you know how its impossible to get through to libs about things that are screamingly obvious to you but they just cant see it? and i know you argue with libs a lot so you know theyre not just pretending not to get it, theres just some ideological self-protection switch in the brain or something that genuinely prevents them from understanding even when its right in front of their faces. and you think back to before you were a leftist yourself and think "how was i possibly so blind?". but theres an awful lot of ideology baked in peoples heads that they have to contend with, and feel-good stories that society fed them, which they ate up in self-defense to not have to think too much about the state of the world
and maybe even after becoming a leftist you still had some undigested ideology going on in your head but eventually those things similarly clicked as one by one the ideological walls fell down? its not easy, and its slow and takes work
same deal with veganism, when you finally really see it like "we make life an utter living hell for trillions of our fellow beings, just cos we want food to taste a bit better? how have i been so blind to this this my whole life?" it becomes really screamingly obvious
i was where you are now not that long ago, and likewise i knew on some purely intellectual level that veganism was the correct thing to do, but just kinda on the same level of light background guilt for other shit like "reading more theory" and "flossing before bed". and then one day i really understood it and here i am, and as a bunch of unexpected bonus wins it also turned out to be really easy (after the first month) and i also eat way tastier and healthier and cheaper now and my mental health is better, and i do honestly think that veganism is leftist praxis as well so win/win. it took me an embarrassingly long time to get there and i felt like an idiot for a bit (and in retrospect one of the main reasons for not getting there sooner was not wanting to have been wrong), but that faded
I don't think there is any logical way to "prove" veganism is moral or not, in the way most vegans seem to feel is the moral justification.
Like you can "prove" that you should care about other people because your brain just doesn't give you a choice in the matter, if you try to make yourself into a completely self-serving psychopath you cut yourself off from real relationships and will just end up developing serious emotional and mental problems. You hurt yourself by trying to not care.
But with caring about animals it seems many(possibly most) people can just choose to not care and be fine. Many people who raise animals to slaughter name them, let them sometimes, etc, and have no problem eating them later. Most people with any interest in hunting, once trying it, have no problem eating the animal they shot and doing it again later. Even when hunting things like deer, where they tend to die in ways that are unpleasant to watch if you aren't a good shot.
Of course "proving" things like this belongs in air quotes because they rely on unprovable assumptions that people choose to operate with being true. But I think most people on this site use a very similar, if not identical set of assumptions based on what I've seen.
i think one key difference is that if youre hurting humans then society turns around and says "hey thats fucked up wtf" whereas if youre hurting animals society turns round and says "hey thats cool and normal" (unless theyre hurting a dog in which case its back to "hey thats fucked up wtf") and i dont think we should understate the effect of societal normalisation on assuaging peoples guilt about causing suffering. plenty of people were totally fine with causing suffering to other people in contexts where society said it was fine (institutional slavery being a very obvious one). if you had been beating a slave who was screaming in agony and it wasnt sitting well with your conscience, you could always turn to basically everyone else in society who would say "hey dont worry about it, the negro doesnt actually feel pain plus its for their own good plus gods natural hierarchy" etc and make you feel better about it, especially if your psychological self-protective mechanisms were already primed to want to accept their arguments. i bet you it wouldnt have been 100% effective for most people though, and i reckon if you had modern mental health data for plantation slavedrivers youd probably find that there was a much higher rate of mental health issues than the rest of the (white) population
and when you look at slaughterhouse workers you see them having hugely elevated rates of mental health and domestic violence issues, cos even though society tells them its cool and good and they can justify it to themselves theres obviously some level where it still really takes its toll on the psyche. and if you offered most people a bunch of different jobs including slaughterhouse worker (all for the same pay) i reckon most people would choose that pretty much dead last. and how many people could sit through dominion and not have a visceral gut response to the cruelty and suffering? not many, i reckon
i think its true that (even with societal context removed) its harder to not care about other peoples suffering that animal suffering, cos its easier for us to identify with them and i guess cos theres always been reasons not to eat people as food. but i do think not caring about animal suffering is harder than you might think, and i think thats part of why weve built up so many societal (and personal) defense mechanisms against thinking too much about it.
remember that most vegans used to be non-vegans (as adults) too, so we do know what it looks like from the other side of the fence and weve been the ones who "didnt care" too (spoiler: turns out we really did care at some level but we built up incredible defensive mechanisms to avoid confronting it)
If you look at historical accounts I think its clear people like slave owners had serious psychological problems caused by the things they did. They clearly benefited more than they were harmed due to the economic benefits they got from slavery, but it did cause obvious psychological harm. These problems they faced were normalized and they would deny they existed or their connection to the things they did, but they were real.
I don't think there is something like that going on with most people. Or if there is, it's masked by the many other greater problems going on in society. These other problems are so much greater it becomes a rounding error.
Of course this is just my subjective opinion based on no data and I could easily see it going either way.
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you know how its impossible to get through to libs about things that are screamingly obvious to you but they just cant see it? and i know you argue with libs a lot so you know theyre not just pretending not to get it, theres just some ideological self-protection switch in the brain or something that genuinely prevents them from understanding even when its right in front of their faces. and you think back to before you were a leftist yourself and think "how was i possibly so blind?". but theres an awful lot of ideology baked in peoples heads that they have to contend with, and feel-good stories that society fed them, which they ate up in self-defense to not have to think too much about the state of the world
and maybe even after becoming a leftist you still had some undigested ideology going on in your head but eventually those things similarly clicked as one by one the ideological walls fell down? its not easy, and its slow and takes work
same deal with veganism, when you finally really see it like "we make life an utter living hell for trillions of our fellow beings, just cos we want food to taste a bit better? how have i been so blind to this this my whole life?" it becomes really screamingly obvious
i was where you are now not that long ago, and likewise i knew on some purely intellectual level that veganism was the correct thing to do, but just kinda on the same level of light background guilt for other shit like "reading more theory" and "flossing before bed". and then one day i really understood it and here i am, and as a bunch of unexpected bonus wins it also turned out to be really easy (after the first month) and i also eat way tastier and healthier and cheaper now and my mental health is better, and i do honestly think that veganism is leftist praxis as well so win/win. it took me an embarrassingly long time to get there and i felt like an idiot for a bit (and in retrospect one of the main reasons for not getting there sooner was not wanting to have been wrong), but that faded
i hope you get there too comrade
I don't think there is any logical way to "prove" veganism is moral or not, in the way most vegans seem to feel is the moral justification.
Like you can "prove" that you should care about other people because your brain just doesn't give you a choice in the matter, if you try to make yourself into a completely self-serving psychopath you cut yourself off from real relationships and will just end up developing serious emotional and mental problems. You hurt yourself by trying to not care.
But with caring about animals it seems many(possibly most) people can just choose to not care and be fine. Many people who raise animals to slaughter name them, let them sometimes, etc, and have no problem eating them later. Most people with any interest in hunting, once trying it, have no problem eating the animal they shot and doing it again later. Even when hunting things like deer, where they tend to die in ways that are unpleasant to watch if you aren't a good shot.
Of course "proving" things like this belongs in air quotes because they rely on unprovable assumptions that people choose to operate with being true. But I think most people on this site use a very similar, if not identical set of assumptions based on what I've seen.
i think one key difference is that if youre hurting humans then society turns around and says "hey thats fucked up wtf" whereas if youre hurting animals society turns round and says "hey thats cool and normal" (unless theyre hurting a dog in which case its back to "hey thats fucked up wtf") and i dont think we should understate the effect of societal normalisation on assuaging peoples guilt about causing suffering. plenty of people were totally fine with causing suffering to other people in contexts where society said it was fine (institutional slavery being a very obvious one). if you had been beating a slave who was screaming in agony and it wasnt sitting well with your conscience, you could always turn to basically everyone else in society who would say "hey dont worry about it, the negro doesnt actually feel pain plus its for their own good plus gods natural hierarchy" etc and make you feel better about it, especially if your psychological self-protective mechanisms were already primed to want to accept their arguments. i bet you it wouldnt have been 100% effective for most people though, and i reckon if you had modern mental health data for plantation slavedrivers youd probably find that there was a much higher rate of mental health issues than the rest of the (white) population
and when you look at slaughterhouse workers you see them having hugely elevated rates of mental health and domestic violence issues, cos even though society tells them its cool and good and they can justify it to themselves theres obviously some level where it still really takes its toll on the psyche. and if you offered most people a bunch of different jobs including slaughterhouse worker (all for the same pay) i reckon most people would choose that pretty much dead last. and how many people could sit through dominion and not have a visceral gut response to the cruelty and suffering? not many, i reckon
i think its true that (even with societal context removed) its harder to not care about other peoples suffering that animal suffering, cos its easier for us to identify with them and i guess cos theres always been reasons not to eat people as food. but i do think not caring about animal suffering is harder than you might think, and i think thats part of why weve built up so many societal (and personal) defense mechanisms against thinking too much about it.
remember that most vegans used to be non-vegans (as adults) too, so we do know what it looks like from the other side of the fence and weve been the ones who "didnt care" too (spoiler: turns out we really did care at some level but we built up incredible defensive mechanisms to avoid confronting it)
If you look at historical accounts I think its clear people like slave owners had serious psychological problems caused by the things they did. They clearly benefited more than they were harmed due to the economic benefits they got from slavery, but it did cause obvious psychological harm. These problems they faced were normalized and they would deny they existed or their connection to the things they did, but they were real.
I don't think there is something like that going on with most people. Or if there is, it's masked by the many other greater problems going on in society. These other problems are so much greater it becomes a rounding error.
Of course this is just my subjective opinion based on no data and I could easily see it going either way.