The Philosopher and the Wolf

If I can only be as strong as a two-month-old wolf cub, then I am a soil where moral evil will not grow. An ape would have scurried away to darkly plot his revenge; to work out ways of manufacturing weakness in those who are stronger than him and who have humiliated him. And when that work is complete, then evil can be done. I am an ape through acc

if you want to understand the soul of the wolf—the essence of the wolf, what the wolf is all about—then you should look at the way the wolf moves.

this tendency is simian in the sense that it is made possible by apes; more precisely, by a certain sort of cognitive development that took place in the apes and, as far as we know, no other animal. The tendency to see the world and those in it in cost-benefit terms; to think of one’s life, and the important things that happen in it, as things that

People say all the time that they love their dogs. And I’m sure they think they do. But, believe me, until you’ve cleaned your dog’s smelly, suppurating, disease-ridden arse every two hours for well over a month, you really don’t know.

The most important you is not the one who delights in your cunning; it is what is left behind when this cunning leaves you for dead. The most important you is not the one who rides your luck; it is the you who remains when that luck has run out. In the end, the ape will always fail you. The most important question you can ask yourself is: when this

They can talk. And what’s more, we can understand them. What they cannot do is lie. And that is why they have no place in a civilized society. A wolf cannot lie to us; neither can a dog. That is why we think we are better than them.

Hell would be far worse if it were not a place where you are tortured and brutalized but, rather, a place where you are forced to torture and brutalize those you love most.

Eventually—after thirty years of dog and assorted other animal electrocutions—it was concluded that the model didn’t really stand up to careful scrutiny. In these experiments, I think we find an instructive distillation of human evil.

When we talk about the superior intelligence of apes, the superiority of simian intelligence over lupine intelligence, we should bear in mind the terms of this comparison: apes are more intelligent than wolves because, ultimately, they are better schemers and deceivers than wolves. It is from this that the difference between simian and lupine intel