The wicked and their supporters

1271:

The terrible suffering the 'slave masters' have inflicted on animals might be said to be truly wicked.  They've manipulated people's minds in order to sell their product.  By, making their customers party to their crimes, is doubly wicked.

Not too many people will admit playing a part in the tragedy of animal abuse, but they’re involved nonetheless - the customers are buying the stuff and the producers are reaping the profits.  No one has clean hands.

The producers have built empires on the backs of animals.   They've provisioned generations of customers.  They’ve supplied food and clothing on both the survival level and at the luxury end of the market.  The Animal Industries have taken a lot of money out of people's pockets, whether by selling them clothing, food, shoes, cosmetics, medications or entertainment.  They seem to provide what others can’t - seemingly reliable, safe, economic and fashionable products and services.  They give the customers what they want without letting on just how the products come into being.  Especially where food is concerned, they’ve been allowed to sell harmful products, tell lies about them regarding their nutritional value, hide the cruelty to their animals, and go on to profit greatly.  We, the customers, have been made into suckers.  We can’t really believe that so much untruth, harmful products or monetary greed can exist.

The customer is partly to blame of course (it takes two to tango) because we believe what we want to believe.  But at heart, most of us can’t accept that some people can be so unprincipled that they’d do almost anything to turn a profit.  I’d be very surprised if even the smallest percentage of humans are truly wicked or so mentally ill or desperate that they’d sell their soul for wealth.  But many wealthy people are capable of doing just that, perhaps because of their desperate fear of ‘being without’.  They’ve only known wealth and cannot contemplate the idea of having less than they’ve been used to.  And if the sort of money they think they need can be made out of exploiting animals, that is exactly what they will do.

It seems that a small but powerful minority are without moral scruples.  These are the really dangerous people in our community, for they’re willing to abandon all moral constraint to guarantee their own material security.  They inhabit the board rooms of agribusiness (and allied industries) and think nothing of forcing small farmers out of business in order to establish intensive farms and processing operations.

For the remaining 99% of us, who’ve never had the chance to be tempted this way, we choose to believe what we’re told, and let ourselves be exploited in much the same way the animals are exploited.  Unless one is vegan, then almost all people seem to allow themselves to become supporters of these unprincipled businesses.  But if we did have the chance, would we be like them too?

All of us probably have a few really deep fears – fear of failure, fear of poverty, fear of abandonment, fear of death etc., but most of us don’t have that monster-gene that allows us to destroy things on a grand scale, in order to make things safer for ourselves.  We might flirt with the devil sometimes, we might be less than fully conscious of what we do, but most of us are still in touch with our own feelings and would resile from actually inflicting pain on either human or animal.

But are most people speciesist at heart, when it suits their purpose?  Perhaps most people would think nothing of someone else exploiting animals if it could be of benefit to themselves.

With what we now know about today's animal husbandry practices, the 'customers' act as if they didn't know.  They see how the tycoon behaves, and let themselves be led by their example, living with a low empathy threshold, in order to carry on eating the poor creatures whilst feeling nothing for them.

Perhaps most people don’t realise the significance of what is happening behind the scenes.  Perhaps they really don't  know how badly farm animals suffer, and on what scale they suffer.  They keep their eyes and ears averted, in order that they may eat what they want to eat and wear what they want to wear.  They close off to information, so that they can act as if they didn’t know.  But in these well informed times that’s a rather lame position to take. It's as if they prefer to seem a bit slow on the uptake, rather than go through the much more taxing process of trying to refute the information on hand.