Being superior

In the broadest possible way, we need to establish where we stand on the non-violence principle. We can make a start by rejecting anything that’s been achieved using violence or violation. If it’s going to be worthwhile at all it’s going to be 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 why we’ve landed in our present 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. Perhaps how this process works is as follows: 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 … using this as a tactic to mask our contempt for them, where we half-heartedly try to get to know strangers and help them and get miffed by their reaction. Could it be that they feel patronised and want to keep us at arm’s length and could it be that we then 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 to not thinking of them as equals. Thus we arrive at separation.
I lived in a town after the second world war to which Sikhs migrated. People then had no experience of other races in town. They thought they smelt (as of course they did and as we must have smelt strangely to them!) and noticed 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 things like the way a person dresses or talks, and we 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.