Our Culture's Shadow

1402: 

If we are going to talk about Animals Rights, we have to decide when to pull back and when to press forward.  We never know where someone’s breaking point is, so we can’t be sure if they’ll be stimulated by the challenge or want to avoid the whole subject for fear of being attacked.

         

Let's imagine that we're having a casual conversation about Animal Rights.  Since we know well enough that this is never a ‘casual’ subject, we might duck and dive around the issues, with nothing said quite directly, with feelings hidden in an attempt to avoid souring the atmosphere.

         

Here’s a quote from Will Tuttle’s book The World Peace Diet, where he refers to our cruelty and violence towards animals as our ‘shadow’.

         

"Children who are violated and abused will, when they become adults, tend to violate and abuse their children in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that rolls through the generations.  We address it by trying to stop the child abuse, and fail to see the deeper dynamic.  This human cycle of violence will not stop until we stop the underlying violence, the remorseless violence we commit against animals for food.  We teach this behaviour and this insensitivity to all our children in a subtle, unintentional, but powerful form of culturally approved child abuse.  Our actions condition our consciousness; therefore forcing our children to eat animal foods wounds them deeply.  It requires them to disconnect from the food on their plates, from their feelings, from animals and nature, and sets up conditions of disease and psychological armouring.  The wounds persist and are passed on to the next generation.

         

"Compelling our children to eat animal foods gives birth to the “hurt people hurt people” syndrome.  Hurt people hurt animals without compunction in daily food rituals.  We will always be violent toward each other as long as we are violent toward animals – how could we not be?  We carry the violence, in our blood, and in our consciousness.  Covering it up and ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear.  The more we pretend to hide it, the more, like a shadow, it clings to us and haunts us.  The human cycle of violence is the ongoing projection of this shadow.

         

"In Jungian terms, our culture’s enormous, intractable, overriding shadow is the cruelty and violence towards animals it requires, practises, eats and meticulously hides and denies. … The shadow archetype represents those aspects of ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge, the part of ourselves that we have disowned.  To itself, the shadow is what the self is not, and in this case it is our own cruelty and violence that we deny and repress.  We tell ourselves that we are good, just, upright, kind and gentle people.  We just happen to enjoy eating animals, which is okay because they were put here for us to use and we need the protein.  Yet the extreme cruelty and violence underlying our meals is undeniable, and so our collective shadow looms larger and more menacing the more we deny its existence, sabotaging our efforts to grow spiritually and to collectively evolve a more awakened culture.

         

"As Jungian psychotherapy emphasizes, the shadow will be heard!  This is why we eventually do to ourselves what we do to animals.  The shadow is a vital and undeniable force that cannot, in the end, be repressed.  The tremendous psychological forces required to confine, mutilate, and kill millions of animals every day, and to keep the whole bloody slaughter repressed and invisible, work in two ways.  One way is to numb, desensitize, and armour us, which decreases our intelligence and ability to make connections.  The other is to force us to act out exactly what we are repressing.  This is done through projection.  We create an acceptable target to loathe for being violent, cruel, and tyrannical – the very qualities that we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves – and then we attack it.  With this understanding of the immense violence toward animals that we keep hidden and the implacable shadow this creates, the existence of 50,000 nuclear warheads becomes comprehensible.  Our “never-ending” war against terrorism becomes not just comprehensible but inevitable, as does our appalling destruction of ecosystems, the rampant exploitation of the world’s poor, and the suicide, addiction, and disease that ravage countless human lives.

         

"The shadow is the self that does the dirty work for us so we can remain good and acceptable in our own eyes.  The more we repress and disconnect, the more inner disturbance we will carry that we must project on an outer evil force, an enemy or scapegoat of some kind, against whom we can direct our denied violence.  We will see these enemies as the essence of evil and despise them, for they represent aspects of our self that we cannot face.  In our quest to eliminate them we are driven to build the most hideous weapons imaginable, developing them throughout the centuries so that today we have the capacity to destroy all of humanity hundreds of times over.  This is not just something in our past, like the generations of inquisitions, crusades, and wars.  We eat more animals, project more enemies, and create more weapons than ever before.  Every minute 20,000 land animals are killed in United States slaughterhouses and the Pentagon spends $760,000 (every minute).  This huge expenditure on maintaining and developing systems to harm and destroy other people is a particularly egregious manifestation of the tragic suppression of intelligence caused by eating animal foods".

Will Tuttle (reprinted with permission)