“Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy”
If one is fed up with greedy governments, oppressive capitalists, racism and hatred, and idiotic human beings one only has to read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to understand they are not alone. Swift is unparalleled in his ability to satirize society in a way that turns everything upside down upside down again and makes the abnormal seem normal and the normal seem not so. This is the case with his adventures for three years on the island of the Houyhnhnms (horse, The Perfection of Nature). Riddled throughout this section are Swift’s jabs at every aspect of society he believes keeps man from his true, noble nature and posits him into a universe fraught with ills that demonstrates, to anyone as sophisticated in reason as the Houyhnhnms, man’s lack of it. Nothing is spared in Swift’s biting satire of everything from imperialism to education of youth. By demonstrating the virtues of the Houyhnhnms this analysis will show the defects in mankind Swift perceived in all aspects of society in his fellow Englishmen.
Of course, the Houyhnhnms represent rational man perfected, devoid of human evil, lies, greed, and other unsavory emotions and weaknesses found in man. Because of their sophisticated reason and rational administration of their society, the Houyhnhnms represent the perfection of nature. In an attack on slavery and oppression, the Houyhnhnms recoil in indignity when Gulliver informs him Houyhnhnms are castrated and made servile in his homeland. After describing the warring and destruction habits of the Yahoos, we see the Houyhnhnms have the virtue of not tolerating violence against others in rational men, “Although he hated the Yahoos of this country, yet he no more blamed them for their odious qualities, than he did a gnnayh for its cruelty, or a sharp sto...