The Antidote

1867:

There’s a general air of pessimism in our Western societies (and elsewhere, no doubt). To fix our collective pessimistic views, vegans argue that the switch can be flipped by making a stand against the profiteers, boycotting a lot of the unethical stuff they’re selling, and finding ethical alternative product. This may sound simplistic perhaps, but it’s a great start. By highlighting what is most destructive in our society, identifying it in our own lives and leaving it behind us, we can then feel some optimism, that there’s a future worth having and passing on.

In our quest to continually seek pleasure and avoid pain, we let ourselves become submissive to those who run the show. We work for them, spend the money we earn from them, to pay for the goods sold by them. If we are an unthinking consumer, we comply with exploitative production methods because we don’t know any other way to conduct our lives. We give support to the very worst systems. We keep quiet about what we wouldn’t normally approve of. We feel pessimistic not only because what others are doing but because we can’t seem to move out of the rut we’re stuck in.

Once we drop our own participation in all of this, we can drop our pessimism. There might be some personal cost at first, when we have to avoid buying or doing things we might have once enjoyed. But it’s a small price to pay, to reverse compliance with the powerful and rich, and help to reverse our society’s inherent destructiveness. And nothing more destructive in our society than the animal trade, the enslavement of animals, the killing and eating of them and their various products.

Vegans realise that by letting go of so many popular food and clothing items (and having such a clear ethical reason for doing so) we pit ourselves against most people’s attitudes concerning ‘the use of animals’. The drabness of conventional attitude, the cruelty most people are associated with, all of this can be reversed by a simple boycott of unethical products (and there are a lot of them out there!!). As difficult as this may seem, it’s almost certainly the antidote to the rife pessimism, apathy and ethical spinelessness amongst our fellow humans.