Dealing with certain preliminaries first

632:

Vegans who promote Animal Rights need to understand the size of our task. And the manner of it. People have changed over these past 40 years. We are amongst children of the Information Age. They’re discriminating (as we were in the 1970s, but they have access to more information to ‘discriminate’ with). Today it isn’t enough simply to pass on information and expect to wow people with it, today there’s more cynicism and suspicion - no one’s taking in all the new information available, just the bits they want. We are information-saturated. As communicators of ideas nothing is very straightforward, especially if the idea isn’t immediately appealing or if it’s an inconvenient idea, like veganism.

            Today, bombarded, softened up by the sheer volume of information being put out, we become pliable (or so commercial-political interests hope anyway). The aim is to intentionally misinform us, to install beliefs into our minds in order to cauterise individual thinking. They succeed only when we follow the crowd and do as we’re told. Once people have settled into lifestyle habits they’re more or less unshiftable. Eating habits are no different to any chemical addiction, since most of the addiction to animal products concern the powerful taste sensation of them.

            Convincing people that they’ve been duped is a massive hurdle; why would they believe us?; why would they want to: why trust what we say? There’s so much misinformation in circulation today that anything too new, too radical or too inconvenient goes into the too-hard basket of ‘unbelievability’.

We need something special to break through all of that. Something all-encompassing, for it’s likely that most people will see the vegan diet one-dimensionally; that it is simply good for slimming. Or they’ll see it as good for other self benefits too. But veganism is more than a diet for personal food-advantage. On a deeper level it suggests a whole other way of thinking.

Everything about being vegan, and everything stemming from it, gets the brain cells moving faster. It lets us see stunning potentials and transformations. It addresses a lot of allied issues. Now if, for whatever reason, we’re drawn to it, if we’re receptive to the reasoning behind it, then it’s likely we’re also hearing what vegans are saying about animals and their ‘right to a life’. Whilst not necessarily agreeing with us at first, they may be ready to consider giving our arguments a fair hearing. And that is the beginning of a fuller understanding of non-violence and all the benefit that is for our own species.

But there will always be those who are most decidedly NOT drawn to this. For them, everything about veganism is either unclear, unbelievable or unattractive. As animal advocates we have wear that. For us it’s probably the hardest part of all, juggling the responsibility of explaining it with the trickiness of dealing with such heavy initial reluctance.

How do we expose the misinformation? How do we get people to believe we’re telling the truth? How do we deal with our own inapproachability? Somehow we have to find our own way to weave a path through this undergrowth, so that we can better incite enough empathy to get people to consider the plight of exploited animals before their own convenience.