The teaspoon doesn’t resemble suffering animals but the methods you are using in your attempt of saving animals from suffering.
Our problem is not with you trying to save as much as you can but with your definition of as much as you can. The boat resembles the suffering animals and if you keep using a teaspoon the boat will keep sinking.
But enough with the slogans, they are good for a slideshow not for a forum.
I think there is a problem with the sense of responsibility in your attitude. If you visited our website and bothered writing in this forum it means you want to discuss the issue and you have at least some room for acceptance.
I think it is most important that you’ll be convinced that you must think and act as if you are responsible for all the suffering, not in the sense of causing of course but in the sense of saving.
As I already explained there is no doubt in the significance of saving one animal. We don’t say or imply in none of our texts (including why and teaspoon) and neither do I now in this discussion, that since there are so many suffering animals helping one is insignificant.
I agree with your nickname as a philosophical approach but not as an activistic approach. As activists we must seek to solve problems from the roots. We must hope and long to stop all the suffering. For me the fact that everyone matters is a reason to try and help them all, because as you say all of them matter.
The problem is not with helping someone in a time of need when you bumped into the situation or when the situation bumped into you (as happened to us all I am sure), the problem is with managing a whole activism life on the basis of sporadic help to someone and then another one and then another one and tomorrow maybe another one.
If instead of looking for the source of the suffering that all these ‘ones’ endure and deal with it we’ll keep focusing on helping each one while more are being produced and in a much faster rate than we are able to help the ones we can, it will never end.
Random activities to help one animal are blessed, but managing an entire activism career on that basis is immoral and irresponsible, it is consciously letting the roots of the suffering continue cleaning your own conscience, feeling essential and influential.
And that brings me to the reason why I think this approach is so popular. There is a serious romanticization of the "it will help this one" approach and it is understandable since it is so hard to comprehend the massive numbers of suffering creatures and stay sane not to mention influential and full of hope and motivation. However this approach is very dangerous as an activistic conduction. Very soon activists feel hopeless and helplessness and so there is an inner trend of romanticization, you can call it - the perceptibility of the personal influence. It’s freighting how obvious it seems to activists that the goals are set by the likelihood of accomplishment and not by the urgency determined by the level of suffering and number of sufferers.
This abstemiousness is motivated by many activists as an attempt to keep others in the group and sometimes to keep them vegan and that is of course absolutely justified, the problem is when the hopeless and helplessness dictate the agenda.
Even if many activists nowadays try not to think about a vegan world but about the next vegan it is clear that a vegan world is the goal. When they refuse to think about the possibility of a vegan world to become (and we add about the possibility of a vegan world to become sufferingless), they disregard the chance that it might be impossible and perhaps they should look for other plans of action. This approach nullifies the option that maybe a vegan world is not an option. I know it is not a conspiracy and I know it is not their goal, but it’s a serious obstruction in the way of current activists and future activists who should constantly search for a way to address the source of the problem. It sets the bar so low that many activists are sure it is o.k to be satisfied with converting a few people or even dozens of people’s diets into a vegan diet instead of thinking how to stop all the suffering. If activists will hear all the time that everything they do is good and important and that everything influences, many won’t even think that they should long to end it all, that they should aspire to influence all.
The fact that everyone matters is a reason to try to help as many as possible it is not an excuse to disregard the mass numbers and be happy with helping one.
And if to borrow the lighting analogies made earlier in this discussion, even though every photon matters, when you can affect the whole darkening room or at least don’t know yet that you can’t, you mustn’t be satisfied with just a few photons.
