The disease of pessimism

Friday 19th November 2010
All the time we humans are still using animals we won’t get past being pessimists, and we’ll never shake the guilt, and we’ll always feel like failures because of it. It mightn’t be so for the exploiters themselves, since they probably don’t care enough or like themselves enough to be optimists-for-the-future anyway. Nothing will stop them doing what they do, for as long as they can do it. They’re pessimists who feel as though they’re optimists.
But even vegans catch the disease of pessimism, not out of guilt but from nurturing a negative outlook. I’m thinking of vegans I know who get depressed about how things are looking, who can hardly fail to notice the bastardry everywhere, and how things aren’t looking so good for ‘voluntary change’. That’s the pessimist’s forecast, whether from the exploiter, the consumer or the vegan - each in their own ways holding pessimism as some sort of protection against the shock of inevitability.
Optimists know that pessimism is just a trap to keep us away from change. Optimists know that change hinges on one’s state of mind, and we are in control of that to a large extent. Things may happen but the optimist makes the best of it and even uses adversity to add resolve to the escape from compliance. As vegans we can be far more optimistic and up-beat than our omnivore friends, because at least we’ve made a start at defying convention.
For us there is a way out of the mess. But for anyone too there’s a way out. It just comes down to wanting it enough. Omnivores either won’t or can’t. And they don’t, mainly because they’re locked in to pessimism-about-the-future. And that’s coming out of guilt about the past and particularly their compliance over what foods they’re willing to eat and their addictions to animal products.
The reason we don’t want to address the mess is that it doesn’t seem likely that much will alter for the world just because I happen to personally change my eating habits.
If, however, we do see the connection then a start can be made, by simply altering one’s food regime. But it’s because that connection isn’t made, because changing one’s whole lifestyle isn’t realistic, that the whole process of change is put on hold and one’s outlook remains gloomy.
An omnivore will probably not see changing their attitudes or dropping their addictions as something “simple”. For a start, especially for the not-so-young, there’d be so much ground to make up that the starting line would seem too far away. It would only serve to emphasise how far we’d slipped into convenience-living. The weight of so much moral backsliding holds us in our own deep cell, within Society’s prison, within our mind, within our conformities. And that’s closely linked with morality and religion and god-knows-what-else so that, effectively, omnivores live imprisoned, simply by the way in which they see things.
To become vegan would be like going into free fall - it’s all or nothing. And just imagine, hurtling towards the unknown - the not-using-of-animals. It probably feels profoundly unsafe, especially with one’s list of favourite, addictive foods. Just by contemplating ‘losing’ so many, many yummy things is enough to make one shut down on the whole of the ‘animal thing’ and stick with the safety of the status quo and all the pessimism that goes with it.