Educating the masses

1610: 

Our society today remains specifically un-educated about certain things, and our political leaders prefer to keep it that way. Living in our present world of misinformation feels a bit like living in that famous Faulty Towers hotel, with its grudging reception clerk, who has nothing useful to offer us. It’s often like that in schools, where kids can only learn what’s on the proscribed syllabus; they can only absorb what they’re taught, they can’t necessarily find out what they want to know.

When censorship and misinformation reign, there’s little chance that any useful learning will take place, and therefore no significant chance for change. Society’s chief interest is in social stability, and so it seems to our leaders that the animals’ right to a life (and our right not to have to eat them) represents a subject so sensitive that even discussing the matter is deemed almost threatening. It’s possible that we’ll only be able to slightly penetrate people’s defence shield with alternative information, and then merely hope that we can appeal to their intuitive sense of truth.

What vegans have to say needs, to some extent, to be taken on trust because we can’t prove enough of what we say, at least not to our chief detractors. Our main aim should be to launch ideas that trigger a ‘wake-up’ response in people, so they’ll want to question things and question us.

In order to establish that level of essential trust, we must endorse our questioners' right to make the first move. In their own minds, they have to be sure they’re not jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Even over food, nothing is certain; the plant-only diet has only been tried for a couple of generations, so for most of us who have become vegan, we can't provide proof-positive of the safety of it. But there are no assurances anyway, since even nutrition is still a contentious science. All we can do, to allay any fears we might have, is to refer to the research of mainly overseas scientists, who give the vegan diet their seal of approval. For most people, who are reluctant to listen to us anyway, this wouldn’t be solid enough ground. Instead, they will force their ethics to bend to what they perceive to be personal safety concerns. Hence, ethics become very subjective, rather as if truth can be manufactured from the continuous repetition of any preferred belief.

How then can we shake people out of their complaisant beliefs when the basis of them is so shallow? We’re up against sophisticated, educated, free-willed adults, not a bunch of dummies who are easy to persuade. Vegans and activists in general often sound desperate when we sloganise our cause. It's as if we're trying to break through a belief system by issuing orders -  we say “GO VEGAN”, “Save the Animals, Save Your Health, Save the Planet”, and hope that our conviction will show through. Something will surely rub off. Amongst all the information we put out and the evidence of animal cruelty on farms, there should be enough in what we say  for much of it to be instinctively taken on trust.

But however carefully we deliver our message, people may never be sure of our trustworthiness. We do ourselves no favours if we seem pushy or weird. We should know that sophisticated, intelligent people won’t easily be convinced. And if they don’t trust us, they will invent reasons to dislike us, which is the very last things we want. We might not care about what people think of us, for our own sake, but we don’t want people to be put off from listening to what we’ve got to say because we haven't found a non-threatening way to say it.