Hep Cats and Pack Behavior

Everybody wants to be a cat. Because a cat’s the only cat who knows where it’s at.

You can never really find a large group of individuals. The best you can ever find, for large groups, is a gathering of them. Take an art retreat, a weekend convention, or an occasional bust by a single British agent while innocently planning the downfall of the western world. The reasons for this are two fold. One, your true individual is more comfortable as a single entity, doing their own thing at their own pace. The desire for self determination is stronger than the desire for company, and as such they rarely (or at least, not as often) want to follow along as other people fulfill their self fulfillment programs. The second of course is once you become a large group, you are defined by whatever narrow thread connects the group and as such, no longer individuals. At that point you become “Artists” or “Entrepreneurs” or “War Criminals” or whatever thread connects you.

Now when I say individual, I of course mean it in the semi-classical sense of the Romantic Movement. The obvious images should, of course, be floating to your head already. The solitary poet, the lonely cowboy, the distant painter, the mad scientist planning to show them… show them all. These images are obvious, but they are by no means the only ones. Your individual need not be entirely alone, after all. However, they’re not regularly found at the head of large groups, as I’ll describe here. I’m pretty sure you know where I’m going with this, because most of you are clever people who have at least mastered pattern recognition.

The individual is a cat.

You could almost take this to the extreme of talking about the hep cat rather than the normal person. A hep cat is already a thing after all, but I’m keeping deeper with my cat metaphor. Also, this is so clearly part of a series, where cats are already a theme and if I suddenly make this all about hep cats at this stage then someone’s brain will throw a rod and we’ll all be in trouble by then.

Follow me for a moment, see where this leads. The world loves and individualist in theory, but very few people have the patience to actually put up with one in practice. And in a very real sense, why should they? Take Byron as an extreme example and ask why on earth anyone would tolerate his antics for more than a few weeks. Sure, there are reasons, but they’re not good ones. However, Byron was fuzzy and had big eyes and would only occasionally turn and suddenly bite you for touching his belly. The point is that the individual is hard to deal with because of their wish for individuality. There is a separate point about this metaphor becoming stretched, but we’ll ignore that for now.

Even without the antics of Byron (really? We’re gonna keep going with calling what Byron did “antics” here?) the individual has a hard time being tolerated. There is a constant pressure to fall in line, follow the norm, be part of the group. There is a lot of pack mentality in here, an awful lot of people wanting those around them to conform. Oddly though, they often want the individual near them to conform while admiring the distant individual. The pack must be maintained and the order of the pack must be preserved. So most people are dogs, while the individual is a cat, and chicken tastes of human*. Good, I’m glad you’re going with me on that.
*In actuality, mister Izzard was wrong about this. Human tastes of pig, and the cannibals who ate it called it Long Pork.

Most people are, like dogs, essentially pack animals.

Keeping pack structure is desperately important to those who are invested in it. I’m not talking about children here, who barely understand the structure and simply understand pecking orders and how to maintain them. I’m talking about adults here, the sort of adults who will try and dissuade and young person from taking a path that isn’t one of the acceptable paths. This is best seen in the parent trying to stop a child from majoring in art history and demanding they go into accounting like their parents did. It extends far outside that realm though, as anyone generally feels they can comment on someone who fails to conform to the standards set by their own pack structure. People get told a dozen times a day that they’ve got blue hair, or that they wear clothes outside the norm, or even that their body structure has variances outside their internally set mean in one way or another. I’ve heard people scream that someone is fat about as many times as I’ve heard people scream that someone has a great ass.

In simple terms, most people are dogs. They are tamed, but trapped in a pack and feeling the constant pressure from both sides of the hierarchy. As a result of this, most people long to be that solitary cat. Cats are not tame animals. They are, at best, acclimated to humans. They only cling to us in the first place because our stores of grain made for an interesting abundance of rodents. They don’t perform tricks without direct reward. Even when they do perform those tricks you’re basically working on the sympathies of the cat and asking it to take pity on you. The cat has some society when in the company of other cats, but not a rigid structure where alphas get to eat before the rest of the group followed by betas. Cats are far more interested in pleasing themselves and will eat the food right off your plate while you are eating if you don’t defend your piece of chicken.

The twin result of being trapped in a hierarchy, and seeing someone who is not trapped is envy. People long to be the lone mariner, the solitary cowboy, the… isolated… Antarctic penguin botherer? Yeah, I ran out of things. Interestingly though, as I said, cats are always solitary. They have society, like artists have communities and writers have circles and even lone mariners have that one bar they all frequent. These are the places where the hep cats gather, and perform whatever strange requirements they have for their social structure.

Most dogs really want to be cats.

The interesting thing about all of this, is how much people long to be the individual in conceptual terms. They long to get a sail boat and just sail around the world, but never actually do it. They’d like to get a Walden-esque cabin in the woods, but they like cable tv too much. They want to get a Harley and ride cross country, but the kids need braces or they’ve got that project to do, or something else comes up. There are often practical obstacles in the way, but there are also pack reasons why they can’t do these things. The neighbors would talk, the in-laws would disapprove, their friends would laugh… and so on.

They want to be like cats, but deep in their hearts they are dogs. They conform to a standard that was set long before they were even born and trying to break out of that standard takes more then just an ounce of courage. Most people are aware of the pain, the genuine isolation, the misery, the hunger and the fear that can come with breaking pack behavior. It’s not something to be taken lightly. In many cases, you can’t do it halfway because doing it for real is the only way to do it. So the longing remains.

The longing to be like these people, sometimes leads certain people to hang out in the places where the cats gather. They are not truly cats, they are not hep, but they are dogs that respect the cats (as dogs should) and group around those individual cats, hoping to catch a wif of the freedom they enjoy. They are so known for their grouping behavior, that one might call them groupies. Yes, groupies, let’s go with that. Someone call Webster’s, I’ve got a new word for them.

Large group leaders, however, are dogs and not cats.

When you’ve got a leader of men, he’s rarely an individual in the romantic sense. Your cats are far too self indulged, too self directed, not interested if someone else lives or dies. Most the big leaders in the world are like alpha dogs. The may seem like romantic individuals, but often that’s simply because there is no one above them in the hierarchy to direct them. They are forced to make some decisions on their own. However, they do much to keep the pack structure. They keep those who agree with them at the top of the heap, they keep down those who deviate, and they mark their territory by pissing on things. Seriously, if you don’t have a big estate to keep them on, CEOs are terrible pets. I don’t know how those people who keep them in small apartments can live with themselves knowing they’ve got them cooped up all day.

There are some perks to being on top though, and one of those perks is not worrying about what the people above think. There is no one else to tell you that you can or can’t do this or that, but much of that pressure is replaced by a doubling of pressure from below. There is the twin problems of those who want to be top dog nipping at your heels, and then there is the second subtler group which is far harder to deal with. That second group is the people who don’t want to be on top, but want you to be a good leader. Everything top dog does is going to engender disappointment in someone from that second group, no matter what. Sometimes it will even be anger and hostility before you even begin. See Also – Barrack Obama. In those cases, it can be very easy to just simply ignore the complaints of anyone criticizing them and behave more or less like the sort of sociopath most people think cats are. This might include invading a nation no one wants to invade or telling the enemy to bring it on. See Also – George W. Bush.

These are not the behavior of a cat though, as a cat has no interest in leading anyone anywhere. Besides to their food bowl in or to demand to know why it’s empty. And cats don’t actually act with sociopathic disregard, they just have limited a capacity for solving people’s problems and they know it. So they behave in a manner that best suits their abilities and if that sometimes clashes with the needs of others they’re sort of sorry about it, but there’s only so much they can do. Yes, they could try and be a little less solipsistic, but that’s really more effort than they can manage right now.

The cat does care, but has limited ability to help

And they’re way too cool to try helping if they knew they’d fail.