Open discussion

533: 

When omnivores finds themselves up against a vegan, they don’t like being shown up by better argument. So, they’ll defend their position any way they can. Same goes for vegans who can’t hold their own. If all else fails, any of us might fall back on the old standby - hostility.

            Hostility looks ridiculous today, but in the last resort the option of becoming ‘unfriendly’ is the only way some people think they can fight back.

            I’d like to look at the omnivore, in this case, up against vegan argument - they starting the rot, seeing a vegan having the capability to annihilate their arguments, yet being unwilling to allow this. Perhaps they think they are defending the views of ‘the vast majority’, so they put forward anything to kill the discussion. In this way they play dirty.

If they’re the ones who ‘start the rot’, then we might think we can do worse, by making moral judgements about them … and so it goes on. If we allow such a conversation to be pushed towards the precipice, we can expect a bun fight. Their aggressive response might be something like … “So, that’s what you reckon, do you?”

            Aggro can flare up so quickly; it’s all smiles one minute and World War Three the next. The one who feels attacked is pushed over the edge because they are left with nowhere else to go.

            By NOT attacking, by using a little subterfuge instead, we might avoid a blow-out. I would try inscrutability, keeping them guessing as to exactly where I’m coming from, and if I encounter any ‘hostility’ my first instinct is to restore balance, not attack back.

In any ‘talk-together’, I would keep focused on the idea of our being the planet’s guardians, each of us aiming at the same thing but perhaps by different routes. Everyone’s interested in finding a common purpose, surely. If we can agree to that, there’s a chance that further agreements about details and strategies can be explored, always coming back to the point at which we agreed, and as many times as necessary, setting out from that place to see at what point we actually differ.