Screenshotting as OP’s confidence in defending their own ideas was such that they pre-blocked me as soon as someone tagged me to respond, but I really want to hold this post up as just an incredible example of confirmation bias and groupthink.
Can you imagine a take like this getting over 48,000 notes if the victim were literally any other group? Someone who stands on the power end of a clearly unbalanced relationship with a group who is unquestionably being exploited, a person profiting from their bodies and production, declaring ‘actually this is mutually beneficial’ while dismissing collective boycott of an incredibly destructive industry as ‘virtue signalling’ and it being widely shared and applauded? On Tumblr.com?
This is the extent of the vested interest we all have in maintaining our illusions about our consumption habits. We are presented with the horors of modern farming, we recognise instinctively that this is wrong according to our own values, and what we essentially have are two choices:
1) We can change our behaviour to match our values.
2) We can attempt to argue that our behaviour already does match our values.
One option requires self-reflection, acknowledging our own wrongdoing and vowing to do better by making real, tangible sacrifices in our own lives, while the other offers a reassuring pat on the back that we actually don’t need to change a thing about our own behaviours and our own consumption habits, and that some vague far-away problem is the actual issue, like capitalism, or industrialisation, or something else that requires nothing of you personally.
Almost all of us, all the time, are choosing option 2. Posts like these are always so incredibly popular despite the juvenile attempts at justifications, the zero sources, the no-nuance analysis precisely because they offer us semi-coherent reasoning to continue engaging in our current behaviours while maintaining the facade of caring about animals and our planet.
This is why we have post after post telling us ‘it’s not us it’s capitalism,’ or ‘actually being bred in unhealthy bodies for profit, exploited then having their throat slit at a fraction of their life expectancy is ‘a sweet gig’ or that ‘what we buy doesn’t matter since supply and demand isn’t real.’ This is the diffusion of our responsibility and has been the favoured public response to just about any atrocity anyone has ever been complicit in.
I ask all of you to rise above which ‘side’ you think you’re on, and to look through transparently self-interesed takes that tell you exactly what you want to hear. Be suspicious of anyone letting you off the hook for your own responsibility to make moral choices and passing the blame off to someone else, somewhere else, something you can do nothing about.
Look at what animal agriculture is, look at what you pay for and what you support by spreading rhetoric like this. Look what this industry does to animals, to human workers and communities, to eco-systems, to our environment, and most of all, look what it does to you and your ability to live your own values. Most of us absolutely do have the ability to make different, more humane choices, if we just take the time to examine our biases and really consider why we find reassuring but uncritical rhetoric like this quite so appealing.
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