The Enslaved of England - Part One

1736: Posted Thur

Edited by CJ Tointon

On a recent visit to England, it seemed to me that the English were leading somewhat 'enslaved' lives with lifestyles that only serve to worsen things for animals. English lives are pressured beyond belief and the food they're eating, heavily laced with animal products, is disastrous! It's ironic that enslaved animals reflect the self-enslaving habits of the humans who're eating them.

The lifestyle in England is grim. On the face of it, all seems sophisticated and abundant; but it's crowded and rushed and one has to queue for everything. To a visiting outsider like me, it seems like a slave community - not exactly poverty-stricken like slaves of the past - but a community of slave consumers who, if they're lucky enough to have work, have nothing but rubbish to spend their money on. They earn their spending tokens only to feed it all back into the consumer slot. The contrast between Australia and England is so marked that the English appear to be slaves, if only because they're denied any useful level of independence. They lack freedom, or rather free-time. They lack energy because of the empty food they eat and the face on the street looks pretty depressed. But perhaps it's the same in all Western nations. Too much profiteering by too many dubious industries, too little quality in anything one buys and too many people, each missing something in their lives - something important - and without that 'something', it's as if life itself is taken away.

In England, I noticed too much time being spent in energy-draining inactivity - waiting and queuing. There's money to spend and much to spend it on. Spending has become the chief pleasure, although most of the stuff is not even worth buying. And the warning's always there to 'stay on your toes', 'keep your job or you'll end up in a big mess'. If work is not certain, then money is not certain and lack of money stops everything. Poverty, feeling enslaved, general insecurity, enforced meaningless work, conformity, loss of freedom - it all points to the modern-day version of slavery. It's a system most people dislike, so you'd think they'd be inspired to rebel and go on to discover an entirely different reality. But by a certain age, consumers are too energy depleted to do much about their condition. The only truly liberating opportunity is to "Go Vegan" and disassociate from the society which is devoted to second-rate pleasures, most of which come from exploited animals.

Once you're vegan, you have to do without the 'plenty'. Vegans learn what 'doing without' really means in the context of today's world of plenty. But it goes much deeper than this. That one decision not only leads us to energy food and avoiding most of the rubbish on sale, it lets us switch attention from 'me' to 'the other'. It lets us see our role on this planet, if not to act as guiding/guardian figures, then to see ourselves as equal participants within the vast world of sentient beings.

If we can escape the slavery of this sort of consumer society and if we can maintain a plant-based lifestyle, we just may survive. We may even go on to lead useful lives, acting unselfconsciously (and possibly anonymously) for the greater good and eventually feeling part of our own society, which at this stage is almost impossible for obvious animal-oriented reasons.