Computers let us escape

1675: 

Some of the new information we need, if we’re going to eat an exclusively vegan diet, includes where we get hold of important and essential nutrition/‘foods’ – we need to know where protein is found, how to ensure safe levels of vitamin B12, who sells tasty burgers, and what chocolate isn’t laced with ‘contaminants’, etc. These start-up tips make things go safely and smoothly, but the deeper we get into ethical veganism the more urgent it is that our little cravings for the wrong things don’t interfere too much. The sooner we can make things comfortable for ourselves, the sooner our addictive associations with particular items of food will fade away. And then, once we drop our old misinformed beliefs (particularly in the healthiness of meat and dairy products) we’re home and hosed.

These days we're awash with on-line information. Computers are like home laboratories allowing us to put thoughts into safe practice. A computer is like a fuelled-up Ferrari with a set of keys – straight away, as you start up, you get the feeling that we have a great machine that works well, and that the information we can find is generally pretty solid.

Information that comes to us already in workable forms, as workable as our manufactured Ferrari, lets us move fast, fast enough to escape. And when you think of all the poor guidance most of us have had to put up with through our early years, the misinformation, the speciesism and anthropocentrism, then escape has surely got to be our first priority. Held in custody, as kids often are, without any power, without any means of escaping, drives many children and young people to see their lives as if behind prison bars. (Note the comparison between animals on prison-farms). Since, when young, we are effectively trapped both by our lack-of-confidence and lack of life experience, we can’t see how to escape. Unless we experiment. Which is now made all the safer and easier by way of information accessibility.

Let’s not forget what we’ve been in the past - experimental victims, dosed with misinformation, to make us move slowly, think slowly and bend to the norms of the unthinking majority. And then along comes the on-line world. Just ACCESS, to information. How on Earth it all happened so fast, and whoever puts all this wonderful stuff on the Net, I don't know. Why did they do such altruistic things? It’s beyond me, and yet it makes me feel deeply grateful. It's liberating. But, all the more so because it disturbs governments and worries The Authorities.

The Net gathers together like-minds. There are no megaphones involved. There are no cheap propaganda leaflets. Just a lot of people working for the greater good of providing better information. It makes me realise that we’re entering into an altruistic age, with the sort of altruism which is fun-altruism, even self-benefitting altruism. What's happening is the empowering of altruism. Today’s information blasts its way through the sludge, so that we can pursue new attitudes in the virtual realm. Via our computers we can see what’s ‘out there’, and then we can ‘come home’ and find out if any of it works. And if so, we can then put it into practice. And that spells 'escape'.