In this blog post, we will explore whether the reason why humans dislike insects is an innate instinct or a learned emotion formed in society and culture.
A few days ago, I was surfing the web on my laptop to kill time in my dorm room. In fact, I had a paper due the day after tomorrow, but I was trying to push this fact to the back of my mind and was just staring at my Facebook feed, getting bored. These moments when I was doing nothing and pretending to be busy, these seemingly useless moments, were not so bad sometimes. While mindlessly scrolling through random photos of daily life or trending videos posted by someone else, I suddenly felt uncomfortable being alone in my room. It was as if someone was staring at me when there was no one else there.
Then I slowly raised my head and saw a grotesque black creature attached to the wall. The creature with two long antennae attached to the wall was a long-nosed bat! I stared at the creature with my eyes wide open, suddenly stiffened by the unexpected appearance of the creature. Gopdeung didn’t care about my presence, and just stuck to the way of survival that he had been keeping for a long time.
I didn’t scream or panic, but started to think about how to deal with Gopdeung. Eventually, I calmly took out my roommate’s insecticide and sprayed it on Gopdeung without mercy. In that brief moment, various thoughts flashed through my mind. I thought for a moment about how humans instinctively have a strong reaction whenever they encounter such small creatures and why many people dislike insects. However, such thoughts were short-lived, as I witnessed the scene of a millipede writhing and shaking its legs. I found myself reacting sensuously, shutting off my rational mind. No matter how tenacious the Gopdeung was, it could not withstand the benefits of human civilization.
The Gopdeung, writhing in pain, tried to escape by cutting off its legs, but it was a futile act in the face of the lethality of the pesticide, which was created by the combination of numerous chemicals. The squid, which had been struggling for a while, stopped moving and became a mass of chemical-soaked organic matter, no longer a living being. I carefully put the corpse in a dustpan and left it on the ground outside the dormitory.
I had almost mechanically carried out a series of processes, but then a strong sense of 회의감 (skepticism) swept over me. This was because I had always prided myself on liking insects. When a colorful moth landed on my hand in the countryside, I remember watching it calmly until it flew away on its own. I also remember the satisfaction of carefully catching a spider that was living under my desk and releasing it outside the window. I felt a sense of incongruity with my actions today because I usually did not harm insects that did not harm me directly, such as mosquitoes.
Furthermore, this experience made me think again about what it means to be human. Aren’t humans beings with a contradictory nature, being compassionate to some creatures but instinctively hostile to others who make them feel uncomfortable for a moment? If it is human nature to be civilized and yet to overreact in situations where it is not necessary, then I have come face to face with human nature again through Gopdangi.
A few years ago, there was a boom in the internet about the firefly. At the time, the firefly was known as an insect of the devil that has a tremendous reproductive capacity, does not die unless burned to death, and even if it does die, it leaves behind a new enemy called the kitefly. However, being a bug-friendly person, I investigated whether this was true, and found out that the above facts were just rumors spread by elementary school students on Naver Knowledge, and that the korean cockroach is a harmless insect that does little harm to humans. However, regardless of this rational cognition, I felt an obligatory urge to kill the korean cockroach the moment I saw it, and I put it into practice. Rational thinking told me that I had no reason to kill the insect right away. This irrational impulse must have stemmed from my “disgust” for the insect. There is no doubt that humans universally have a disgust for insects. Even I, who prided myself on liking insects, committed murder because of this disgust. If so, where does this “disgust” come from?
Is human disgust for insects the result of education or an instinct imprinted in our genes? It is possible to think that the source of disgust is one of these two. At first, I thought it was an instinct imprinted in the genes. There are certainly insects that harm humans, and individuals who dislike them would have been better off surviving and reproducing. Therefore, the genes that dislike insects would have been passed down through natural selection. The reason why we dislike insects other than pests is that we are not sophisticated enough to distinguish them.
However, if human aversion is merely based on instinct, it raises the question of whether the emotion of “aversion” should no longer play a major role in modern society, where many civilizations have developed. On the contrary, aversion to insects seems to be spreading further in the modern era through the media and social information transmission. We may be reacting to the social image of insects as “dirty creatures,” “pests,” and “dangerous things” rather than the insects themselves.
This initial thought soon collapsed on itself. If we claim that disgust is rooted in instinct, then other animals, not humans, should also hate insects for the same reason. However, when we think of a puppy running around excitedly chasing a bug, we don’t think that animals other than humans dislike bugs. There is no reason to treat humans and other animals differently at the genetic level. If only humans are considered to be unique, it is nothing more than human arrogance. Therefore, the hypothesis I had initially set was naturally discarded, and my conclusion leaned toward the idea that disgust is a product of education.
There are several more reasons for thinking this way. Looking at our lives right now, don’t children who grew up in the countryside clearly feel less disgust for insects than children who grew up in the city? We can only think that this difference is caused by differences in the environment.
Also, in our society, women generally have a much stronger aversion to insects than men. Again, it is difficult to find a reason for this innate difference. I believe that this difference is due to the environment, especially cultural demands. This is because the framework of femininity that our society demands is tailored to such behavior. This cultural pressure defines our behavior.
In other words, humans are constantly balancing between the “natural” and the “artificial,” and our aversion to insects may be a mixed emotion derived from the two. In the process of avoiding insects due to the demands of education and society, we recognize the existence of insects as part of nature, but at the same time, we have complex emotions that reject them.
Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that human aversion to insects is the product of education. To be more specific, such aversion is established in the human mind as they imitate the behavior of their parents and those around them and conform to social and cultural demands and trends. For someone like me, who has a weak aversion to such things, it could be said that such education and socialization was somewhat weak, or that rational thinking is more based on behavior. But when I think back to how I killed the bulldog today, driven by my aversion, I may have been just pretending to be strong all this time.
You may think that I am making a big deal out of the fact that I killed one Gopdeung while eating meat every day. However, this trivial yet interesting reflection has provided me with a justification for committing murder in response to seeing Gopdeung, contrary to my usual beliefs, and it was a pleasant experience even if I cannot find any use for it.
This attempt to simply pass the time by surfing the web ended up with a conclusion that was not very useful. However, I think it is fortunate that I found a little happiness on this platform rather than spending meaningless time surfing the web. Although it is a somewhat cruel happiness created on the corpse of a Gopdeung, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Gopdeung for giving me this refreshing experience and end this article.
