The Wolves Among Us

For 100 years, the United States’ famous Yellowstone National Park existed as a near-oasis for elk. They took from the ecosystem leisurely, unchallenged, deforming the landscape and hindering the expression of other species. Balance was a memory.

Their quagmire began in 1995 with the reintroduction of 41 wolves. Angelic elk once again had devils in their shadows. As the herds were culled, aspen could flourish, beaver colonies multiplied, and bear populations grew. Wolves restored a natural order.

Without wolves, the elk could not be elk, and wolves could not be wolves. They shape each other and bring full expression to the ecosystem. They have no choice; their nature demands it; Mother Nature demands it. Can we have god without the devil?

The lack of free will nature displays is enviable. There is a jealousy, an admiration of how the songbirds, the trees, and the wolves follow their design perfectly and thus are perfectly virtuous. To be so unhindered, to have no journeys back to yourself. To be born into a family that fully accepts you, that strives to preserve your nature. Or even the orphaned parasite, the cowbird, is often embraced by false parents. To be born into a community that tries to kill you, but not change you. No free will, yet freedom can’t be helped. And neither can the contest of brawn and spirit. Wolves must clash with elk, cougars must clash with deer, and bears must clash with salmon. This is the reality of life.

How often do we do the opposite? How many victims has the homogeneous fog of culture taken? We are born in the mist, raised by it, and its curators try to contain its bounty. There is no escaping an influence that you’ve breathed in since the womb. We are in a way cursed by free will, cursed by adaptability. The mist seeps into us, exerts its will through its agents, and we become tricksters, shapeshifters; we adapt; we are remade in the mist’s image. Ironically, free will is used to degrade free will. It is the sword meant to defend our individual nature, a weapon to wield against those invisible forces that desire to homogenize us, but we use it to cleave our own limbs, embed it into our flesh, and release our blood. We fade and forget. Balance dies with meaning and boldness. Instead of wolves, elk, or beavers, who are not so easily swayed, we resemble docile jellyfish drifting along the current of culture, taking whatever it sends our way and accepting it as natural. This false ecosystem is so pleasing because we love order, an overindulged craving for acceptance and conformity above all else. In an attempt to rise above our shared “uncivilized” past, we accept this homogeneity as progress.

Some of us may feel the pain of culture’s influence more than others, identifying with the beavers and aspens who were restrained for a century. Others may be the elk, whose natural ways of living always felt appreciated.

But who are the wolves? Who has been kept out of the wilderness for too long? Who will hunt? Who are the devils in our shadows?

The wolves are among us.

Many have become golden retrievers or labradoodles, sanitized, sedated, and domesticated by the fog.

With so much interference from the elk for so long, many think that becoming a basset hound is natural or fate. As if it is natural to forget the woods and the snow, the chase and the heat of struggle. The elk’s way is a portion of the truth, the remembered half, and the wolves represent the buried half. Culture curators have denied us the full expression of community.

How can we achieve nature’s goal of abundance and balance? The path is self-expression, to follow our natures. Guarded by free will, tempered by truth and our social nature.

We can’t truly join an ecosystem without being ourselves. But how can we do this properly? How can we avoid shallow, low-quality self-expression? How can we avoid haphazard self-indulgence and mediocre self-awareness? How can we avoid the claim that we are being ourselves when we have merely left one hazy mist to breathe in another?

Individualism should be a public service. Our uniqueness should support life. As with everything in life, it begins with us. Perhaps we need to adopt a ruthless honesty about life and human nature. We have to be honest about our natural desire to remake others in the image of the fog and, right beside it, our desire to make others as we are. We have to be honest: although life is filled with conflict and competition, we succeed through cooperation. We must spread our own seeds, be in our own nature, in conflict with others, but also see others not as competitors but as complements of ourselves and kindred spirits. We depend on each other, so the wolves must value the elk and the elk must value the wolf. In their relationship and competition, they support life.

We must also realize that who we truly are is always with us, yet it is the easiest thing to lose. There is a fortitude that must be cultivated to withstand the mist’s frustration with you. You must endure its civilized punishments and oblivious forest birds dropping seeds of doubt around you. Life requires adaptability, not spinelessness.

But this ideal of abundance, authenticity, and balance is always accompanied by an invariably expanding ambiguity, brought by the mist and those who want to become the mist. Silently, invisibly, a game is being played amongst this structure of progress by those timeless tyrants who seek to replace the weight of culture with their own. They no longer threaten us with spears, stones, or any form of immediate violence to assert themselves. In a way, this “progress” has made their savagery even more effective and enduring, because they are forced to rely almost totally on the spell of influence. They persuade, flatter, make art, market, and seduce. The weapons are social, and the battle is slow and delicate. But churning in the center of this progress is the same unrelenting contest of wills.

We are not forlorn lilies in the field, doomed to be mowed down. On our shoulders are heavy questions, heavy because they are armor. We are not defenseless because in our hands is the sword of free will, wielded as healthy, existential skepticism. Each question is a strike, a block: Is this the right thing to do? What is true? What is the point of this life? What is the point of my life?

Through all this, we must enjoy the great pleasure and peace that comes from following our natures. To feel the unnecessary weights removed and live with a lighter, greener heart. And to enjoy genuine community.

Humanity is like an immortal spring, flowing with a mosaic of colors and creatures coming to life. Incredible variety is the hallmark, and lazy black-and-white thinking cannot nourish us. There is a great communal adventure waiting to be lived out, an unapologetic return to cullings of the herds. A culling done by full expression of the individual, by not allowing ourselves to be remade into domesticated versions of ourselves.

Originally published at https://dave406910.substack.com on July 23, 2026.