Being superior

In the broadest possible way, we need to establish where we stand on principle. We can make a start by rejecting anything that’s been achieved using violence or violation. If it’s worthwhile it’s done in a non-exploitative way. Even though humans have always been advantage-takers, we now need to reject that whole idea, whether it’s in the form of racism, speciesism, snobbery or cruelty. And if very privately we think we’re better than others, that too should be reversed, otherwise we’ll think we deserve to be special, which is exactly what got humans into trouble in the first place. Advantage keeps us separated from others. We are so hardwired in favour of separation and against equality that it’s little wonder that animals are always regarded by humans as inferior.
If we want to understand this attitude, especially in regard to animals, we need only look at the way most of us treat people who are different from us. We indulge in separation to avoid integration. We might not admit it and we might even appear benevolent towards strangers (in order to win a liberal reputation for ourselves) by showing compassion for the less well-off. It may be a tactic we use to mask our contempt for them, where we half-heartedly try to get to know strangers and help them (we assume they need help!) and then, when they feel patronised and keep us at arm’s length, we can safely feel rejected … by which time we can feel justified in separating from them. We might say to ourselves, “ I guess they’re not worth getting to know”, which brings us nicely round to not liking them, and then not thinking of them as equals. This seems to be the way we arrive at separation.
I lived in a town after the second world war to where Sikhs migrated. People then had no experience of other races of people in their town. They thought they smelt (as of course they did and as we must have smelt strangely to them!) and said that “they don’t even speak proper English”. To this day the two communities have never accepted each other.
We stay in a separation cocoon where it’s more comfortable for us. We don’t wish to make the attempt to integrate, so we notice the way a person dresses or talks and conclude that we have nothing in common with them. Soon enough we are thoroughly distanced from them. To be a minority victim of this sort of attitude must be terrible (those with ‘inferior’ origins must surely know how it feels from bitter experience!) and it’s a feeling that many of us, from ‘superior’ backgrounds, are hardly aware of, because we are so used to ‘practising’ separation on others when it suits us.
It’s the same process we go through with animals, especially and most dangerously those animals living on ‘farms’. We humans feel distance between ourselves and them. We believe them to be inferior to us, and that allows us to exploit them without feeling pity for them. Separation-beliefs make some humans and absolutely all animals into inferiors. This allows us to treat them differently. We believe them to be ‘brutish’, less sensitive to pain and therefore unable to notice what we dish out to them.