On the one hand your question can be summed up with, "would it be different if everything was different?" But since we guess that you don’t ask this in a rhetorical or totally hypothetical way, we must assume that you seriously believe the world can be changed into the model you have described.
If so what you are actually asking us is why not work hard to make a perfect world? which is very similar to the first question we addressed in our
FAQ (regarding a vegan world) and the answer is you shouldn’t since a perfect world is not possible and even if it was possible, unfortunately as dreamy and wonderful as it would be as you describe it, it won’t be sufferingless world and that’s the only world we can morally justify.
But we’ll start with the impossibility.
Most humans haven’t even made much more basic ethical decisions than the extremely radical and complex changes you suggest in your description. It is impossible to educate most humans not to objectify each other, not to discriminate each other on the basis of race, gender, ethnical orientation, class, weight, height, prettiness and etc.
You’re talking about a world free of war for example while the fact is that there is always a war going on somewhere in the world. As written in the slideshow
World Peace, the hopes for world peace followed by the United Nations establishment after World War II, were broken 150 times till now by the 150 wars that broke since then. Every year there are more than 3 new wars. In the slideshow you can see the list of wars in the last 100 years. Do you need a stronger proof?
You mentioned famine as well and we ask you to please read/watch our articles about
world hunger ,
poverty and
world debt which are all directly connected to famine and are supposed to sober your delusions of a world free of it.
You can’t seriously discuss "
decentralised, renewable, green and sustainable technologies that have no "built-in-obsolescence"" while no matter how irrational and how many derivative harms its use got, the whole world is still addicted to oil. There is an endless list of reasons why not to use it but it still is the most popular energy source in the world.
You cannot seriously suggest social and economic paradigm while the world is changing in the opposite direction. In the last couple of decades a tremendous middle class is formed in several countries and among them huge ones like India, Brazil and China which is comprised of people with consumption desires similar to the American and European, meaning from that perspective more personal cars (which will increase the global oil addiction), bigger houses and most importantly much more animal derived products.
In your ideal world everybody grow their own food and so don’t use any means of disinfestation, no packing, no further processing and no transportation of food but that can only be technically relevant for a relatively tiny group of people.
And if equal distribution of the resources was such a failure when it was examined in relatively small scale human societies for a relatively very short time and regarding one species only, how can it be implemented on the whole world with all its inhabitants?
Anyway the global course is exactly the opposite for that matter as well. More urbanization, more huge supermarkets and less small retails, more industrial food, more corporate rule over every existing plant, more chemicals inside the food and inside the land it grew on, more packages, much more transportation and etc.
Not only that less and less people in Asia, the most populated continent in the world, grow their on food, the fast urbanization process the Asians undergo highly increases their per capita animal consumption and it is part of a rapid and persist increase all over the world. The world per capita consumption has more than doubled over the last 40 years and in the developing countries it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.
You are talking about fruitarian primitivism while mass populations are moving from rural to urban areas, a structural change which unfortunately also uttered in food demand patterns because a wider choice of foods is available in urban markets, because urban lifestyles prioritize on foods that require less time to prepare and because urban residents do not grow their own food.
People in developing countries currently consume on average one-third the meat and one-quarter of the milk products per capita compared to the richer North, but this is changing rapidly. More people everywhere are eating more animal products as soon as their incomes rise above poverty level. The animal rights movement can’t deal with the current enormous amounts of exploited animals and it will only get worse. In the future many more animals will suffer much more.
You can read more about it
here Speaking of animal consumption, we are sure that you are a vegan and we are all vegans for years and we are sure that all of our readers are as well so all of us know how easy it is to become one. It is not that humans have to do something unusual or difficult in order to become vegans, only to replace some of the ingredients in their food with some others. You know the facts. There are so many good reasons including egocentric ones to go vegan but still you constantly hear from humans that they are a part of the food chain, that eating meat is natural, that in the bible it's written that it's o.k to eat animals, that you should focus on humans' problems first, and that if everyone become vegetarian, then what will we do with all the farm animals and etc, while they insist on systematically torturing non-human animals, spit in the faces of the world’s billion hungry people, harm their own health and "bequeath" their children a destroyed planet.
You are expecting humans, who are too lazy to recycle, such an easy and undemanding task, to maintain a moral life?! They hardly go through the trouble of separating paper from plastic or just to try soy milk. They fail to cut down their weekly meat quantity when they get a direct order from their doctors. They fail when they are told that their own health is in danger, so you expect them to do it for other species?!
Humans prove again and again that their profits, taste preference, convenience, entertainment etc, are much more important to them than morality. Most of them are not even willing to hear the facts and listen to the arguments, not to mention stop financing animal abuse.
Things change in the world when there is an interest, money and a market for the change. Three elements that unfortunately the animal rights movement doesn’t hold. Humans don’t have an interest in going vegan, the animal rights movement doesn’t have money and the market wants steaks not tofu.
The change that you are asking for is the same as a vegan world quest for that matter. There is no interest because the ones in power benefit of the current state of affairs. We think it is pretty clear that you know that as much as we do and the LSD falling out of the sky indicates that perfectly. You used such an illusional example of how reality can change because you know that the chances to change reality with something real are zero.
The LSD example naturally reminds us of the BLTC project and our fundamental opposition we have towards it. Your idea same as the BLTC idea, entails human participation, meaning it is still a social change idea since a social change is required for its success. And by social change we mean in this particular issue and as mentioned before an extremely radical social, moral and conceptual revolution.
This is our fundamental ethical problem with the project. It still relies on humans’ compassion and willingness to cooperate. It still gives human the power to decide whether to stop torturing others or not.
Any idea that relies on humans’ compassion is doomed to fail. We don’t say that because we hate humans but because we read the newspaper today. And it looked just like the one we read yesterday. Just a cursory glimpse of history, biology and other species behaviors and character and you don’t really need much more to understand the basic principles of life.
It is not humans’ wantonness that should convince you that there is only one solution but the fact that your perfect world is so simple and right that nobody can confront it rationally. But still it is far from our reality. In this world rationality is not enough and good arguments are not relevant. In fact, the fact that the animal rights arguments are so strong and so well-based but still fail again and again, is the exact thing that should wake you up. Animal rights activists shouldn’t get strengthen from their strong arguments but the other way around. When arguments that are so strong and so obvious don’t work there is something basically wrong with the addressees.
For example
the Denmark argument we made in the
Manifest proves that point and also that utopian expectation are false and dangerous.
Ironically some activists use the Denmark example as a proof that a vegan world is possible. But there is no question that humans, and we mean all of them, can maintain a healthy, cheap, satiating - vegan diet. There is no doubt about that. The question is not if they can, but if they will.
And Denmark was “only” vegan not a society where “
there is no war and no famine; There is no government and authority constantly applying stressors, laws and regulations; There is no property or territory issues so that individuals and groups can easily found their own cultures and belief systems and grow their own food with no fear of attack or dispossession from other groups....There is no economy that asks us to squeeze the life out of other living beings on lower rungs of social hierarchy in order to profit our greed and ego; No supermarkets and their shelves lined with products dripping of suffer...”As you desire.
Reading
the women argument in the manifest and the article
The "Wrong" gender you realize that it is not very realistic that once there was and egalitarian human society. How can humans have changed from the society that is described in the article you have linked to the current one? But even if it did, the fact that it changed into the current sexist, chauvinist, violent, objectifying and patriarchal society is so scary that we wonder why would anyone consider giving humans another chance? and don’t take this the wrong way it is not punishment nor justice that we are looking for, it is simply a rational realization that things are only getting worse (the fertility rate of societies in which women are simply means to men aims subjected to their desires and decisions, are much higher then the ones in which women are "only" systematically discriminated against) and there is no reason to believe they’ll ever get better.
And even more powerless than women are children which you can read a little bit about their situation in the article
To Their Own Flesh And Blood .
With such terrifying amounts of violence that humans inflict on children, their own species continuation, and in so many cases to their own children, their own flesh and blood, it just leaves no room for hope to anybody else.
We can go on and on specifying the world suffering but the point is clear and we think that with such a violent and abusive record that humanity holds there is absolutely no room for wondering.
So the immediate reaction was obviously a bit of a shock that someone who knows factory farming can really believe in any kind of utopian society, but after it passed, many "how to" questions came to mind. But your world is too imaginary to seriously discus how it can be accomplished and you haven’t written a single idea how to create it (we allow ourselves to omit the LSD option), so there is no point in specifying these questions here.
We would like to say that as hard as it is to imagine the world without speciesism (which is what we have tried to accomplish before we initiate the O.O.S movement) it is even harder to imagine it without violence. It is too basic and inherent. If it is not speciesism it will be powerism - discrimination on the basis of weakness. Equality is not an option even theoretically because all the creatures are in a constant fight over the same resources (not just food). The stronger will always prevail. This is how humans got their current total dominancy in the first place. And the article you linked doesn’t contradict but fortify this argument. Even if the theory the article suggests is true, it serves as a proof to the point that we mustn’t lay our hopes on social changes since they are fickle. Things change and in most cases for the worse as broadly mentioned here earlier.
Even if the world was that great place described in the article, it was ruined and if you don’t believe in the supernatural then it is all human made. No matter if it is social forces that overpower humans’ individual rational thinking or humans’ true nature, it is a human phenomenon solely and a one that last for thousands of years now.
By commodifying and enslaving large, powerful animals, the ancient progenitors of Western culture didn’t establish capitalism, they performed it.
Such a fundamental human phenomenon which nowadays is more than another economic discipline but a way of life, didn’t come out of the thin air. It is biologically originated. Gathering capital (food, water, land, cave, shelter, clothes, axe and etc), was and still is in many senses highly significant in fitness terms. The more one got the greater the chances of his survival. And you can observe direct proportion between the willing to share some of the gained capital and the biological relation. Obviously nuclear family comes first, then extended family, tribe, race, nation, species and even taxonomic order (mammals first obviously).
Even if Riane Eisler is right that there were such societies that "
lived in partnership between men and women made communities in fertile valleys, use metal to make bowls rather than weapons, and did not engage in war". and they were conquered by the “
The invading dominator cultures herded animals and ate mainly animal flesh and milk, worshiped fierce male sky gods like Enlil, Zeus, and Yahweh, settled on hilltops and fortified them, used metals to make weapons and were constantly competing and warring” where did the later came from?
Humans prove all the time (and so does many other creatures on earth) that they are basically opportunistic. Humans are highly sophisticated omnivores so it makes a lot of evolutionary sense that they would be opportunistic much more than partnershipistic.
And if violent conflict, competition, oppression of women, and class strife, don’t characterize human nature how come these traits are expressed everywhere all the time and the ones she bounds to the original human societies are extremely rare?
Another way to tell that story, which by the way the article’s author seems to be unsure of himself ("
Whether there actually were earlier cultures that were more peaceful, partnership-oriented, and egalitarian, as Eisler and many others assert, or whether violent conflict, males, and competition have always dominated human socioeconomic cultural structures is still a hotly contested issue among academics”), is that instead of relying on successful hunting every once in a while, which is not reliable enough for the growing human species, unfortunately humans thought that maybe they can live with the animals they live off. It was an efficiency decision that we disagree that significantly influenced the way humans seize animals. They were always means to their aims, the change was of a degree not kind. Humans started to enslave animals because it was more efficient from their perspective and because they could have. They didn’t kill the aggressive males of the herds because they are evil but because it made much more sense. Same as the European conquers didn’t hate the indigenous of the new lands they discovered and so enslave them, they simply could. They saw weaker creatures so they exploited them. As simple and as cruel as that.
This story does by no means make things prettier, on the contrary. The indifference efficiency which perfectly demonstrates modern capitalism is much scarier than hate.
Its battery cages, gestation crates and castration rubber bands that made us internalize that this world is hopeless. If Eisler was right and it wasn’t humans’ natural character, the daily routine nonchalant torture that billions upon billions of creatures suffer year after year after year, relatively silently, wouldn’t have happened.
Whether you agree with us or with Eisler, this article is supposed to convince you to be in favor of an absolute and irreversible solution since utopians (and this society was definitely not utopian…), can be easily changed and in our case into a nightmarish reality.
Why do you ask to give the abusers more and more chances?
We know you wrote that if it is chanceless that humans ever change then “perhaps they may as well not exist”. But it is chanceless as we tried to prove here and all over our website. Article after article and paragraph after paragraph in the
Manifest and
FAQ , we proved it is impossible to change society and we argue that even if it was, it can easily reverse or become much worse.
Your general perspective sounds not anthropocentric and definitely not speciesist but for sure human oriented, while it should be suffering orientated or victim orientated.
We don’t see the importance or relevancy of the intention or well being of the victimizers. For example you are overwhelmed with humans’ wantonness, but do you think it matters to the victims whether humans are abusing them because they want to or because they have to?
For some reason you give humans an automatic chance. You suggest that activists should devote their time to changing humans and actually refer to their power and control as obvious.
Activists should try to “dethrone” humans, not try to convince “the masters” to change their treatment toward their slaves. Human superiority should not be considered inevitable but unfortunately it is. It seems that the natural tendency and the first and last plan of action, is to explain to humans that their daily torturing of the weaker for their own minor benefits, habits and pleasures is wrong. But the natural tendency should be to stop the suffering in the most deep rooted and fastest way, and the most efficient way is definitely not by asking the oppressors to be more considerate and fair.
The presumption that life should be no matter what, and that humans have a substantial, self-explanatory right to exist is oppressive and violent because it’s necessarily on someone else’s expense. It is impossible to justify the existence of whom who will necessarily hurt someone else.
Minimizing the suffering causing is personally impressive but is morally unallowable. Suffering is bad and it’s got to stop even if it is caused only for the causer to survive. Why must the sufferer suffer for the suffering causer? Why must he be sacrificed? What is the moral basis for this systematic forcible immolation? How can it be justified? What permits such dynamics? The answers are respectively, that the sufferer mustn’t suffer, he mustn’t be sacrificed, there is no moral basis, it is not justified and power is what permits this dynamics.
And it doesn’t sum up with humans’ extremely massive and inevitable footprint.
In a world of constant tension between creatures drive to multiply as much as possible, a nonviolent world is technically impossible.
In your dreamy world trillions of creatures would still suffer from rape, hunger, thirst, dehydration, infanticide, violent dominancy fights, constant fear of being hunted, diseases, torture, slavery and caducity.
In your dreamy world, hyena cubs would still viscously fight each other, tearing slices off other cubs’ faces including ears and lips, to get more food.
In your dreamy world wasps would still inject their eggs into a live caterpillar’s body to ensure that when their descendants hatch they will have breakfast (the wasp larva will eat the caterpillar from the inside out).
Your dreamy world is definitely not a masculinityless world. Brutal fights for territory and for the "right" to mate would still occur in immense numbers. Walrus would still fight each other over territory like sumo fighters with giant teeth that can reach up to one meter long and more than 5 kg weight.
In your dreamy world billions of insects would still get chemically liquefied before they are eaten by spiders. And snakes would still swallow whole animals and slowly digest them until red tailed hawk would hunt them, digging in with their talons into the snakes’ body until they give up fighting back and then start to cut pieces of their body and eat them. And duck, dolphin, sea lion females would still be gang raped.
Every single second somewhere in the world, a giant hornet fights a mantis, a shark fights an octopus, a white belly sea eagle fights a banded sea snake, a giant weta fights a bat and if the bat prevail the other bats will fight him over the weta, thunder lizards fight each other, a crown eagle fights a chevrotain, a blue crab fights ameloctopus, a giant centipedes fights an iguana, a galapagos snake fights a marine iguana, a polar bear fights a ringed seal, an arctic tern fights a polar bear (beating their noses when they come for their eggs), bat falcon fights other bats, a hawk fights a viper, a numbat devour termites, a crocodile an egret, a shoebill a lungfish, the mexican long tailed bat an insect, a coyote hunts a rabbit and an anaconda crushes a capybara to death or griping so tight that the blood can’t even circulate and so the poor capybara slowly suffocate to death.
And the tiny fraction of animals that will escape their enemies will suffer from droughts, floods, diseases, hunger, thirst and the pain and misery of growing old.
The history of the evolution of life on this planet has been written with pain and suffering. Survival and reproduction have been the only imperatives guiding the gradual changes in morphology which have given the various species their present forms and behavior. All the organisms are selfish. They all have been, they all are and they all will act in order to promote their own genes. That is what life is all about and consequently that is what all the living creatures are about. No criticism just mechanism.
We see things through binoculars and tend to think in terms of purposes and goals, even when there are none. In life there is no such thing as a purpose. Things simply occur. Just as there is no purpose behind a chemical reaction, burning of sugar for instance, there is no purpose behind birthing, metabolism and DNA duplication. It started out as basic organic chemistry, and along billions of years acquired more and more complexity. One of those "upgrades" was the ability to suffer, feel pain and fear. That’s life. Technical chemical mechanism. Animals are the victims of chemistry.
It is very cruel and cynical to think that it’s part of life so there is nothing we can do about it. The fact that all these atrocities, all this suffering is part of life, is exactly the problem.
As soon as sensibility developed among the living creatures life became a living hell. You can’t nullify sensibility and since no creature can live without inflicting pain and suffering on other creatures directly or indirectly, life is not moral.
Like in any other situation, only when we acknowledge the roots of the problem, will we be able to solve it, and the roots of the problem, the origin of the suffering, is in the mechanism of life itself. Every day you choose not to destroy this world you choose to approve it. Moral people do not stand idly while helpless creatures suffer.
