The Need for Monsters in Today's Society

Present day society is always looking for someone to praise. We, as humans, are looking for someone to protect us from evils and fulfill the role of hero that society feels comfortable with. I felt that Question 20 on the Beowulf Socratic Seminar brought my attention to this. I feel that society needs the monster and has always needed the monster to make society run. A monster presents society with a reason to collectively join together to defeat the monster. In the present day, the biggest monster we face is terrorism. While everyone points to terrorism as the reason why society cannot be stable, I feel that the terroristic attacks to the United States have brought society together. Yes, terrorism has proven to be able to perform awful damage and has ruined so many people’s lives. But without terrorism, the United States would most likely turn to fighting against other countries and end up entering another major war. I can see this progression in Beowulf. Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon all represented what terrorism represents in the world. These monsters actions were brutal and almost ruined a society like terrorism does in the world today. But at the times when these monsters were present, the Danes and the Geats combined together as one, instead of turning on each other. Once when the dragon was dead, the Geats were left vulnerable to attacks and war. In the present day, I look to 9/11 to represent what the monsters in Beowulf did. 9/11 scared all of the country. But instead of terrorism ruining a society, I saw the United States strengthen and advance as a society. We started implementing more precautions to make sure 9/11 never happened again. As a country, we focused on helping each other, rather than being at war with each other thanks to a tragic event. In no way am I defending terrorism but I feel that without an evil in the world, society wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Evils, such as monsters and terrorists, keep society thinking about the worst, which in turn creates a better society that will protect itself instead of being open to attacks.