"The Hungarian-born philosopher Aurel Kolnai gave the horrifying qualities of bugs some serious thought. Kolnai ultimately decided that what upsets us is “their pullulating squirming, their cohesion into a homogeneous teeming mass” and their “interminable, directionless sprouting and breeding.” That is, it’s the quantity of crazy ants that’s so destabilizing. As the American psychologist James Hillman argued, an endless swarm of bugs flattens your perception of yourself as precious and meaningful. It instantly reduces your individual consciousness to a “merely numerical or statistical level.”

This is what’s soul-crushing about crazy ants: What wafts off them is the same faintly nihilistic feeling that comes the moment you realize hammering the pound sign won’t connect you with a human being and only funnels you back to the same automated instructions. It’s what drove Mike the Hog-a-Nator to grab an assault rifle. And it’s also, apparently, the feeling Tom Rasberry has been left with, having watched his alarm about these creatures be sucked up into an unintelligibly massive system forced to juggle lots of other, equally terrible problems, and then quietly disperse into the goop.

Insects, Kolnai wrote, unsettle us, existentially speaking, because they “arouse generally the impression of life caught up in a senseless, formless surging."

- via The New York Times