1252:
All of us are trained from
childhood to make judgements of other people - if someone seems bad or stupid
or weak, our judging of them makes us feel better about ourselves. We like to feel superior. It’s a god-on-my-side sort of feeling. But by being vegan we are also trying to win
recognition for an important principle, which should be bigger than the
satisfaction of feeling ‘better-than’.
It’s the principle that
counts. It should never be about me and
my progress towards enlightenment but about the abolition of animal enslavement
and the realisation of its importance. Therefore
I shouldn’t be too quick to judge others, for fear of doing damage to the
Animal Rights movement itself. I, as a
vegan, represent other vegans and their reputation. By judging those who aren’t thinking like me, I
can be certain to turn them away from a particular way of thinking that they
might have come round to, in time.
Memory plays tricks on us
when we think we’ve always been ‘clean’; none of us have always been on
the ‘right track’. We haven’t always
been vegan. We once had another
viewpoint, but along the way we changed. For my part, it hit me one day that it was a
good idea. The idea came unadorned and
without someone pushing it. And it
occurs to me that I might NOT have become vegan if I’d met up with a
judgemental do-gooder who I found to be unattractive, with whom I could not
identify.
Feeling safe as a vegan
should cancel out any need to be judgemental. The violence in our society stems from some
people being thought of as inferior. If
I’d ever encouraged that, I’d have only added to the problem of making others
feel inferior, and why would I want to do that? Maybe somewhere in my past I was taught that a
little violence kept others in their place or that it would force them to rise
to a higher level. But I know that 'being
in the right' can, ironically, put us in the wrong, when judgement, aggression
and a disregard for the non-violent principle contradicts all the good that we
believe in.
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