Daily Inspiration Quote by Aleister Crowley

Abolishing wild animals "on principle" is Crowley at his most gleefully poisonous: a one-liner that flatters itself as anthropology while really performing a Western fantasy about China as a machine for order. The joke turns on bureaucratic diction. You don’t abolish wolves; you abolish a tax. By yoking living, unruly nature to the language of policy, Crowley implies a civilization so compulsively rationalized that even the nonhuman world must submit to administrative neatness. It’s a compliment dressed as an accusation, or the reverse: “systematic” signals admiration for coherence and endurance, but the punchline frames that coherence as suffocating, anti-organic, almost metaphysically hostile to spontaneity.

The subtext is less about zoology than about control. Wild animals stand in for whatever resists assimilation: unpredictability, dissent, the sacred messiness of life. To claim they’ve been “abolished” is to accuse a culture of preferring governance to ecology, principle to experience. Crowley’s phrasing also leans into an Orientalist tradition that treats Asian societies as hyper-civilized and therefore subtly inhuman: efficient, disciplined, but spiritually sterilizing. It’s the mirror image of the Western self-myth where wilderness equals freedom and authenticity.

Context matters because Crowley’s persona as an iconoclastic critic and occult provocateur trades in deliberate exaggeration. He’s not reporting; he’s posturing. The line performs a familiar imperial trick: reduce a vast, complex civilization to a single, memorable mechanism, then smuggle a moral judgment inside the mechanism’s elegance.