11-09-2015, 10:03 AM
Quote:It almost sounds to me as if you're saying, "You're just one person and your actions, despite the ethical/metaphysical implications for your personal path of spiritual evolution, will not have any impact worth noting." Am I understanding you correctly?
More or less, hehe. There's a few things tangled up in there.
Generally speaking, political and social goals seem hit or miss. I really don't think we have much power as individuals to effect such ends reliably (the key word is "reliably", as in "consistently" and "reproducibly"). I somewhat suspect that the most influential people in our history were in the right place at the right time, and that most lasting change occurs when action is taken within specific windows of opportunity that open up randomly. So the amount of impact you have in consensus reality strikes me as, at best, an entirely open question.
Note that that opinion of mine is completely divorced from the moral or spiritual side. I'm simply talking about being able to accomplish a goal in society, not what one should or should not put their energy into. There are great reasons to fight for long shots or even lost causes. And perhaps it is the spiritual and metaphysical wakes from our individual actions that somehow open the windows I mention above. But now we're not talking about master plans for rolling out veganism or anarchism or whatever in society, but something much less predictable and tractable.
Just a little bit of my personal approach there for color.
Sure, we are the politics / market / everything, but that confers no abilities with respect to making effective use of those systems as selves. And don't forget the effects those mass systems have on us, probably far more than we have on them.Quote:Manipulated though we all at various levels may be, if there wasn't a consumptive force into whose mouths the industry could put its products, if there weren't dollars being spent upon its continuation, then those "powerful interests" would be interests sans power.
It seems so simple: put less demand in, get less meat out. Surely you're not wrong about that. But does that not beg the question: why is meat demand so high? And more questions, too: why is meat demand so oblivious to the impact on the environment? Why is environmental destruction something we don't see more clearly and care more directly about? Why is animal suffering something we so easily ignore?
One of the reasons I became less passionate about politics is that, when you start to really look at the entire drama as a whole, rather than focusing on this part or this part, you start to get an inkling of how these systems, even destructive ones, point at the real questions that we're here to address spiritually and evolutionarily. Things that offend you begin to look less and less like obstacles to happiness and more and more like lessons we're learning.
So I guess that's my larger point: that I think focusing on eating less meat skips over important lessons we must learn about compassion and proper stewardship. In my personal opinion, consuming other life is a given in this vale of tears; the work to be done is not on how to avoid consuming life, but how to do it with love.
Quote:Why did you passionately devote yourself to Occupy?
Wow, good parry.
Occupy seemed like it might be indicative of one of those windows I talked about above. A lot of people felt like that; that there was a huge groundswell and they had to be part of it, not because it would result in any one specific thing so much that it was an opportunity you didn't want to miss. But your point is taken; we all tilt against the windmills of our choice.One thing that might be useful is that I saw Occupy as more of a meta-political project than a project with a specific goal in mind. Indeed, that's what we always told the press and others who asked what we wanted: we avoided stating specific goals that would placate us, and instead focused on building the platform of Occupy as a community. If we had done it more to my liking, Occupy would simply have been the infrastructure we'd commonly maintain, upon which people could launch all the protests, campaigns, projects, etc. In other words, I wish we had made more strategic use of the window, but I'm still pretty happy with how everything worked out. I can definitely say that we had no illusions about how distant our real political goals were.
Quote:The particular position that I am taking is not that veganism is the solution to all the world's troubles, only that broadly engaged veganism would curtail (and ideally eliminate) one of the greatest accelerants of planetary destruction, and give the planet some breathing room, so to speak.
As somebody with the anarcho virus
I'm wary of anytime somebody says "if everybody would just do X" because I assume there are good reasons people aren't doing X and getting everybody to do X typically means "force them to do X". So it's less that I disagree with you than I just try to approach the problem from a different angle, namely: is there some underlying Y that is making X more attractive?Honestly, part of me would just prefer to see civilization go away altogether, which would have much of the same effect. I do think we need to eat less meat, me especially.
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