Eric WeinerAug 14, 2020·9 min read

The biggest con of all time

By Eric G. Weiner

The sad bit is you were conned by the people you loved and trusted most in your life… your parents. Mind you, they were just unwittingly passing the con along as it had been passed along to them. The entire con has been going on for at least a million years. And it is a con without conscious connivers.

How is this possible?

It is evolution at work. The process of “natural selection” works just as well within a culture as it does in nature. Once a particular cultural direction is taken, it must overcome what hinders it, and latch onto what supports it, or else like any doomed species, it dies off. Think of the development of the automobile once the idea of driving vs. riding horses caught on.

From a rickety, slow, wind-up novelty, it quickly evolved to become a self contained magic machine — faster than any land creature on earth, able to travel such speeds all day long, containing previously inconceivable pieces of fantasy like headlights, radio, remote garage door openers, cd players, GPS guidance systems, video, computers, and recently, self-parking, and even self- driving capabilities.

Contrary factors needed to be overcome. These machines were smelly and noisy and fabulously expensive. As symbols of the very rich, they were resented by the poorer classes, and hated by rural dwellers because it scared their animals and messed up their roads. Then Henry Ford and his assembly line made the price accessible so it was less resented by the poor who could now aspire to ownership, and rural folk realized it was now cheaper than owning horses in the long run and could be used to transfer produce to town more quickly and economically. The negative stories, about the possible ill effects on the lungs of children, and society in general, largely vanished as everybody began to climb aboard the excitement of this new thing that now existed on the planet, growling to change the world.

Entire industries co-evolved around the automobile. An entire infrastructure of assembly line factories, steel mills, parts manufacturers, highway and bridge construction companies, rubber plantations and tire manufacturers, and of course the oil industry — extraction, refining, distribution etc. Then there arose the supportive industries of service and filling stations, washing, repairing, road maintenance, painting, selling, advertising, inspecting, licensing, policing, and, of course, insuring. Each piece enabled, further refined, and eased the continuance and advance of this cultural direction.

Faster cars demanded better tires. Better tires demanded better roads. Better roads meant better surfaces and better tire materials. Asphalt manufacturers, gravel purveyors, and tire manufacturers grew gigantic.

Exploitation of international resources demanded suppression of resistance. Political lobbying and military personnel and apparatus grew to achieve this. Feedback loops evolved. Oil, steel and automotive companies paid for the politicians who would create policies that aided them, which consequently provided them more money enabling them to control yet more politicians and media channels which in turn further aided the products and reinforced the initial cultural direction.

Along with the physical, were the psychic evolutions. Cars became highly sculpted objects of desire, the romantization of the “of the open road”, James Bond and his supercars, the glorious car chases, the car as masculine accessory; the “muscle car”, the SUV, the pick-up truck, the “sportscar” and of course, also, “the family car”.

Movies, popular songs, TV shows, all sang the praises, the adventure, and the mythology that goes with the automobile experience. It became a central, giant self-perpetuating machine. It requires no mastermind, or single cabal (though there were plenty of mini-cabals); each element feeds and sustains the other. And so it goes. Now cars are our way of life. No one ever talks of eliminating the automobile — making them more ecological yes. Ending them, no.

And so it happened when humans began to kill. Unlike the automobile, this direction has had one million years to refine itself and become a core, basically unexamined part of our lives.

This was not just “part of our nature”, as is commonly supposed, this was a cataclysmic event. It is reflected in the Western bible when Eve (morally flawed woman that she was) supposedly gave a “forbidden fruit” to Adam (poor innocent male). The forbidden “fruit” was not a fruit but a dead being, the original sin was the murder of our fellow creatures, the male hunter was the one passing the sin of his killings onto the woman, and the “Tree of Knowledge” as with the other tell-tale reversals and psychological disguises noted above, was actually the Tree of our subsequent Ignore-ance.

When Jane Goodall first documented chimpanzee predation she noticed a startling discontinuity. Early on in her fieldwork she would throw out a bunch of bananas to attract chimps, inadvertently creating an instant hierarchy in the scramble to get first pick. She later ruefully realized that most natural food sources in the chimpanzee wild are fairly spread out — like berries on a tree — and hence seldom create such an unnatural convergence on a single food source with the intense resultant hierarchy. However in the stressful, compressed circumstances caused by a single bunch of bananas, the largest, most aggressive apes dominated the food grab.

However when Goodall later observed predation by a non-dominant chimpanzee, everything was startlingly different. Even the most senior, dominant, aggressive apes, respectfully kept their distance and submissively awaited the killer’s permission before daring to come forward for a taste.

This primal fear and respect is learned anew by every would-be gang leader and ruthless politician. If you are willing to kill, and can show your ability to do so, you jump to the top of the pack. You have displayed a ruthlessness not often shared; but immediately feared. You have proven yourself to be lethal danger and not to be crossed.

Humans, who must remain protective of their helpless young far longer than most species, have enormous empathic gifts to overcome to become successful killers. Once the predatory turn was taken, many powerful supporting features had to come into play to keep this cultural ball rolling. Hence the great, long, and extremely powerful con that has led to us marching enraptured and blind down our murderous path.

There are many components to this con. Imagine yourself in a room with a murderer. Would you be inclined to argue with, let alone criticize this person? Rarity of critique is built into the system. Second, in order to insure that our young would still be cared for sufficiently, a certain section of society had to be raised with different sensibilities. Women became the nurturers, the child “carers” while men were raised to be hard and insensitive — able to do the “hard work of manhood” — hunting and fighting. This division of sexual labour and psychology helped keep the con going. Not surprisingly this new “killer sex” used its propensity for violence and blunted sensitivity to intimidate and dominate women, children, animals, and… basically… anything in its path. This included domination of other humans, the historical mindset, nature itself, and all political and social agendas.

Denigration of the victim was another great tool which developed at this time, and has been used many times in many ways ever since. The division of “us” vs. “them”, “the Human vs the “Animal”. This word “Animal” is quite the piece of magic. One of incredible power. In one breathtaking word/concept, Over 9 million species were thrust into a single decrepit container and instantly rendered disposable.

“In the beginning was the word”. Religions arose to certify our difference and sanctify our “Dominion” over these “others”. Unlike “animals”, apparently we alone had “divine souls”. Our near divinity was granted by God himself who made us in his own image and therefore looks just like us — (if you are an aged, white male). This God initially demands we kill animals as sacrifice. Later he relents but lets us know that by saving all the animals from the flood (which he created) we are now entitled to kill them whenever we like.

Each religion created its own schema that allows killing other species to be conscience-free. The Native American beseeches the “Buffalo Spirit” who then grants permission to kill individual buffalos. The Inuit chews up snow and spits it into the mouth of the seal he just killed because “the seal allowed itself to be caught in order to get a drink of fresh water.” The Old Testament declares that “The life of the animal is in the blood of the animal” so the Jew and the Muslim drains the blood of the animal and therefore cannot not really be accused of “taking a life”.

The con goes on and on. As science grows ascendant over religion it provides new rationales. Descartes reassured us that the screams and cries of animals mid-vivisection were just the “clockwork creaking of machinery” because lacking our “supreme reason” they cannot possibly feel like we do. Those who felt otherwise were ridiculed as “womanly”, “childish” or “oversensitive”. Behavioural psychologists later reassured us that what we witness in animals is just reflex, or mere “stimulus/response”. Until very recently science declared that even studying things like “feelings”, “pain” and “emotions” were off limits. The crime of “Anthropomorphism” became the scourge of young scientists who might dare attribute “human” characteristics such as pain, terror, etc. to the non-human — as if humans were the sole possessors of these feelings.

In modern times we evolved ways to move our mass imprisonment and murder of other beings far from view. In fact laws have been passed making it illegal to photograph or video inside these “Agri-businesses”. When we finally meet the “products” of these industries, we do not see dead, innocent, beaten and tortured individuals — but “steaks”, “burgers”, “chops”, and “roasts”.

Language evolved to become a major enabler — cows became “live-stock” and “heads of beef”, pigs became “pork”, chicken became “poultry”, and all become unobjectionable “protein meals”, “animal harvests”, or “essential sources of high-grade protein”. And so the con goes on and on.

Charlie the Tuna can’t wait till we capture him, so we can appreciate how fine he tastes. Cows love to give us their milk rather than to their own young who are purposefully raised with anaemic diets and confined in tiny pens for life to produce the white flesh we prize as “veal”.

We continue the con by raising our children to love and identify with animals while feeding them their dead bodies. This enormous cognitive dissonance forces them even further from confronting a horrifying reality that was never confronted by their own parents, or their parents before them. Hence the con goes on in silence; it is unspoken, unspeakable, and all the more effective because of it. It is in the silent air we breathe, we take it for granted and it invisibly rules us.

We are given all kinds of world views to support our murderous ways. “It is nature’s way”, “All life consists in killing and consuming other life” and many other familiar bromides that soothe our feelings and are not factually true.

We live a life surrounded by our phenomenal murder yet remain wonderfully oblivious to it. This astounding blindness was built up in countless increments till we arrive at today.

We now kill over 200 million of our fellow beings every day yet never see it. That is the equivalent of slaughtering the entire population of Russia and Great Britain combined, each and every day! And that is only land creatures. Add fish and we get 3 billion slaughtered daily. 72 billion land animals are murdered per year and over a trillion living beings of the sea. Yet most of us never hear, see or smell it. We hear no evil, see no evil, smell no evil. We clothe our bodies and feet in their dead skin and fur as no creature has ever before us and consider it normal. The very glues we use to keep our objects together are often composed of the tendons of the creatures we have torn apart. We create myths about the need for dairy and animal protein for our health in the face of their major role in heart disease and cancer.

We imagine we are the most important thing in creation — in fact all of creation was supposedly made expressly for us to enjoy.

Yet if even the beings we hold in lowest regard — insects — were to suddenly die off, all planetary life would cease within 50 years. On the other hand, if humans disappeared overnight the entire planet would flourish.

Killing and “meat” eating is currently our human norm. The vegetarian, and the vegan, are the eccentrics, the weirdos. “They” have to justify what they are doing, not we. We are the greatest murderers in the history of the world yet most of us know almost nothing about what we are really doing. This is not an accident.

We have been conned, we continue to be conned. We need not feel guilty about our ignorance. It is the greatest, longest, and most successful con of all time. We have been living inside a horrific falsehood, a dream that has been created for us, and by us, via a process as old as life itself. This million year old cultural direction has been an excruciating nightmare for the rest of the living, sensitive world. It is time to leave this dreamworld. It is time to open our eyes and finally wake up.

Tranlated from transcript by Elsie 112 by Eric Weiner

Blog #13

I have been the lucky recipient of a genetic experiment that enables me to write to you, my human masters, this letter of heartfelt thanks. I am privileged to be able to report from the experience of one who straddles the great dividing line that runs through the entire world.

First and foremost, I must thank you for giving me existence itself. Without your impregnating my mother I would never have come into being, so I owe you my life. Given this, I wish to relieve you of any possible guilt you may harbour regarding using us however you may chose to do so. This, of course also pertains to sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, horses and all my fellow beings you have benevolently brought into existence on this wonderful planet. This, of course, also applies to your own children, though to my puzzlement only a small percentage of you take full advantage of this. Certainly it is true that some of you confine and forcibly administer great physical and mental pain for corrective or even recreational means on your progeny, and that is, of course your absolute right. Some of you go on and torture, rape and even terminate your offspring, as, of course, is also your perfect right as you have brought them into being as you have us. What puzzles me is how seldom you eat these, or render them for others of your kind to do the same. Perhaps we taste better than your children. If so, I am very grateful to be able to keep rendering you service even after you decide my life is over.

Because I have one foot in the human world due to my genetic improvement I am able to report on the other side of the great divide to you. I am sad to admit that many of my confreres are ingrates in extremis. My mother, for example, resented being impregnated by her betters. She tells me of being forcibly immobilized while a strange “two-legged one” (this is the primitive way my animal fellows refer to you) stood behind her and forcibly shoved his entire arm up her vagina without her consent and impregnated her against her foolish and selfish wishes. She went on to resent her male calf being almost immediately taken away from her so it would not lessen her supply of milk that of course was always intended for your consumption and commerce. Lastly she remained horrified and upset to discover that her calf (she consistently considers it “her calf” when of course, it was always yours) was kept in isolation and in a totally restricted state wherein it could not move at all and was fed a deliberately poor diet to produce the anaemic white flesh so highly appreciated by yourselves as “veal”. In her dreadful ignorance she failed to see the character building opportunity this gave to her calf which she herself would never have been able to provide. Instead of seeing the great honor bestowed upon her, she greatly resents it to this day. She is still beside herself missing this calf and mourning its death in childhood at your hands despite my repeated explanations of its great necessity and utility. I unhappily must report that such petty attitudes are shared by the majority of your subjects, and I must say such ingratitude should relieve you all the more of any lingering regrets you may have regarding using such unworthy subjects as you wish.

I can also reassure you that such primitive attitudes are shared by those you wisely use as experimental subjects. They strenuously object to being forcibly made to ingest enormous quantities of toxic, or even non-toxic substance until their death because they completely fail understand the absolute necessity of such LD-50 tests (the forcible feeding of substances that may be marketed to determine the dosage wherein 50% of the recipients die). Incredibly they think you should subject your own kind to these tests as they will then be of even greater value to you. They similarly object to being burned, battered, starved, electrified, deliberately injured, given cancer, ulcers, heart disease, mortal infections, amputations, to advance knowledge itself. Little do they realize that such knowledge may sometimes even improve their own lot in time. They have very poor long term perspectives in these matters and as such are no judge of such meritorious actions. They also, and perhaps even more importantly, lack a perspective on values. They give little if any credit to your superiority and self evident moral and godly virtues. Many even go so far as to think you mentally unbalanced, even evil. Such attitudes, if nothing else, are certain proof of their own inferiority and unworthiness of consideration and I am so grateful for the opportunity you have given me to rise above these malicious and ignorant prejudices and see the truth with clarity. Again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and feel the luckiest of cows to be able to come even this close to your own eminence and sparkling clarity of perception.

Ever yours,

Elsie 112

Blog #12                                             April 2020

Much of humanity, has spent much of its time, blithely living life and going about its daily business while aswim in seas of evil. Generations lived when slaves were casually bought and sold like dogs, were routinely beaten, raped, worked to near, or actual death; yet citizens of those times considered themselves “good christians” (or protestants, or muslims, etc), – indeed the “crowns of creation”.

Civilizations thrived where citizens went about their daily lives feeling quite moral while young virgins (and infants) were routinely sacrified to the gods for the community good. Even the civilized Greeks did it, as for example King Agamemnon, who sacrificed his own daughter to ensure the defeat of Troy. Romans, the largest and most advanced folk of their times, regularly flocked with their families to the Colliseum to watch people fed to lions, men fight to the death, bulls and bears chained together to see which would kill which, to witness the mass slaughter of elephants, etc., all for a good day’s entertainment. This was no more troubling to their contemporary consciences than going to the movies is to us. This went on for nearly 400 years and saw the death of an estimated 400,000 people and over a million animals. In the American south as evidenced from photos of the time, families thought it just fine to bring their children to watch lynchings or their immediate aftermaths – they even sold postcards of these events. Millions of Germans who thought they were the crème-de-la-crème of European culture thought it perfectly fine to exterminate Gypsies, Jews and the handicapped for the sake of the Aryan Race.

So how do we know if we are living in similar times? How do we know if we are similarly unconscious of an evil we are immersed in? How do you look from the outside at what you are within?

Today I mentioned this to my son-in-law who is helping me write a book about our relations with the “animal” world. He talked of coming to realize that we have within us the contradictions of being both Prey and Predator and hence both the victim and victimizer not only of others but of each other. I have usually thought of this in terms of the tensions between the “animal within” and the “animal without”; ie the resonant structures in our neuro and social systems, and consequent conflict with our actions and attitudes to the actual “animals” outside. The ambivalence is there for sure. Just consider the horrendous treatment we provide to creatures in labs and factory farms (animals on the “outside”) to the lavish treatment and love we give those creatures we consider “Pets” (animals on the “inside”).

However my son-in-law’s point is somewhat different. He is talking of us being originally prey animals. Prey animals who have turned into Predators. This unusual turn has great consequences. Most predators are solitary with a few notable exceptions; lions in the cat family, and wolves and wild dogs in the canine. Both of these are true predators – they come armed with sharp teeth and claws, short intestinal length to pass toxic waste quickly through their systems, and high hydrochloric acid content to process meat efficiently. We however lack these features and so are not natural carnivores, nor even true omnivores such as bears.

We are herd animals who live in groups like most prey animals. But unlike most prey animals we have learnt to use our groups to kill. This, along with language and artificial weaponry has made us the most effective predators on the planet. But with our prey nature comes the “herd instinct” – the deep tendency to conform to the herd, to “think as one”. This is part of why we often act without questioning what we are doing. As prey our lives depended on being in synch with the herd. If the majority are doing something – especially killing, or something else disturbing, we have ancient mechanisms which kick in to keep us doing anything which opposes the motion of the herd.

This is a partial answer to the question of why we can live in such oblivion to social actions that are terrible. We are designed as prey animals to follow the herd and not deviate from its group behaviour.

Today we live in a world far more steeped in blood than that of the Roman Colliseum. We currently kill 66 billion land creatures per year and over a trillion in the sea. Yet we think of ourselves as the most civilized, advanced beings to have ever lived.

The question remains, how do we help each other step out of the herd to see our actions independently?  I would love to hear from you if you have any ideas about this. Thank you.

I was reading an excellent book by Matthew Calarco called Thinking Through Animals. It is a very concise survey of the philosophical ideas running through modern animal rights thinking. While discussing Peter Singer and Tom Regan, (both authors have made valuable contributions to our views about animals), he mentions both have gone to considerable pains to ensure their positions are based on rigorous logic to avoid the oft-levied accusations of “sentimentality”. This idea struck me anew as odd. Why is an appeal to our sentiments inferior to cold, rigorous logic, so much so, that even animal defenders must avoid it at all costs? Where does this come from and why?

When I was a young boy in the 1950’s, I recall watching southern senators on TV ridicule northern senators who proposed an end to the worst abuses against Black Americans. They would rhetorically ask: “What are you, a Nigger Lover?” The implication being that only those with excessive affections could “love” something so obviously abhorrent as a black person. More often than not in those “good old days” the white senator would shrink away in shame, or else retort: “it has nothing to do with feelings, but the principle of equality set forth in the Declaration Of Independence”.

During the earliest protests against animal experimentation and vivisection (dissecting live animals), protestors were frequently characterized and dismissed as “little old ladies in tennis shoes”. Apparently there was something bad about anyone who was: “little”, “old”, “a lady” or a wearer of “tennis shoes”. No doubt these awful characteristics stood in marked contrast with the stalwart defenders of animal experimentation, who by inference, were conversely: “big”, “young”, “men” and no doubt, wearing hard leather shoes or boots. The hierarchy of size, age, sex, and the use of animal product is clearly revealed.

In more recent times, defenders of the environment are derogatorily called “Tree Huggers” (note the excessive emotionality implied). Donald Trump recently said Greta Thunberg needed a course in “anger management”. Coming from this towering exemplar of reason she should no doubt immediately enrol. Responding humanely to issues of all kinds usually gets one derided by right wing apologists for the status quo as “sentimentalists” or “bleeding hearts” i.e. people who feel too much. In contrast to what one might ask?

This accusation that those who would defend either “animals”, the environment, black people, the poor, etc. are too emotional, motivated by overblown feelings, can be found again and again whenever a humanitarian cause arises. The large, staunch young men who represent the status quo invariably paint themselves as the holders of stolid, hard-headed reason and logic. They see themselves as “the realists”, and the sole possessors of credibility. It is worth noting that 96 percent of the murders committed world-wide are by young men (between ages 17-34). The supposed holders of logic and “reasonableness” overlap, not coincidentally, with the most homicidal segments of the world population.

Where did this primacy of “hard-headed” logic over feeling come from? And perhaps more importantly, where did the contempt for feelings and emotions originate?

It began a very long time ago when humans began to kill other Peoples. And by “Other Peoples” I mean those beings we now call “Animals”. What a change a simple word can make. To kill other peoples is objectionable – though not if we first depict our human victims as “animals”; “subhuman”, “pests”, “parasites”, “vermin”, or “savage beasts”. Such linguistic redefinitions have allowed human slaughters over and over throughout human history.

To kill “animals” is less fraught emotionally. They are lesser; they have less reason, less feeling, less consciousness, less mind, less self-awareness, less soul. Or so we have conveniently claimed. Those who became good at killing these “Other Peoples” needed to subdue their emotional response to these beings. They needed to deaden their own feelings as well as their perception of the feelings of these “Other Peoples”. Empathic feeling, or “sentiment” is a dire impediment to killing. Such feelings could be left to women who had to “care” for infants and children, and to infants and children whose feelings didn’t matter much anyway, and would eventually (if male) have such feelings beaten out of them one way or another.  “Feelings” and “emotionality” became despised in male/hunter dominated cultures. To be overly sympathetic meant you were “womanish”, “childish” or “infantile” – all terrible things to be, or so one would be led to believe.

The human being was literally split into two. In the female half of the population feelings and sentiment were allowed. In the other half, sentiment and feeling meant you were “unmanly” and this could literally be a death sentence if you were male. Of course this division between male and female is not absolute. Obviously there are ruthless women and caring men but statistically this division holds true.

We continue to be plagued by this early division between the “bleeding heart”, feeling, “feminine” parts of our populations, and the opposing “hard-headed realists”. These “hard realists” are typically found in the right wing side of the political spectrum. The right invariably supports the strong: the entrepreneur, the military, the police, the proven “successes” i.e. the rich and the corporate world. They tend to despise the poor who they see as “losers” and unworthy of support. If only we bolster the strong we will be “Great Again”. The “feeling” types usually find themselves on the left of the political spectrum. These are the people who believe in social programs, the social safety net, minimum wages, equal rights, support of public education, the environment, etc.

What we are facing now in the world is the violent collision of these two ancient strains in our history. The rise of the “Strong Man” – the regimes of Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping, Assad, Erdogan,  Orban, Bolsanaro, Duterte etc. are a re-presentation of this age-old archetype of the tough, hard, ruthless warrior/hunter/male who derides people on the basis of size, power, sex , looks, and differences – real and imaginary. These men dominate by means of fear, intimidation, and violence. They represent the major human trajectory for much of our time on earth. The rise of feminism, the attempt to attain equality, and the linking of the female, “animal”, indigenous, black and differently sexed groups, fundamentally threatens this ancient established order. The reaction is now erupting. Either we will continue the logic of male dominating heartlessness, or we will embrace our more feeling, caring selves. One way leads to death, the other to a love of life. We are coming to the showdown. The fate of the world now depends on which side triumphs. Whose side are you on?

How We Kill

In Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale, June and her husband are plotting their escape from a religious/fascist dystopia called Gilead. When they get to the border they will claim they are just going for a daytrip. They will take no luggage so it will look plausible. Her husband begins to think about their beloved cat. Obviously on a day trip they wouldn’t be taking their cat with them. But if they leave it behind its meowing might attract attention and arouse suspicion. Perhaps they could give it away? No this would only arouse more suspicion and in such dangerous times no one can be trusted. Finally the husband speaks up:

“I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her I knew he meant kill.That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.You do that first in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.”

How we have arrived at this current place and time is a very long story. How we have converted other sensitive living beings – our fellow travellers on this planet – into “its”, and then gone further and converted trillions of them into nothing at all, is a psycho/social act of magic that is almost incomprehensible. Of course we have done it before to blacks, Native Americans, Jews, Gypsies. Yet never on this scale, and never have so many participated on a daily basis.

We have become a global world of Hamlets. We know, and yet we do not know. We believe, and yet disbelieve. We live somewhere in between, in a strange semi consciousness, a semi-willed fog of “sort of” ignorance. We feel unable to act. We know we should not be cruel to “animals” and most of us would not deliberately inflict horrible cruelty on an “animal”. However most of us really do know what goes on out of sight (but not really out of mind), in the factory farms and abattoirs. We know it is horrible, incessant cruelty but we pretend not to know, we put it out of consciousness, we put it in a back dusty corner somewhere, we become willfully blind, and think we cannot act. We have become paralyzed. The Constitution is crumbling before our eyes and the Nazis are rebuilding in the United States and much of Europe and we pretend (as we did once before), this can’t be really happening. We have become so used to being passive consumers – of everything – that any action seems alien to us. We are provided food by others, our clothing and housing is provided by others, our entertainment is provided by others. Our government is provided by others. We sit and we watch. We sit and we consume. We sit and we are told what to think and what to do. We are not supposed to decide anything, except what brand to buy, and most of us don’t. But what we are doing is allowing the worst atrocities in the history of the world to continue.

It is not really that hard to change. There really is no loss in changing and giving up “meat”. To the contrary, here is so much to gain. Better health, better tasting food, better peace of mind, greater self-respect, and a contribution to the whole world at large. The only sacrifice is losing an ignorance that you really don’t have to begin with. It is giving up a crippling self-delusion.  It is giving up a terrible habit of passivity that you are far better to leave behind. It is not that you do not know. You do. We can live a more ethical life where we have agency.  This has nothing to do with being perfect; it just means being a bit better, a bit kinder, and a bit less paralyzed. We can do this, and we must.

If you want to begin to know what a given “animal” is really like, you must first get down to eye level with it. We have lived so long in a myth of being “above” the “lowly” animal with the accompanying condescension, it has become very difficult to see a fellow creature as it actually is. Additionally, most of the “animals” we in contact with – dogs, cats, hamsters, cows; are four legged. Being two legged and upright we inevitably are looking down on these beings. This “looking down on” is both physical, emotional and metaphoric. It is hard for us not to feel superior to beings that are literally “below” us. This is the heirarchal legacy of adults over children, men over women, and large people over smaller people in a culture long oriented around violence and dominance.

So what happens when we go down to eye level? If we do this and succeed in leaving our preconceptions behind (no easy task), we may be surprised at what we find. The gaze that looks back at us may confound and confuse us. We may find it unfathomable. Not because it is mindless, or less intelligent than our own but because we may be unable to plumb its depth. It is “fathoms” deeper than we ordinarily go. This gaze is seldom encountered when we are looked at by a fellow human. It is a gaze only very rarely experienced in the presence of a truly evolved yogic master or holyman who has arrived at a state few humans ever attain let alone sustain. It is the most level gaze most of us will ever experience. If we have not abused this being it will look at us without judgement, without guile of any kind, and with a presence (a being in the present) that we will find hard to understand. It is a living philosophical look. I think what we call “animals” live philosophical lives. Not of abstract thoughts about the universe and morality, but lives of continual contemplation of the extant world around them. They are an embodiment of philosophy. They are always in the now and ever present in the world. They are feeling existence both in themselves and in their surroundings. They are deep, it is we who are shallow. No they do not use words (though their ability to communicate with each other has long been underrated by us) because they have no need to. We needed words because we have lost so much. Humans are attempting to recreate the world of direct experience of the world that they have lost by using words. “Animals” are present with one another and have not lost the myriad ways of nonverbal communication that are lost to most of us. They live in a landscape of immediate feelings, gestures, body language and smells that in ourselves have nearly been atrophied out of existence. We yearn for these beings, love them, hate them, and are fascinated by them because they represent all we once had and lost.

We have traded off most of our natural gifts because of our need and compulsion to live in unnatural situations. These beings whom we denigrate, live in what in a human we would consider a state of grace. It is not some idealized state of perfection – they have their pain and sorrows – but compared to us – they are in a state of profound peace much of the time. They are not consumed by the past nor obsessed with the future, they are not in a fury of judgement about others and certainly not in judgement of themselves. They are not continually trying to better themselves, radically increase their possessions, or need to define and justify themselves by great accomplishments. We are not their superiors, in fact we are petty, desparate, and in all the ways that are truly important, their inferiors. We have so much to learn, and are so poorly equipped to do so.

Belief Systems and Change

Blog  #8

Language is the brick in the edifice of the dream we call civilization. Belief systems are the mortar. Language and the way it is used creates and sustains attitudes and mental constructs, but it is our belief systems that weave everything together. We seldom question belief systems (after all, they are “belief” systems) and we are deaf to anything that contradicts them.

We live in a created reality which has walls which hide anything outside itself. How else does one explain how people (slaveholders) lived quite happily and unquestioningly for thousands of years with slavery? How to explain that in many cultures including imperial Rome infanticide was a commonplace and accepted occurance? How one of the most civilized countries in recent times could condone the wholesale round-up and murder of millions of jews, gypsies and handicapped people without blinking an eye? We create hypnotic structures that we live within and they put us to collective sleep.

In western society we have a belief system that began 5000 years ago and still wields its vision over us today. That system was called the bible. God supposedly created us in his own image (rather than the more plausible reverse) and all creatures were conveniently given to us by him so we could have dominion over them. They existed to serve us, work for us and, most importantly, be our food. The one thing belief systems have in common is that they serve the holders of the belief system.

Some Native Americans had a belief system where they spoke to the Great Buffalo Spirit In The Sky and made offerings to this spirit. In exchange, the Great Buffalo Spirit sent buffalo for them to kill and eat. Then white men arrived with a belief system that made it ok to kill millions of buffalo to make hats, and destroy the natives’ chief source of food. Their belief systems also made it perfectly ok to kill “Indian savages” and take over their world.

Certain Inuit people will chew up snow and spit it into the mouth of a seal or walrus they have just killed because they believe the creature let itself be killed so it could get a drink of fresh water. Belief systems serve those who believe in them, that is their purpose. The belief in the divine right of kings served kings, as the “infallibility of the pope” served many popes. The belief in “The one true God” has helped Jews, Christians and Moslems kill each other and innumerable other peoples who believed differently, this had the added benefit of liberating land and properties that could then be taken over with a clear conscience.

Belief systems are usually so entrenched that they are taken for granted and almost never questioned. Anyone who does question them is immediately considered crazy, or an enemy. The Christians who did not accept the Roman Gods were fed to the lions, when these Christians in turn became dominant, dissenters were labeled “Heretics” or “Witches” and burnt at the stake.

Today the new “normal” largely goes unquestioned. When I was young we believed the United States was the “Good guy”, always helping the poor and downtrodden with our generous aid, and working for universal freedom and democracy. We Americans looked at protesters in South America and elsewhere as “ingrates” and “Communist agitators”. Our belief systems kept us ignorant and blind to our ruthless exploitation of other countries resources, our support of murderous dictators, and the true uses of our supposedly generous “aid”.

Today our belief system has it that it is quite ok to eat “meat”. We bring our kids to McDonalds by the millions, we sit down to our steak dinners without a second thought. We torment and murder (yes murder), billions of our fellow creatures every year without giving it a single thought. All this is considered perfectly normal and respectable. We do not ask our politicians what they ate for dinner any more than we asked politicians 300 years ago whether or not they owned slaves. 

We are on the brink of change. Beliefs are changing and we are beginning to wake up. We are beginning to see the truth behind our blinding belief systems. Norms will change.

When we fully emerge from our mass delusion we will look back at our current belief systems with disbelief.

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.

Vegan Blog 6

I remember a very disheartening experience I had, when as a child, I was first taken to a zoo. First, there was the smell. In the indoor sections of the pens the stench was overwhelming and wholly unexpected. My knowledge of “animals” came from picture books and television wildlife programs and smells did not exist there. The confinement in small quarters, and the lack of frequent cleaning made the “animal’s” visceral reality shocking.

More disturbing by far was the faces of the “animals”. I expected friendly, docile, loving, respectful faces. Faces that in effect said, “You are my master”, “I am your subservient inferior.”  What I saw was entirely different.

The captive inhabitants ignored us almost completely even while many people crowded the cages and manically tried to attract the “animal’s” attention. They waved handkerchiefs, made what they thought were animal noises, yelled and screamed at the “animals”, pounded on the bars or glass, some threw objects or popcorn at them. These people seemed either enraged at the animals’ indifference to them, or desperate for the “animals’” attention.

But the thing that shocked me beyond anything else, was when the occasional “animal” did look in my direction, the look that has stayed with me till today, many decades later, was one of utter contempt.

After years of confinement one can imagine that the inhabitants of zoos would grow indifferent to the clamoring throngs of visitors. They would need to screen them out of their consciousness to preserve what remnants of sanity remained to them in such unnatural settings. But the look of contempt? What can we make of that?

Recently I stopped on a rural gravel road near where I live because a group of cows along with one goat were grazing near the road and I love photographing and looking at cows. There were several females, one nursing calf, and one goat all coexisting very nicely as a group around a large uprooted stump.

When I emerged from my car with my camera the adult cows looked at me warily as I approached. Then, as I locked eyes with one of the lead cows, I saw that look once again that combined disgust and contempt.

For us humans this is almost unbearable. What an affront to our status. These cows belong to us don’t they? They are our possessions; they live at our behest and on our behalf. Don’t they realize we hold their lives and deaths in our hands? After all the centuries of our breeding them, slaughtering them, trading them, herding them, confining them, don’t they realize who we are?

If they still look on us with contempt rather than respect after all that history they obviously must be very stupid “animals” …  Or are they?

Perhaps my perception as a child, and now sixty years later as an adult is distorted. Perhaps I am in error.

Find out for yourself. Go to a zoo. Go to where you can see cows eye to eye and see for yourself what is actually there in their faces as (and if) they look at you.

And if you then see what I have seen, ask yourself, why do they look at us as they do? What is it that they see? And then ask yourself, what if what they see is the truth?

If we are willing to look with fresh eyes, if we are willing to see what really is there to be seen, we may discover a way back to actual reality… liberating though painful as that may be.

In a recent article in The Guardian about Christina Crawford author of Mommy Dearest her groundbreaking book of her abuse at the hands of her famous actress mother Joan Crawford:

“Christina’s own survival was something she achieved almost entirely without the help of outside agencies. In the US, child protection laws were introduced from the 1960s, and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, creating a single federal focus for preventing and responding to child abuse and neglect, didn’t come into effect until in 1974. Growing up in Hollywood in the 40s and early 50s, Christina had no recourse to the authorities. In fact, after a particularly violent episode she characterizes as her mother “trying to kill me”, it was (Joan) Crawford herself who called the police and asked them to arrest her daughter for delinquency. “I was 13 or 14. And it was then that I realized the world had gone insane. The officer was very kind. He told me that there was nothing he could do because there were no laws to protect me. He told me: ‘You have to try to live [here] until you are 18 and can go free. But, otherwise, if anyone calls me again on you, you’ll have to go to juvenile detention.’”

It was shocking to me (and I am no longer easily shocked) that such child protection legislation just arrived so relatively recently. But attitudes can change quickly and we can go from total blindness to suddenly seeing, so there is hope.

On CBC yesterday there was a radio show about the shrinking moose population in Canada. One of men interviewed who had worked in an environmental capacity for the government expressed his concern as a citizen and a hunter. He said he was very concerned about the moose. He went on to say that even if the solution meant he had to forgo hunting for three or four years to help restore the population he would be willing to do so. This is a truly enlightening and generous stance for a hunter to take, however let us put it into different context before we get too impressed with the magnaminity of this offering. Imagine if he was talking of Jews, or Muslems, Christians, or Black people.

“I am concerned for the (insert minority of your choice). Even if it meant forsaking my hunting tag for three or four years to restore populations to original levels I would do so.”

Such concern for the moose will be of little comfort for the moose. To forsake killing it for three or four years can be viewed as benevolent only if we accept the underlying premise that of course it is morally acceptable to kill it to begin with. What an unquestioned right underlies this generosity.

“I would be willing to forsake killing (Blacks, Moslems, Jews, Christians) for three or four years if it could return the population to previous levels.”

At which point we would resume killing them with a clearer conscience with the knowledge we are preserving the pool from which our killing can continue.

We clear forests, fields, and wetlands to make way for our suburbs, housing developments, factories, farms and cities without a thought to the thousands of beings crushed, maimed and displaced by these activities. We do these things without thought because we learnt these things were not the proper place for our concerns. The whole subject never comes up and so we do not think about it. They are beneath the threshold of our concern and to bring them up seems ludicrous. “What? I need to consider the squirrel, chipmunk and bird nests in every tree I cut down? I should worry about the mice, moles and woodchucks underground who may be crushed and suffocated by bulldozers in digging the foundations for my house?”

“How could I build anything if I worried about such things?”

How indeed? What would this earth look like if these things were not beneath consideration? What if these ignored beings were considered persons rather than irrelevant things whose lives were not even worth thinking about if considering them impedes us?

Someday we will look back on our attitudes toward the non-human peoples of the world in horror. They are in the same place we once reserved for Black people, Native Americans, non-christians of all kinds, and even children.

We literally think we are god’s gift. And this god who coincidentally looks just like us (if we are white and a male) was the one who gave us the divine right to dominate, rule over, and ignore, all the living beings who live on this planet that do not look like us. Is there a greater arrogance imaginable?

To talk of these others as “people” or “persons” seems ridiculous. It seems self-evidently absurd. We are the only “people” or “persons” on the planet, the rest are “mere animals”.

May I suggest you go out and really look at a cow, a pig, a cat, a dog, or a deer, and see what is really there in front of you, as opposed to what you assume is there. If you truly look, as if you are looking for the first time (which is exactly what you will be doing), you will see a person as sensitive, and as thoughtful as yourself – perhaps more so. But first you must ask yourself, who do you think you are? And the corollary, who do you think they are? Nothing is as it seems.