Born Sighted, Conditioned Blind

1888:

If we find what seems to be a good idea lying, figuratively speaking, at the side of the road, we might think it lifeless. But curiosity tempts us to pick it up. We might prod it and poke it just in case. Magically, it shows a little life. We stay with it. And the longer we stay with it, the more life we seem to endow it with. Until, almost suddenly, it comes to life. So alive, in fact, that we ask what it is; we question it, trial it, test it, only to find treasure. But it’s almost invisible to others, so we can’t convey it past walled-in attitudes, which dismiss the animal-thing to let people eat what they eat in peace. “Leave me alone”. Like those telemarketing people who phone you at dinnertime - don’t give them the slightest chance to start talking or you’ll never get rid of them. Same with this animal thing. Open up to that one and another perspective floods in. Which is why this subject is, to all intents and purposes, a no-no subject. Its main association is with food and food pleasure. A vegan perspective on animals and plant-based food just looks like ‘anti-food’, a subject in which almost no one is interested.

So with conditionings and misperceptions, plus social pressures, this subject may evoke a zero interest or be merely a no-go matter. Lack-of-interest, along with attitudes that have their shutters down versus we lettuce-eating, tree-hugging hippies.

How can we interest another person in matters they’ve always found best to avoid? But if there is a point of interest in veganism it might not be in its ethics.

Initially, the biggest interest is coming from those interested in food - the health-giving properties of illness-preventing food, and through plant-based taste experiences. Those who are put off don’t want to disturb their present, familiar, ‘safe’ diet. They don’t want capsize their chief interest.

If they became vegans, it would certainly disturb the conditioning. The negative attitude towards farmed animals is based on image conditioning. We learn from an early age that calves are cute and cows are ugly; the young are pretty, the old repulsive. Take a pig, a full-grown ‘porker’ - it’s difficult to elicit warm feelings for ‘something’ like that. A pig looks too-weird. The result of humans meddling with genes and things. The human: not content to take the animals, not content to enslave and imprison them, we scientifically distort the animal’s body to being most productive of best-selling bacon cuts or deforming broad legs to make better ham. How do we get people interested let alone passionate about such matters when they still use? So how? Well, not in the direct way, or via ‘compassion’, because the mass mind-set about these animals is that they are too ugly to bother with. In other realms of interaction, if it’s human then there’s lots of compassion, compared to the astonishing lack of it for the non-human.

For vegans, it happens explosively, rocketing us off, right over the social barrier. Once on the other side we tune into finding vegan food, we deal with plant-based consciousness, we even learn to deal with the opprobrium and apathy. But in our own life, something has clicked. We’ve been brought in close to these dear animals, to their cause.