Lack of knowledge makes the other a monster. Monsters provoke fear, preventing us from learning about the other.
Interestingly, people completely incapable of feeling fear become quite curious. Where there is fear, there’s usually a desperate desire to know at the same time. Fear prevents us from dying, annihilating our own identity.
Due to the fundamental and extreme ignorance of the human condition, monsters are essentially everywhere.
Knowledge is corrosive to one’s identity. To learn about the other is to get lost in the other. Monsters in the most primal sense are predators. Predators eat people. To be consumed is the most literal and complete form of identity disintegration. The identity is fused, merged, or becomes the identity of the predator.
From this perspective, the highest of all virtues is courage. Besides rationality (the virtue of applying reason and logic by thinking through the facts one deliberately pursues). Without courage, we are trapped in our own stifling identities and locked into a deterministic bind voided of volition and free-will.
My ventilation is strong
But I gargle and gurgle
Forgive my grotesque nature
A phallic protrusion on the edge
Made of stone sitting like a vulture
I face the north and observe
The light that cycles from east to west
I’m guarding the good with evil
To defend against evil
I am a Gargoyle