Energy maximisation

Maybe as vegans we are convinced about our arguments concerning animal slavery but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be a breeze convincing others. The odds are stacked against us. It all becomes energy-draining when there’s no apparent progress. So what do we do to prevent a collapse of our own vital energy? Usually we fret, worry about being ineffective, lose motivation, feel tired, depressed, etc. In an attempt to restore energy we steal it from our day to day commitments until something suffers in our private life, relationships become stretched, projects are neglected, we don’t do things well and we are torn between our commitments. The more we do for animal rights the less time we spend with family and friends.
The original idea that inspired us eventually makes too heavy a call on our energy and puts pressure on our other commitments. Even keeping up our vegan diet or vegan lifestyle demands extra energy. In other words vegans take on extra responsibilities and for these they need supplies of emotional energy and energy of every type. What helps to build energy more than anything is inspiring books or watching those DVDs about modern day methods of animal husbandry or going and seeing for ourselves how they handle animals. Whatever fires us up and keeps us passionate, wherever we find the impulse to be dealing with the issues, this is what keeps us going, with the work in hand.
If we let our personal life suffer in any way we know things will go wrong all round, so it’s a matter of getting the energy balance right. We know the cause is important but how do we find the energy we need for it without compromising home life? Certainly vegan food is high powered stuff, plenty of energy there, and unlike most other people we aren’t slowed down by eating stodge. As well, the significance of the issues themselves help boosts energy. But burn-out is never far away. So, how do we keep up a high energy profile? supply?
If energy is a problem it may be our attitude to energy itself needs looking at. Maybe we should consider energy not like a finite resource, like the amount of petrol we have left in the tank, but a self perpetuating process, as if a certain type of energy once released acts to generate more energy; a type of energy that expands the more it is expended. We hope that animal rights activities can give us energy in much the same way as, say, acts of kindness often do, where we get a beneficial feeling about it and are often surprised by how little energy depletion takes place when we’re giving out or we’re feeling passionate about something. It’s a contradiction of the laws of physics, this energy. It defies logic. But it may be true that - the more we use, the more it is replaced.
By letting go of self interest and starting to think about others’ interests instead, the switch-over occurs. In the case of caring about animals, defending their interests, we draw energy from involvement -doing the right thing leads to generating energy for ourselves. Could it be that simple? Could it be that when energy is released for the ‘greater-good’ that we start a chain reaction? Could it be that when we begin to take an interest in a forest, an animal, a human, when we start advocating for them and not for ourselves, the energy seems to appear from nowhere?
Does the opposite happen, where self-interest drains energy? More greed, more need? If so, it puts a whole new spin on things, in that however hard pressed we are with our personal lives it may be that we’ll always have time and energy for a cause because the cause generates energy.

After the debate

After the talking is over we might have to agree to disagree. And then move on. Repairs to be done and time over for talking. But whatever we are doing we always eventually have to come back to getting ideas across. Struggle and frustration it might be, but this subject can be a never ending fascination, finding new ways of convincing people that vegan food is fantastic and the vegan principle universally relevant. But relevant to what? What are our priorities? Is it animal rights, damage to the planet or starving children? The scale of each problem is great but why vegans go on about the animal issue so persistently is because it is such an easy crime to identify and so simple to contribute to the ending of. Meals can become cruelty-free, every item of clothing can come from plants and our cosmetics and toiletries can all be non-animal tested. By starting here with commodities we help to transform this species into something much grander, where we WANT to focus our attention on all three areas, repair each one just for the sheer love of the defenceless life forms around us. But how do we communicate such an optimistic message?

We do have some pretty impressive arguments, we just need to know how they can be packaged, so that they’ll make sense to anyone. We need to be reasonable people and use reason to float our ideas, but our effectiveness depends on how we communicate. Remaining friendly in an atmosphere of provocation shows a lot about our constructive character. If we can all rub along together and take up positions in opposition to one another but refuse to take umbrage, then our opposite views are mutually challenging. Opposition doesn’t have to mean assault. As long as we keep the focus on repair we can delve deep into issues concerning food, animals, health, planet, non-violence, children … and if we’ve been talking together constructively, it doesn’t matter if there’s been lot of disagreement.

Debate

It’s hard to get a debate going on animal rights. We may be busting to tell people everything we know about the horrors of animal abuse but others hold strong views too, including the tight not to have to listen to us, so we need to respect the sovereignty of opinion. Even if we reckon it’s a patently wrong opinion, all opinion-holders should be able to have their say. Otherwise we lose the freedom of speech.
There should be clear channels for airing views without fear of being attacked or cut down before we’ve said our piece. If, for example, we’re debating the use of animals, we are bound to touch on animal products, which means some will think we’re having a go at them and therefore there’ll be some heavy disagreement. Whether we are discussing with friends or with an audience, there’s no point in wasting a good opportunity by becoming defensive or aggressive whenever we’re not on common ground. If we get aggro about our views we cause people to dig in their heels and argue against us, just to save face.

Setting the stage

[This blog is also much longer than usual - 700 words]

There’s so much waste and cruelty and so much done against the greater good, that it makes some people despair. For others it quickens the importance of the work that has to be done before things get worse. And that work, the repair of rivers, forests and habitats, as well as the repair of our attitudes to animals, needs a mature, environmentally-aware set of vegan principles to power it. Veganism represents an attitude change which can inspire this sort of repair, by using a non-violent approach. Vegans are in a position to play an important part in restoration work, having cleaned up their act by going so far in attempting to shake off their ‘shadow’ (they’ve done it by respecting the natural order of things and reversing their own speciesism. Hopefully, apart from our attitude to animals, we’ve also learnt to be at-one-with-others and practise non-violence in action. If we’ve done that then, as vegans, we are in a position to help bring about a transition to a peaceful future.
If in the future there were to be peace, we’d see the beauty of animals, obviously intend them no harm, and we’d automatically be vegan. If we were truly at peace with the world we’d even be close to the people who hold different attitudes to animals.
But we aren’t at peace yet, which means vegans have to be the first to set an example, by taking on a self discipline that unfortunately, for the present, keeps us separated from others. That’s hard for vegans however there are compensations. We do enjoy a freedom others don’t. We should make the most of it to build a new template for human community.
Vegans and the society in which we live (being in it but not of it) are obviously trying to live as non-violent members of society, our aim being to encourage no ‘dislike’. People who aren’t vegan don’t need to be disliked and should feel free with us to explore all the ethical issues we talk about without being afraid. For vegans it may come as a surprise but even though we disagree with others about important issues we can still like whoever it is we’re talking to. We can even give the appearance of liking them too!. It’s a great step forward for any non-vegan to be discussing vegan issues, so we as vegans don’t have to win every argument – our aim shouldn’t be to put them right or fight tooth and nail to prove we are right but help maintain a creative flow of ideas and views.
Within any dialogue, however we answer questions raised by others, we should be making our own point too … by the direction we take things, maybe not getting anywhere near that point we want to get to but having that aim nonetheless. Then others will see we have an agenda and that we mean business … but not sacrifice everything to make our point. However serious our aim is, it doesn’t have to be so serious that it could make someone feel so uncomfortable that they read it as a feeling of dislike towards them. Once there’s animosity, the game is over in an instant, and that disliking will cloud everything that has gone before or will come after.
If I am having any sort of serious discussion, I can alter the atmosphere just by raising the tone of my voice, to indicate if I’ve lost patience or am ready to show more interest. We are all adept at showing likeableness or revealing that we have ‘a nastier side’. And if my nasty side comes through I can kiss goodbye to any good will. Once that appears I’m no longer listened to. It doesn’t matter how intelligent my arguments might be, as soon as I’m no longer liked or respected, every word I utter will fall on deaf ears. And if, as an opinion-holder, I’m disliked then it’s likely my opinion will be disliked too; a person might come to dislike veganism on the basis of disliking the vegan who introduced the idea, hence the bathwater is thrown out with the baby.

The shadow

[This is a twice-as-long-as-usual blog - 930 words]

We might be having a casual conversation about animal rights. No one’s used to talking about such things so we’ll duck and dive around the issues with nothing said quite directly, with feelings often hidden or snide remarks being made, all attempting to say things that we believe but which could be unwelcome and sour the atmosphere between us. I mention all this as a prelude to the quote that follows, from Will Tuttle’s book The World Peace Diet. (http://worldpeacediet.org). It describes, on page 222, ‘the shadow’ (in Jungian terms) being “our cruelty and violence towards animals”. What Will Tuttle says we might not like, and so we might want to rubbish it, because if we don’t then we might have to agree and that would lead to a big lifestyle change.

Tuttle:
“Children who are violated and abused will, when they become adults, tend to violate and abuse their children in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that rolls through the generations. We address it by trying to stop the child abuse, and fail to see the deeper dynamic. This human cycle of violence will not stop until we stop the underlying violence, the remorseless violence we commit against animals for food. We teach this behaviour and this insensitivity to all our children in a subtle, unintentional, but powerful form of culturally approved child abuse. Our actions condition our consciousness; therefore forcing our children to eat animal foods wounds them deeply. It requires them to disconnect from the food on their plates, from their feelings, from animals and nature, and sets up conditions of disease and psychological armouring. The wounds persist and are passed on to the next generation.
Compelling our children to eat animal foods gives birth to the “hurt people hurt people” syndrome. Hurt people hurt animals without compunction in daily food rituals. We will always be violent toward each other as long as we are violent toward animals – how could we not be? We carry the violence, in our blood, and in our consciousness. Covering it up and ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear. The more we pretend to hide it, the more, like a shadow, it clings to us and haunts us. The human cycle of violence is the ongoing projection of this shadow.

The Shadow
“In Jungian terms, our culture’s enormous, intractable, overriding shadow is the cruelty and violence towards animals it requires, practises, eats and meticulously hides and denies. … The shadow archetype represents those aspects of ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge, the part of ourselves that we have disowned. To itself, the shadow is what the self is not, and in this case it is our own cruelty and violence that we deny and repress. We tell ourselves that we are good, just, upright, kind and gentle people. We just happen to enjoy eating animals, which is okay because they were put here for us to use and we need the protein. Yet the extreme cruelty and violence underlying our meals is undeniable, and so our collective shadow looms larger and more menacing the more we deny its existence, sabotaging our efforts to grow spiritually and to collectively evolve a more awakened culture.
“As Jungian psychotherapy emphasizes, the shadow will be heard! This is why we eventually do to ourselves what we do to animals. The shadow is a vital and undeniable force that cannot, in the end, be repressed. The tremendous psychological forces required to confine, mutilate, and kill millions of animals every day, and to keep the whole bloody slaughter repressed and invisible, work in two ways. One way is to numb, desensitize, and armour us, which decreases our intelligence and ability to make connections. The other is to force us to act out exactly what we are repressing. This is done through projection. We create an acceptable target to loathe for being violent, cruel, and tyrannical – the very qualities that we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves – and then we attack it. With this understanding of the immense violence toward animals that we keep hidden and the implacable shadow this creates, the existence of 50,000 nuclear warheads becomes comprehensible. Our “never-ending” war against terrorism becomes not just comprehensible but inevitable, as does our appalling destruction of ecosystems, the rampant exploitation of the world’s poor, and the suicide, addiction, and disease that ravage countless human lives.
“The shadow is the self that does the dirty work for us so we can remain good and acceptable in our own eyes. The more we repress and disconnect, the more inner disturbance we will carry that we must project on an outer evil force, an enemy or scapegoat of some kind, against whom we can direct our denied violence. We will see these enemies as the essence of evil and despise them, for they represent aspects of our self that we cannot face. In our quest to eliminate them we are driven to build the most hideous weapons imaginable, developing them throughout the centuries so that today we have the capacity to destroy all of humanity hundreds of times over. This is not just something in our past, like the generations of inquisitions, crusades, and wars. We eat more animals, project more enemies, and create more weapons than ever before. Every minute 20,000 land animals are killed in United States slaughterhouses and the Pentagon spends $760,000 (every minute). This huge expenditure on maintaining and developing systems to harm and destroy other people is a particularly egregious manifestation of the tragic suppression of intelligence caused by eating animal foods. “ Will Tuttle (reprinted with permission)

Vegan

"Vegan" conjures up the idea of difficulty, so it’s dishonest to say becoming vegan is easy. Our listeners aren’t fools – they can see veganism isn’t complicated to understand but is probably quite hard to carry out. It is based on a set of principles so simple a small child could understand it, but in reality it means a lot of giving-up of things. To contemplate giving up familiar and favourite food, for example, isn’t something we do hastily. Considering veganism, we bring on a taste bud revolt. It involves mainly food but not only food. There are clothing items, shoes made of leather, entertainments using animals, cosmetics tested on animals - the list is long. Then there are social factors involved in becoming a vegan, handling being a social misfit, being ridiculed by others, etc. But to get it all into proportion we have to remember that it’s a beautiful and mighty principle we, as vegans, are promoting. Surely, we can put up with the pain of being misunderstood, especially when we think of the advantages we get, of a clear conscience, a healthy body and the beneficial effect (of a plant based diet) making for a clearer mind and faster brain. Admittedly, it’s a discipline and therefore we have to work at it, but we are undoubtedly contributing not only to the ‘greater-good’ but to a better carbon footprint. And the plant-based diet we adopt, if taken up by large numbers of people would, in the end, lead to the eradication of world hunger, since most of the plant food currently being grown is still being fed to animals, so that they can be ‘grown’ to feed humans. Vegans cut out that whole wasteful process entirely. But the greatest advantage of veganism is in the significance of its disassociation with animal cruelty. Whatever hardships vegans might have to put up with, nothing compares with the suffering of the animals. So nothing is as important as boycotting products and sparing so many innocent beings from unnecessary pain and suffering. That is what ultimately cements vegan resolve and ultimately makes sense of what we say.
But veganism isn’t a breeze. It’s still difficult for people who want to be vegan, especially if they have a mental block about how to get past addictions to their favourite foods (especially if there’s a nagging belief that a plant-based diet might be unsafe). All the more reason then that we, as vegans, should realise where most people are at and why what we are saying may be frightening. And if we speak aggressively it can be both shocking and insulting. For example, the slogan “Meat is Murder” is really saying “You are a murderer” and for that reason alone vegans need to ease up on the invective. Accusing people of this is seen as an attack. Is it valid to attack like this? How careful should we be with our words? Surely it’s valid to point out the nasty side of human nature, even though we know people will turn away if we do? It’s always a toss up between need-to-know and wanting-not-to-know.
If it is valid to speak very openly then what exactly is this aspect of human nature we’re trying to draw people’s attention to? It is common to everyone, vegans included. For all of us ‘our shadow’ exists. It is that part of us we want to hide, not the gentle, generous side but the hard, mean-hearted side. Vegans may say things that shock and people’s reaction is predictable, but as soon as veganism is mentioned, something funny happens between people. As soon as, in a conversation, the penny drops that ‘animal rights’ is the subject and not health or diet, a defence shield goes up. If vegans decide to try to talk about animal rights, we must to decide beforehand how far to go and let intuition guide us by the moment. At times we have to talk openly and at other times pull back. By pressing forward we don’t know where someone’s breaking point is going to be, if they’ll see it as a personal attack or if they’ll be stimulated by our challenge.

Making it interesting to people

The BLOG ends here for a week, no access to Internet and working away from home. Blog resumes 12th July.

When it comes to talking about animal rights we need to be seen as fair minded, creating a space for free exchange of opinions, so that those who don’t agree aren’t made to feel unsafe when they speak out against our ideas. Vegans should be assessed, ‘sight unseen’, as decent people. People who wouldn’t try to hurt anyone’s feelings just to win their argument. They wouldn’t swoop in for the kill to make the non-vegan look foolish or evil.
If we don’t let people speak they simply won’t listen back to us in return. If they already think they’re in a weak arguing position we’ve got to hold back on the value judgments, ease up on the rhetoric, tone down our classic animal-defence-outrage. Not use expletives. Not be seen as being-always-right. And certainly NEVER show contempt. It might make us feel good but that isn’t quite the point. It just isn’t a good look. In our own minds we have to get past calling them names, labelling those who won’t agree as ‘intractable’. Most people have to disagree to save face. They take it all in, what we say. But they don’t want to show it. Privately though, they may need time, to add each new piece of information into their own picture, to build their bigger picture, so they can come to their own conclusions, in their own time. They don’t want to be hurried or cajoled. They don’t want to have to agree just to get us off their back. Or agree when they’re not quite sure. Whoever knows how near change someone might be?
If people seem stubborn is it just because what we’re saying is unfamiliar, and they’re ashamed at being so unfamiliar with it. And what we say, anyway, is difficult to grasp, the implications of it all (you talk to someone about Animal Rights and you can see their minds computing all this new stuff and thinking – “oh, shit!”). It’s as if we’re introducing something as new as a distant planet.
Our job isn’t to recruit them or fight them but to interest them … and for our part it’s got to be personal to the extent that we must seem interested in them. In that way we stand a good chance of being liked, not only for our own part but for what we are saying. Having our views taken seriously.

The BLOG ends here for a week, no access to the Internet working away from home. Blog resumes 12th July.