ISJ Fall 2022: Conscious And Unconscious Culture / Richard Pearce

What do you know of the private life of the mosquito? We know it sometimes bites us and may carry diseases. So we kill it when we can. However, the mosquito lives its own life – being born, shedding its skin, growing up, breeding, and dying, all of which it does for mosquito reasons, none of which we understand. All we know about them is that sometimes they bite. Moreover, only a mosquito knows what it is like to be a mosquito and bite us. They seem to be well enough informed on this to survive but show no signs of learning or making fine adjustments to circumstances.