Conforming

1583: 

The exploiters, focused on self interest, know their customers can be relied upon to not-want-to-know-what’s-going-on. More importantly, they know customers are locked into a tightly controlled, food-oriented habit.

Children are often born with in-built trust. They trust their elders. So it was for me. When I felt the weight of adult restriction, as a kid, I accepted it from people I considered were lovingly protecting me. Through them I learnt what ‘normal behaviour’ meant, but the sting in the tail of this cosy background was conformity. My habits were to conform with everyone else's - first guided by parents and then by copying conformist behaviour. When it came to choice of food obviously that meant choice within an omnivorous range.  (When I was a kid, no one had ever heard of vegetarians let alone vegans).

Once I'd escaped parental control, I was able to decide what 'normal habits' involved. I wasn't long before animal issues came up, and the need to boycott abattoir stuff. Hence vegan for life.

And if young adults today follow a similar path of logic, they'll eventually arrive at the same vegan principle, concerning the need to free ourselves from subservience and free captive animals from theirs. It's always about slavery and freedom, and the freedom of choice most of us humans have - one over the other.

As a teenager, I took up running and the only teacher who showed any interest in my athletics was also my history teacher so, in return, I showed an interest in his subject, which later I went further with. By studying history you study slavery, and the human struggle to escape it. Humans have forever been trying to win their freedom and discover value systems that align with true progress. We've found the first part but not the second. Yet. If we look back in history we can see how that fight-for-freedom unfolded. We prize that freedom. Most of us are basking in freedom these days. In the relatively-free-West, we no longer have to struggle on our own account. We don't need slaves since we can use machines to do our hard work for us, and this lets us enjoy the luxury of contemplating the ugliness of slavery. That's human slavery. It doesn't cross the species barrier.

For those of us where it does cross over to enslaving other sentient beings, we desperately want to do something about it. As advocates for these enslaved food-producing animals we have to shout loud because, unlike their human slave-counterparts, they have no chance to organise their escape. Animals have no power to do anything against the wishes of the human. They're powerless against human oppression. Unless there's a human advocate, vegans no less, to step in on their behalf, they have no chance of being released.

As vegans, our own present highly prized freedom allows us to be animal advocates, but that comes at a price. By uncovering certain truths and speaking about them in public, we find ourselves getting off-side with people. Animal advocacy upsets almost everyone, and for obvious reasons! But it won’t always be that way. There are obvious chinks of good sense in what vegans are saying. It will be apparent, eventually. Vegan principle and anti-slavery make sense in two ways - as buoys marking the progress of human evolution and as cautioning the danger of neglecting our human health. We, as vegans, wish to weaken the ‘exploiters'’ influence on Society by keeping people away from animal foods and therefore out of hospital, and safe from premature death. We encourage people to un-poison their bodies and minds and of course to no longer be part of the obscenity that amounts to 150,000 animal executions a minute. Until we move away from so much gratuitous self-harm and this daily holocaust happening at abattoirs all over the world, nothing can possibly go well for us personally or collectively. The first rung on the escape ladder from the omnivore trap is to drop our 'matey-ness' with the 1%ers.