The disease of pessimism

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The disease of pessimism

All the time we humans are still using animals we are pessimists, unable to shake off the guilt and always feeling like failures because of it. The exploiters themselves, since they probably don’t care enough, are the most cynical of pessimists. But despite setting out in the right direction even vegans often catch the disease of pessimism. We might not have the same guilt but we do easily lose faith in our fellow humans, and that amounts to pessimism.

It’s the pessimist’s forecast, which ever extreme it comes from, that our pessimism protects us from the shock of the inevitable.

            Optimists know that pessimism is the excuse we use to keep us away from change, whether it be change of attitude or of lifestyle. We also know that change hinges on one’s confidence of being in control of our own minds. Adversity happens, but the optimist makes the best of it and even uses it to strengthen 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 gesture towards a better future; to a very great extent we have defied convention.

            We have devised our own way out of the mess, and we know it’s no different for anyone else. Just by making this one stand we step away from the most ugly aspect of conventional lifestyle. Here is a simple-to-understand way out of the violent society into which we’ve been born, it just comes down to wanting to escape it enough. Omnivores either won’t or can’t, mainly because they feel so helplessly locked into their own pessimism-about-the-future. How can a rosy future include the abattoir, the cage, the dangerous conventional diet and the addiction to animal-based commodities?

            The general consensus is that we don’t think the world will be greatly improved just because we change our eating habits. But if we do make the connection between personal attitude change and the long-range changes that issue from it, then it’s likely we’ll be able to see how important it is for each individual to make a start. The start, we would suggest, is to simply alter our daily food regime.

Not everyone sees that yet. And it’s because this connection isn’t made that the process-of-change is put on hold. With no imminent change foreseeable one’s outlook must remain gloomy.

            Changing attitude or dropping addiction is not seen to be something simple. For a start, there’s so much ground to make up, from convenience-living to ‘principled-living. For a pessimistic omnivore to become an all-or-nothing-vegan would be like going to the moon, or like going into free fall and hurtling towards the unimaginable. If one were to contemplate such a change, it could either feels profoundly unsafe or unthinkable, with all those favourite foods we’d no longer be eating. It’s enough to make one stick with what one knows, including all the pessimism that goes with it.