Wake up sheeple!
Wake up sheeple!
Wake up sheeple!
Did that work? Of course not. There are still a lot of people in the world participating in majority-accepted systems that hurt others. There are still people paying money to have innocent lives taken for their pleasure. There are still people driving cars. Still people flying on jets. Still people buying albums from child predators and wife beaters. Still people using slurs because it’s fashionable.
Common wisdom holds that these kinds of people — carnists and drivers and abuse apologists — are simply unaware of the consequences of their actions, or in a tight spot where they can’t make better choices. I disagree. While I’ve heard outlandish stories about grown adults thinking meat comes from the shops and not from a cow, these people are a small minority. And scientists have been telling people about the climate crisis for over 100 years. Yes, really that long. There’s no excuse for not knowing about it today, the secret was blown decades ago.
I call these kinds of people evil.
I would like to address the most common complaint with this kind of thinking, which is that people are forced to kill others through carnism and pollution to live. I don’t believe this argument in most cases. I don’t believe most people saying this have actually tried. But even if they have tried not murdering innocents and discovered they were about to die, I still have a problem. My problem is that killing others en masse to support your own life is the morality of Count Dracula.
Dracula is an archetypal cultural symbol of evil. A specific kind of evil having to do with arrogance, wealth, abuse, and violation. Dracula thinks it’s okay to take lives to preserve his own because he is smarter and more powerful than humans. Just as human carnists think it’s okay to pay a butcher to pay a slaughterhouse to kill cows for them because they are smarter and more powerful than cows.
It’s also the morality of the Nazis. Who believed that ideas of genetic supremacy were justification for the mass killing of “lower” life forms. And don’t take My word for it, take Jewish holocaust survivor Isaac Bashevis Singer’s word for it:
“In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”
I won’t hear arguments that there is nothing evil, abusive, violating, or fascist about eating meat. The parallels between average people’s behaviour, and our cultural myths and history of greatest evil, exist because the behaviour is the same. It is identical, and obviously so. There will never be a justification for industrialised evil on such a scale, nor participation in such systems. Not even the preservation of a life. Choosing to live, when living means the slaughter of innocents, is evil. There are no excuses.
I’d like to soften the blows of these words just a little, though. First, if you are a child living under someone else’s roof and they put dead animal in front of you, you haven’t made a choice, so you are guilty of nothing. Your parents bear the guilt and the blame for this act of evil.
Second, I am not unilaterally opposed to friendship or kindness towards fascists. Many of My closest friends are fascist collaborators who spend money funding the animal holocaust. What sets them apart is that they are capable of understanding their actions are wrong and have a willingness to change. I would rather they stay alive so that one day they might turn the sum of their actions to good.
But as for those with no plans to change…
You know the score. You know, very clearly, the effect of your actions. You are no sheeple. This idea that the carnists and polluters are asleep, unaware, is false. What we are talking about is a choice. A choice to support industrialised slaughter and drive countless species to extinction. To bring natural disasters upon the poorest populations in the world. You are Pharaoh holding Moses’ staff and casting a plague upon the innocent.
I believe it’s time to take the kiddie gloves off. We spent long e-fucking-nough telling the “sheeple” that their actions have consequences. Sheep are a symbol of innocence. There is no innocence left in the murderers after the decades we have spent telling them the truth. They are wolves in sheeple’s clothing. They deserve to be made to feel guilty for their actions. That’s how I changed. It’s how I intend to change others.
