Children's books and TV shows: harmless entertainment or brain-rotting indoctrination?
How "cute" stuffed animals and talking personifications corrupt our children's brains.
Stuffed animals are an ubiquitous toy every one of us has grown up with. We cuddled them, played pretend, had tea parties and slept with them. In books, on television screens, in movie theaters, and in video games, walking, talking animals that have wisdom to impart on us (or just look cute) are a staple of every Western childhood.
My daughter has a puzzle she loves playing with that has a little teddy bear flying in an airplane. The bear looks cute, of course, but is that really more interesting to a child than a little boy or girl flying in an airplane? Wouldn’t they relate more to the latter? Why is it that almost every bit of media, including the clothing children wear, adorned with cute versions of vicious animals?
In real life, bears are not cute. They’re strong, fast, can climb trees (at least the black bear can) and can be extremely dangerous - especially to children.
Lions are not cute animals to be cuddled with, they’re dangerous predators that will eat you without hesitation - especially if you’re a small child.
Not all stuffed toys are of predators. There’s also elephants or giraffes, for instance - and while these wild animals won’t hunt humans for food, they could easily trample them if they got in their way or if they were scared or protective of their young.
So, given that these animals are not inherently more relatable than, say, a stuffed animal of a dog or cat (which a child might actually cuddle successfully without being killed), or just other children and adults - why have they completely overtaken children’s media? Could there be some nefarious propaganda at play here, innocently masquerading under the disarmingly false pretense of “cuteness”?
My wife, who as a child loved the Lion King, tells me that when she had to write a school report on actual lions, she was shocked to find out just how vicious these predators were. Seeing videos of them devouring their prey almost scarred her. Yet by then she was already a teenager. She understood in theory that lions eat other animals, but she couldn’t fathom what that really meant.
My theory is that the personification of animals is so prevalent for two reasons:
They’re commercially successful, as children (and many adults) love cute things. For over a century, starting with the first teddy bear, companies have been making stuffed animals cuter and cuter, figuring out the perfect formula for how to appeal to a human being’s innate desire to care for and cherish “cute” things - originally a mechanism in our brain designed to encourage us to take care of otherwise noisy and objectionable human babies, and also to stop us from eating the immature young of other animals - for the simple reason that leaving a baby deer to grow up and become an adult is a much more viable hunting strategy, giving us more meat in the long-run (and allowing that adult to reproduce, too).
Vegan and environmentalist propaganda. Think about it: veganism was virtually non-existent even just a few generations ago. Rates of veganism and vegetarianism have gone up from about 1% in the 1970’s to over 5% now. Who does this benefit? Well, there might be vegans who just want more people to be vegans - but there’s also a whole industry of meat-substitutes popping up, from fake meat like beans made into a meat-like container, to full on lab-made atrocities. And let’s not forget the massive profits of the grain industry.
But what if we get even more conspiratorial for a second? Does the philosophy of vegetarianism and veganism fundamentally detach human beings from their natural drive to hunt and slaughter animals? Does decades of indoctrination via cute animals create generations of people who are terrified of fulfilling their genetic destiny as hunters? That is what we are, after all.
A generation of children raised on cute stuffed animals will be all the more incapable, and therefore dependent, on governments and corporations to provide for their needs. And independent and capable people are any government’s worst nightmare.
What do you think? Why are vicious animals personified as cute toys to cuddle or watch on TV?