"Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal"
About this Quote
Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, delivers this like a jagged couplet: indictment, then self-indictment. The first sentence reads like a familiar environmental lament - humans engineer their own menace and the nonhuman world pays the bill. Then he snaps the frame shut with that blunt corrective: "But then, man too is an animal". It is not a soothing reminder of kinship; it is a refusal of the alibi that humans are uniquely rational, uniquely separate, uniquely entitled. The pivot is the point.
The intent feels less like policy argument than moral unmasking. Van Vliet is poking at the story modernity tells itself: that danger is an accident of progress, and progress is a human-only category. By insisting on our animalness, he drags human violence back into biology and instinct, but without excusing it. If anything, it sharpens the charge: we are animals with tools, narratives, and systems - capable of industrializing what other animals can only do locally.
Context matters because Van Vliet's art thrived on anti-polish and anti-comfort. His work dismantled the "civilized" surface of American culture, and this line does the same. It suggests that the real scandal isn't that humans act like beasts; it's that we pretend we're not, even as we build machines that let our appetites scale beyond any ecosystem's ability to absorb them. The final clause lands as a grim equalizer: if animals are getting the worst of it, they're getting it from one of their own.
The intent feels less like policy argument than moral unmasking. Van Vliet is poking at the story modernity tells itself: that danger is an accident of progress, and progress is a human-only category. By insisting on our animalness, he drags human violence back into biology and instinct, but without excusing it. If anything, it sharpens the charge: we are animals with tools, narratives, and systems - capable of industrializing what other animals can only do locally.
Context matters because Van Vliet's art thrived on anti-polish and anti-comfort. His work dismantled the "civilized" surface of American culture, and this line does the same. It suggests that the real scandal isn't that humans act like beasts; it's that we pretend we're not, even as we build machines that let our appetites scale beyond any ecosystem's ability to absorb them. The final clause lands as a grim equalizer: if animals are getting the worst of it, they're getting it from one of their own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by Don
Add to List
