The disease of pessimism

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All the time we humans are still using animals we won’t get past being pessimists, and we’ll never shake the guilt of it all, and we’ll always feel like failures because of it. It mightn’t be the same for the exploiters themselves, since they probably don’t care enough to be optimists. Probably, nothing will stop them doing what they do since they’re pessimists who pretend they’re optimists. 

            But even vegans catch the disease of pessimism, not out of guilt but from harbouring negative outlooks. It’s the pessimist’s forecast, whether it’s coming from the exploiter, the consumer or the vegan - each in their own way they hold pessimism as some sort of protection against the shock of the inevitable.

            Optimists know that pessimism is just a trap to keep us away from change. We also know that change hinges on one’s state of mind, and the confidence of being in control of it. Stuff happens, but the optimist makes the best of it and even uses adversity to add fresh resolve.

            As vegans, we can be far more optimistic and up-beat than our omnivore friends, because at least we’ve made a practical optimistic statement, and to a very great extent we have defied convention.

            For us there’s a way out of the mess. But it’s no different for anyone else; for anyone 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 this terrible pessimism-about-the-future which comes from guilt (about the past), and particularly their compliance over what foods they’re willing to eat and how addicted they are to animal-based commodities.

            The reason we don’t want to change our lifestyle, diet, etc is that, being pessimists, we don’t think the world will alter very much, just because we might change our eating habits.

            If we do see the connections then it’s likely we’ll be able to see how a start can be made, by simply altering our food regime. But not everyone can see that yet. And it’s because these connections aren’t being made (because changing one’s whole lifestyle isn’t realistic) that the whole process-of-change is put on hold. During this time one’s outlook remains gloomy.

            An omnivore will probably not see that changing attitude or dropping addiction is something simple. For a start, especially for the not-so-young omnivore, there’d seem to be so much ground to make up. The starting line would seem too far away, and 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 all the conformities of mind - imprisoned, simply by the way in which we see things.

            For the pessimistic omnivore, becoming an all-or-nothing-vegan would be like going into free fall. Imagine hurtling towards the unknown (the not-using-of-animals). It probably feels profoundly unsafe, especially if we’re thinking of all those favourite, addictive foods we wouldn’t be eating any longer. Just by contemplating ‘losing’ so many yummy things, it would be enough to make one shut down on the whole of this ‘animal thing’, and stick with the safety of the status quo and all the pessimism that goes with it.