Blog # 7

Vegan Blog #7

The Origin Of Evil

Why are we such a malevolent species?

Just to state the case; the sharks who terrify us, kill an average 6 humans per year, the ferocious lion, 20.

The largest killer of humans in the world is the mosquito, which have no choice in the matter and don’t pretend to be the “crown of creation”. The next largest killer of humans is humans, to the tune of 475,000 people per year.

But this is microscopic compared to the numbers of “animals” we kill, over 60 billion per year! This is almost 10 times the population of humans on earth. Of course this number does not include fish and marine animals. We kill a minimum of 1 trillion of these beings each year. We have also exterminated 80% of the world’s species… so far.

Yet we still consider ourselves the most enlightened creature on the planet.

By what criteria? Because we can build fast cars and tall buildings? Because we can write books and compose symphonies? So could members of Hitler’s Nazi party. Would we consider Albert Schweitzer and Gandhi such great guys if we discovered they had tortured and killed hundreds of millions of people?

Our achievements pale in comparison to the unimaginable suffering we wreak on each other and non-human species day after day, year after year.

We are the most destructive species that has ever existed… by far. We are not “the crown of creation” as we so like to title ourselves; we are self-deluding monsters.

The big question is why and how did we get here?

I think the answer can be found in two mutually reinforcing factors: Language, and the structures of our brain. Both of these are the building blocks of our belief systems and our belief systems are mirages we live within.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Book of John

The bible got this right. The word is extraordinarily important.

The first task the western god gave Adam was to name all the “animals”. When this was finished, God gave Adam dominion over them all. This conjunction of naming and dominion is not coincidence.

Throughout history we find the names a conqueror uses for the conquered define and limit the way we think, and consequently act, towards those named. “Slaves”, “Swine”, “Niggers” “Kikes”, “Gooks”, “Nips”, all lead us to certain ways of thinking, which in turn encourages, and invisibly justifies, certain behaviours.

Language arose for humans when coordinated efforts of complex and very stressful nature were required. This was group hunting – whether of “animals” (an enabling word if there ever was one), or other people.

Language provided two things, first it allowed depicting the victim in advance of the actual encounter. This depiction of the victim in absentia, “outside of the actuality” (“abstr-act”), was useful for planning a killing. Secondly, it allowed one to think and perceive of the victim in a reduced form. This abstract way of holding the denatured victim in one’s head (sans smell, sounds, physical reality) helped reduce emotional response to the victim making its killing much easier and more efficient.

The evolution of language encouraged the takeover by the cerebral cortex and the left hemisphere (the “dominant”, “language” half of the brain). These became the “executive” parts of the human organism. It is in these brain regions where abstract thinking takes place as opposed to the lower midbrain and brainstem functions that mediate the emotional and physiological aspects of our functioning. These “lower” functions became more and more devalued over time. The right hemisphere (the “non-dominant hemisphere” as it is referred to) controls the left side of the body which is the sinistral side from which the word “sinister” is derived.

Living in the world of abstraction increased as language grew into the main mode of human communication, and eventually, of thinking itself. Actual reality retreated, and the symbolic world gradually replaced it.

As killing became the way of life, the concentrated food supply allowed greater population density. This in turn ratcheted up the need for even greater language skills. Living in the more detached, abstract world, helped reduce the emotional/visceral stress closer living creates.

In a feedback loop, population density encouraged greater language use, and greater language use allowed ever-greater population densities. A parallel loop developed as our violent death-dealing lifestyle required greater abstraction, while abstracted ways of living and perceiving allowed ever-greater death-dealing violence. The more we practiced violence the more we had to develop distancing/abstract ways of living to protect ourselves against empathic reactions.

Living in unnatural density created the need for moral codes and religions to police the resulting sexual and emotional disruptions. The villainizing of sexuality and all the “animal passions”, and the need to be “god-fearing” and submissive to higher authority, had their origins here.

Increased population density, and intensified reliance on killing as a way of life, created great internal conflict. The human need to nurture our offspring for a very long time means we are endowed with powerful sympathetic ability.

To be very empathic as well as a ruthless killer is hard to juggle. The solution was the sexual division of labour – men became the ruthless, “logical”, powerful hunters, and women became the emotional, “sentimental”, “childish” caregivers. A 2013 global study on homicide by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that men accounted for about 96 percent of all homicide perpetrators worldwide. This is the direct result of that division of labour.

As male domination became the norm, cerebral, abstract “higher” parts of ourselves, and the “lower” “animal” empathic parts of the brain became powerful enemies. The feeling parts were the clear loser. This conflict can be seen throughout history i.e. the “spiritual vs. the carnal”, “The human vs. the beast”, “the Christian civilization vs. the savage hordes”, “The rational adult (male) vs. the “animalistic” child, or “overemotional” woman”.

The rise of the cerebral cortex to dominance in the human brain was a takeover of the “lower” “animal” regions of the brain. This triumph of the symbolic brain over the “animal/feeling brain replicated, and reinforced the new killing-based reality.

As time went on, we humans grew further away from the experiential world of our victims and simultaneously, by necessity, the experiential world of our selves. Distancing institutions such as ruling hierarchies, military (“chains of command”), “animal husbandry”, language usage and long distance killing techniques made for greater and greater ability to inflict mayhem without having to vividly experience or morally grapple with the reality of the results.

Our interactions with other life have increasingly become invisible. Our fellow creatures on the planet have become an undifferentiated, unimportant, looked down upon mass known as “animals”. These grew even less visible as “meat”, then more invisible as “steaks”, “fillet”, “chops”, “poultry” “beef” and “burgers”, and finally “livestock”. We never eat the bloody, decaying corpses of feeling sensitive individuals; instead we get a daily dose of “protein”.

We are billions of deaf and blind sleepwalkers cutting a gigantic swath through a screaming, bleeding, feeling world all the while dreaming we are made in the image of the divine.

Our antagonism between our “animalistic” parts and our cerebral “rational” parts made for antagonism to any reverberating structures in the outside world and vice versa. The “animal” became the outward stand-in for “the animalistic” aspects of ourselves and needed to be subdued, mastered or even destroyed. For the “animals” outside to be subdued, mastered or destroyed required that those parts of ourselves we shared in common with these beings needed to be suppressed as well.

Our human enemies too, only need to first be transformed into “animals” with words such as “vermin”, “pests”, “cockroaches”, “rats” or “pigs” for us to be able to kill them without conscience or consideration. These strategies worked for the Nazis, the Tutsis, and innumerable other murderous nations and tribes throughout history.

 Eventually the whole natural world came to be seen as something to subdue and dominate as if it was a hostile or malignant enemy. In a way it is.

To embrace the non-human world in its actual sensing reality would mean the destruction of the world, as we know it. It would mean the dismantling of the structures we have built and lived under since the beginning of what we call “civilization.” – a civilisation which brings us to where we are today as the most destructive killing entity on the planet.

 For us, and the rest of the world to survive, we must extricate ourselves from our abstract cocoon and learn again how to react to the real world around us. We must exit our collective delusion.

We must become friends with the “animal”, emotional, physical parts of ourselves so we can become whole again; and we must get on peaceful terms with the feeling beings (including other humans) who exist in the real world around us. These two are inseparable.

There is no other way. If we continue on the path we are on, the only destination is annihilation, of ourselves, and of all the rest of the beautiful life on this planet.

There is hope. Monsters can wake up and change. I used to be a fervid carnivore, I was also a hunter who killed and ate deer. I didn’t even like vegetables. If I could make the change way back in 1968 anyone can easily do it today.

It is a terrible thing to wake up and realize you are part of something extremely monstrous.

 Putting a pillow over your head and trying to go back to sleep is far worse.