Absurd pessimism

577:

There’s good reason for us to have faith in people’s ability to change. After all, excluding the ‘from-birth’ vegans, all of today’s practising vegans have once been omnivores. And therefore we all once had a rather gloomy view on life, by way of our conformity. We were (nearly) all part of The System, and we can see now that it was a system that clearly couldn’t succeed. Being so much part of it, how could we have ever been optimistic?

            You don’t have to be an omnivore to be pessimistic, many vegans I know are just as doubtful about the future. We’ve all thought, things will never change. The human race is going to hell in a hand basket, etc. Pessimism holds us back. But do we see how infectious that is? What hope is there for others coming along behind us, who aren’t yet vegan, if our defeatism makes things worse? Especially if we are vegan.

            I’d suggest that we are simply avoiding taking personal responsibility for the way things are. And it doesn’t help if we are naming and blaming, in order to feel-better. Our own complicity with the Animal Industries or, if we’re vegan, our pessimism, dooms us.

            The more violent amongst us focus on revenge, shifting focus away from taking responsibility to blaming. We blame ‘the corporates’ because they’re easy to hate. “They are responsible. They’ve made us what we are, they’ve infected all of us”. And so we deflect personal responsibility away from ourselves and onto the big crooks, whose wickedness is so obvious.

            Most of us are, being humans, small time  crims who reckon we can be let off the hook by going for the big boys, the trans-national executives, the politicians, the rich … and the Animal Industries. We demonstrate our hatred of them and get brownie points for being active campaigners against them. But it often screens our own guilt. It lessens our own self-examination. It downgrades the significance of personal discipline. We get more interested in fighting the good fight than in self-development, all for very good reasons of course. We concentrate on bringing down the big boys, and when that doesn’t do a scrap of good, then pessimism creeps back into our soul to keep us company – “It will never work. Whatever I do it is nothing compared to the damage they do”.

            Because we aren’t rigorous enough with ourselves, we therefore can’t be rigorous enough in our activism. It turns full circle: we’re back to why we aren’t being rigorous, why we go for the easy option, why our activism can so easily deteriorate into a thirst for revenge. We’re hooked on making value judgements.

            But these judgements are so predictable. All we’re really doing is getting our rocks off. What we aren’t doing (although pretending to ourselves that we are) is engaging in the ‘most optimistic pursuit of all’ - raising awareness