Standing aside

546:

For vegans one enquiry is highly valued, but the enquiry could be largely unnecessary, since everything is already understood, on a deeper level - there’s nothing NOT understood by any of us. It’s like coming across a pristine stream and drinking from it. We all know it, when we taste pure water, even if we’ve never tasted it before. It’s a eureka moment - “This is how water really tastes”.

            So it is with animals. Not many of us could actually do anything to hurt one or would ever want to. Nor is there anything going on concerning animals that, on some level, we don’t already know. Every adult knows that animals kept for food undergo horror. We don’t have to visit an animal farm or an abattoir to know this.

            Since everything is known people can be left to discover things for themselves. The information is accessible for those who want it (and our job is certainly to make that information accessible). Perhaps vegans need to let people work things out for themselves. We can butt out of other peoples’ business. For our part we just need faith-in-people, that when they are ready they will go looking.

            But our problem is that we think others are incapable of finding out for themselves. Certainly, an omnivore who is moving-towards-being-vegan may need some encouragement from us, but our main role is surely to stay out of the way while they go discovering. We can be on standby, ready with the first-aid kit in case the slope is too slippery. We can be there assisting and understanding, especially if people don’t know what to do. Along their route of discovery they’ll hit feelings, as they pick up on the details (of what a plant-based diet is all about, implications of a vegan lifestyle, etc), and as they experience the whole unfolding process; as they realise what they’ve been involved with all their lives; as they realise how their past may now seem like a personal catastrophe; as the prospect of major-lifestyle-change, of succumbing to a single new idea, might feel like being doomed for ever by having thought it. But if we, who’ve largely forgotten the process we went through, nag them, nudge them or even ‘guilt’ them, they might just step back and say it’s too hard, and not want to go through with it.