women; at the same time, we had an explosion in criminal accusations of rape by powerful men.
Animal met Angel.
And that’s because human sexuality is more animal than angel, and that runs smack dab into our god-like aspirations. This contradiction leads to many of our moral prohibitions and cultures around sex, which exist to restrain that animal tendency in an effort to elevate us right, wrong, or indifferent, and that leads to challenges.
The result is often cognitive dissonance. We quickly ignore the gross reality of one foot planted firmly within Animalia - Chordata - Mammalia - Primates - Hominidae - Homo - Sapiens.
Yet, while we are ignoring the animal, we are also attacking our traditions, which Donald Kingsbury described as: “a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.” Our desire to remove many of the restrictions on sexuality hasn’t led to freer or more satisfying sex. In fact, it’s resulted in less sex as the protective systems no longer exist.
We, ironically, took structures intended to elevate us from our animal half and removed them, which unbalanced us. This is because we rarely appreciate the contradiction of the animal and the angel, and this goes beyond just poop and sex.
The Contradiction
Back to Becker, he highlights the challenge thusly:
“the tragedy of man’s dualism is that he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.”
How do we balance the animal and this angelic aspiration? We’ve explored the challenge through two very basic activities, but as we pull our minds from the gutter, we start to see that the duality shows up in almost every topic, and it’s equal across all politics. For example:
Cancel Culture treats people as if they must embody perfect virtue. Yet humans are flawed, contradictory, and evolving. The duality here is between the angelic demand for moral purity and the animal fact of human imperfection.
Political rhetoric casts parties or leaders as embodying the ideal (freedom, equality, security). But in practice, governance is messy, compromised, and self-interested. Trump is a great example of shattering this contradiction by embracing the baser instincts and not caring about the ‘acceptable’ image. The moral panics that emerged are telling.
Social Media curates an angelic self with perfect images, polished language, and carefully framed lives, while in private, our bodies, relationships, and emotions are chaotic, messy, and mortal. We personally suffer from dissonance and yet also fail to realize that we are comparing our animal self to the online angel. The consequence is collapsing mental health, and a reason why getting out, touching grass, and interacting with the real, animal world is so important.
Even the restaurant’s separation between the rough and tumble, ‘locker room’ humor in the kitchen and the suave and sophisticated angels in the dining room shows the code-switching humans naturally do. The angel and the animal aren’t that far apart in daily life.
The key here is balance. We do have a duality. We are messy animals who excrete stinking crap, who act in selfish ways, who have desires, egos, and behaviors that would make an angel cringe. On the other hand, the call for that higher aspiration often overextends by relying on ‘could,’ or ‘should,’ while ignoring how far we’ve come in evolution.
The balance isn’t about just accepting the base animal, and it’s not about rejecting it either. It’s recognizing our anality that strives for an “immortal soul” while being tethered to the undeniable evidence of being a “worm-infested body.” Embracing this contradiction certainly helps balance how I view many contentious topics, and it helps me understand the visceral, moral reactions I see when that messy animal gums up the image of angelic purity. It even underpins our emotional elephant compared to our logical rider that we’ve explored before.
So, where does Rock ‘n Roll come into this mix? The explosion of this genre was edgy, tribal, and instinctual, and yet resonated with billions because it found that balance between the rocking animal prancing half naked on stage while cranking out angelic melodies. Rock ‘n Roll created a beautiful, sometimes irreverent, and deeply tribal synthesis. Sex and Poop highlight the anality of our human condition, and Rock ‘n Roll5 shows us how to harmonize that with our angelic aspirations.
Where have you dealt with this duality, juxtaposition, and dichotomy?
How might this insight help you deal with these issues in the future?
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
To the astute reader, by the time you finish, you’ll understand a little better why anal sex carries such taboo and eroticism.
Simply put, no boobs, too young; high and firm, sexually mature; low and saggy, too old. This is critical because women are also one of the few animals that have a menopause.
If you don’t get this reference, let’s just say that a lady cat, in heat, will engage in coitus with multiple male cats, which is why litters of kittens can look so vastly different.
And if this description offended your sensibilities, that’s exactly the contradiction I’m talking about.
I just read Denial of Death. It was my first exposure to the strange fascination psychoanalysts had with shit. On the one hand, it is interesting to wonder how much we are fascinated by this but do not know it. On the other, it sounds like their analysis went off the rails and simply condemns them as being disconnected from reality.
I prefer your summary here in using the truth of bodily functions to level the playing field and remind both sides of the aisles we all shit, and we're all going to die. Why not play nice?
Perhaps the concept of “original sin” is the Judeo-Christian perspective on humanity’s animalistic nature.