The great delusion

1643:

Objects may not be living and breathing beings like us, but perhaps their purpose is to show us what being is really all about; it’s as if they sometimes ‘respond’ to our feelings for them, as if they ‘read’ our feelings. Maybe this is twaddle, but you must admit that somehow objects do react to our attitude to them; probably the planet is changing its climate in response to our profligate use of fossil fuels. More constructively, a flautist possesses a flute and the flute takes on the status of ‘a treasured possession’ and it almost becomes a living being. It takes on a symbiotic relationship with its player. Whatever we call it, there’s something very nice going on here. Isn’t it everyone’s dream to lose themselves in a relationship, to love something or someone, in a symbiotic pact of intimacy? In her attic, the flautist reaches for her flute, it being the inspiration for their making some fine music together.

But all this symbiosis and closeness isn’t necessarily the complete answer to life. For that we need more than one flute. We need many 'flutes'; we need to ‘symbios-ise’ with several elements in our life. We need to address perhaps a vast array of dysfunctional, inherited attitudes (which are far from producing any mutual benefit). The most damaging of these is likely to concern the way we use animals. Here’s a classic example of delusion: a belief in the safety of having a ‘non-relationship’ with the animal we are about to eat.

Our contact with certain animals, our cruelty towards them, is to our mutual disadvantage. It starts out easily but ends up badly. Humans and animals – we’re deluded enough to think we’ve discovered a bargain, where it’s all advantage on our side with minimum disadvantage. Later, too late usually, we find things don’t work out quite as well as we wish. Here we have a lop-sided situation, the too strong against the too weak - the destabilising element being the human intellect, hungry for advantage. In this case, we have the ugly act of enslaving, killing and consuming the animal - the attacker attacked from behind, creeping up slowly and unnoticed, then striking us down boldly, just when we’re not looking. The attack comes in two forms, shame and illness. Which one deals the final blow is unimportant – but vegans advise against trying to conduct an anti-relationship. Why try to get away with it when you don’t have to?