Conscience

1620: 

A numbed conscience lets us get away with things. A troubled conscience casts a dark light on what we do. Does conscience prick when we eat a steak? Can we put our conscience to sleep when we want it to NOT notice something unsavoury?

Either sub-consciously or consciously, we all suffer some sort of ‘conscience pain’, unless we’ve learnt how to switch it off. And if it can be switched off, then habits grow like weeds around a healthy plant, until it chokes, until we lose sensitivity altogether. And that means we can only ever be half awake to the world we live in.

It seems that a big part of our awareness-development relies on our seeing things very clearly, whilst the ability to cauterise our conscience requires us to close our eyes, for fear of being blinded by what we’re looking at.

When it comes to the matter of choosing our food, most people have learned to become desensitised. With animal-eating we say, “Everyone does it so why shouldn’t I?” And just to help us along, we have ads on the TV that help us normalise this habit of animal-eating. We’re helped further by the cooking shows, where the good-looking chef is always seen radiating bonhomie and using lots of meat and dairy when preparing those delicious-looking dishes. We’re encouraged further by the ever-present eating scenes in travel and holiday programmes.

Promoting animal foods is big business. Animals are always portrayed as being here for our benefit. The messy or cruel side of animal life is never shown, only the ‘end products’ which are always made to look ultimately attractive. The animals responsible for all these ‘goodies’ are never known as living beings only as dead constituents of our favourite foods.

It is the mark of a so called 'educated person' that they can convince themselves that, because they haven’t been personally involved in torturing or murdering animals, that they can’t therefore be held accountable for what goes on behind the scenes. Conveniently, they dumb down their conscience, pretending they know nothing, even when they know plenty and enough.

The animal-eaters know, for instance, that whilst their own hands seem to be clean, that they nonetheless support the Industry with their dollars.

None of us want to see ourselves as cold-hard-bastards. So, to that end, we endeavour to keep our untroubled consciences asleep. And in this climate of acceptance, we learn to accept meat and various animal secretions as ‘just normal’. The only time we might feel a disturbance in the air is when we have the misfortune to encounter one of those ‘damned vegans’ who ask awkward questions. Like, “How can you possibly go on supporting the Animal Industry, when you know what they do”? Then the main aim is to avoid vegans at all costs for fear that their loud voices will wake the sleeping conscience.