In regards to eating meat

[3DMonkey]

One of my favorite quotes, by Aldous Huxley:


Personification in politics is an error which we make because it is to our advantage as egotists to be able to feel violently proud of our country and of ourselves as belonging to it, and to believe that all the misfortunes due to our own mistakes are really the work of the Foreigner. It is easier to feel violently toward a person than toward an abstraction; hence our habit of making political personifications. In some cases military personifications are merely special instances of political personifications. A particular collectivity, the army or the warring nation, is given the name and, along with the name, the attributes of a single person, in order that we may be able to love or hate it more intensely than we could do if we thought of it as what it really is: a number of diverse individuals. In other cases personification is used for the purpose of concealing the fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war. What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood. By personifying opposing armies or countries, we are able to think of war as a conflict between individuals. The same result is obtained by writing about war as though it were carried on exclusively by the generals in command and not by the private soldiers in their armies. (“Rennenkampf had pressed back von Schubert.”) The implication in both cases is that war is indistinguishable from a bout of fisticuffs in a bar room. Whereas in reality it is profoundly different. A scrap between two individuals is forgivable; mass murder, deliberately organized, is a monstrous iniquity. We still choose war as an instrument of policy; and to comprehend the full wickedness and absurdity of war would therefore be inconvenient. For, once we understood, we should have to make some effort to get rid of the abominable thing.

Complete quote: http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/07/...ty-of-war/

Are you saying eating meat is akin to mass murder and war ? Is a farmer who has humanely raised his livestock for food guilty of murder and war against animals?

I think Monica's "Huxley" post was in response to Monkey's comment.

However, let me analyze this Huxley quote in the context of meat-eating.

Humans justify their acts by telling themselves certain things and agreeing on them collectively. The collective agreement becomes very powerful. Collective agreements from history:

1) Blacks are an inferior species of human with less intellect, therefore it is right to enslave them.

2) Women are inferior to men, therefore they are chattel and cannot be allowed rights.

3) Non-catholics are evil, and must be tortured until they repent and convert (Spanish Inquisition).

And currently:

1) Muslims hate Americans, therefore we must kill them.

2) It's okay for humans, their children, and babies to ingest a certain amount of poison (hydrogenated oils, pesticides, food additives and preservatives, GMOs, etc) because the FDA says so.

3) Animals eat each other, so it's okay for us to not only eat them, but cause them to live in torturous conditions and kill them mercilessly.

4) Animals don't have feelings like we do, so we should not consider their feelings when deciding how to feed the human population. They are things for us to use, because we are more important than all other beings here on Earth.

5) Humans must eat meat, because we always have, and because the government makes a neat little food chart that says so.

As far as I can tell, humans do not need to eat meat (there may be medical exceptions, and this has been previously discussed). We eat meat out of habit, tradition, social agreement, taste, an addictive response to continuing aggression and fear (also previously discussed--the meat carries these energies), and we justify killing animals for food collectively in the same way that Huxley posits that proponents of war justify war with absurd collective agreements.

These collective agreements must be seen for what they are in order for societies and the world in general to move forward. For instance, if we had not changed our collective agreement that black Africans are an inferior race, where would we be now?

You left out

. Plants don't have feelings, so it's okay to eat them alive.

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And meat eating is NOT an abomination.

? Are you saying you think it isn't, or are you saying you think I think it isn't?

If you perceive it that way, I can totally understand why you are not eating meat. That would be insane.

Well yeah, but that doesn't mean I think people who eat meat are abominable people, which is what they often think I think, if I tell them my opinion about meat-eating.

So, you think I am committing an abomination but I am not abominable? How is this not a contradiction?

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Huxley is one of my ancestors.

Cool!

I would add to Diana's excellent analysis of the Huxley quote, that another reason for the obvious parallels, is the great lengths people to to, to gloss over what is actually being done. Using different terms and psychological tricks, just as with war. (The whole article is well worth reading, by the way.) It's dissociation.

And the same logic applies to eating vegetation. The dissociation is either a flaw or an asset. It can't be both.