Acting local is the only real option, but eventually we must extend ‘local’ to it’s logical end point of ‘personal’. In order to solve the problem behind the global corrupted society of humanity we need to have a complete vision of what it means to be truly and fully a human. We cannot protest or vote or fight our way to a solution because our root nature will always remain open to exploitation, debased beliefs and fraudulent justifications, because we are visionless. There needs to be a change at the level of our base cultural code, the starting point at which we begin our relationship with our environment, the Universe.
This means to conquer our animal nature, and to conquer the belief that we have to remain involuntarily subservient to our animal nature, but without losing a custodial respect for nature as a whole.
In fact we have bizarrely done the exact opposite of this: we have refused to abandon our reliance on our animal nature, whilst completely abandoning our custodial duty to protect the natural world.
Most people would say merely by our technological and artistic achievements we have already moved beyond any comparison with animals, which are entirely constrained by their survival prerogative, are free from moral choice and can do no ‘wrong’. Yes these achievements are a glimpse of what it means to be human, but why are we not yet free of the threat of our own destruction? If we had truly done so we would now be truly free. The fact is that we are able to selectively justify certain ethical failings by using the argument of being true to our ‘nature’ to permit ourselves to act without self restraint and in a way that creates unnecessary suffering, deceit and greed.
We tell ourselves that competition is natural.
We tell ourselves that allowing the weak to fail is a natural process.
We tell ourselves that war is in human ‘nature’.
We tell ourselves it is in our nature to be greedy.
We tell ourselves that equality is not natural.
We tell ourselves that self gratification is natural.
We tell ourselves that population growth is natural
We tell ourselves that racism is natural
We also tell ourselves it is natural to eat animals.
These are all ways of saying we have no choice but to do the the things that we do, that we cannot stop the cycle of harm, that ‘life is not fair’. But it is only the animal that is defined by lack of choice. The human is defined precisely by choice, but we have not yet understood what that means. We can choose to be anything we want to be, but so far we choose to pretend we are animal, in other words we choose to pretend we have no absolute choice. This is because we cannot understand why something more than an animal (a human) would be clothed in the vehicle of an animal, whilst not also being constrained by the limits of an animal, and so we apply the limits ourselves, as an attempt to provide a corrective logic.
We all in a way tell ourselves:
‘We can only behave this terrible selfish way because we are just a strange animal that must somehow survive according to its horrific talents’
The truth is, for an advanced species to come into existence (the ‘human’ prerogative in the universe) it can only do so by evolving out of an animal environment, and it can only do this by making a set of autonomous decisions that free it from the rules that govern the underlying animal biology. Anything that remains stuck between the two prerogatives without being able to commit to either, will be aberrant, and fail.
We must be entirely animal or entirely human in order to survive.
We do not yet have a vision of what it means to be truly, entirely human.
If we were to really elevate ourselves beyond our animal nature, we would need the starting point, and the most basic thing we would we need do is stop eating other animals. From this position we would be free to reconstruct our relationship with our environment and ourselves, because eating is the fundamental nexus point to all conscious physical existence. How we eat is the starting point to what we are as physical beings, and our physical being in turn provides a home to our spiritual being. A spiritual being is nothing other than the set of choices of the physical human. A spirit is the sum total of it’s affections, which are forged by the physical choices. A spirit in a sense returns to the animal state of choicelessness. It is fully formed and governed by its own spiritual prerogative. It is the physical human that provides the engine of choice and intellect by which the spiritual prerogative of a human is fixed. Thus the decisions we make in how we live our lives are the determining factor in our future evolution as a spiritual species, if we have one.
If we wish to solve our biggest problems: greed, poverty, violence, environment collapse, we need to change our physical ‘code’ at the most simple fundamental level. This sounds impossibly ambitious, but I believe it is actually outrageously simple for any individual, but that it is only impossible to do so whilst we are trapped in the mindset of an animal that eats animal. This is because if we tell ourselves we must eat meat, we must also justify the mistreatment of animals, and internalise the fundamental belief that killing is justified. This gives rise to a cascade of consequential beliefs and justifications that govern how we treat each other, how we imprison and use each other, that are limitless in their aberrant logic and lead in the end to the entire orchestra of human ills.
The need to eat meat is a way of choosing to remain dependent on our biology, and thus not free at all. Eating meat thus psychologically internalises the belief that we are not free to be anything else that we want to be, and all our subsequent actions are determined by this. If we were to exercise our freedom correctly we would use our technological abilities to provide a nutritional solution for our bodies that would remove our craving for meat and dependence on killing and torturing animals in order to extract and consume their proteins, amino acids, fats, hormonal excretions and nutrients. This is the only route to becoming an advanced species in the universe, and avoiding self destruction and an exploitative mindset.
We are pretending that we cannot already do this.
The autonomous choice to stop being an animal, to stop killing animals for food and to adopt a mature role as custodian of nature, whilst also being absolutely free from nature, is the most fundamental step to becoming a true civilisation. Only by taking this step can we rewrite our basic source code in a way that would inevitably lead to the evolution of our species away from our destructive and unsustainable ideologies. This is a simple and teachable method within the possibility of every human on the planet.
It will not solve everything directly or immediately, and there are other issues with the human psyche, but it is the only route to begin a solution. For example, stoping eating meat does not itself cause war to stop, but you can never choose to stop going to war if you also eat meat because the conditions that give rise to war are dependent on the beliefs and social constructs (such as racial superiority) that automatically follow on from the core belief of eating animals. There is an extent to which eating meat entitles dishonest behaviour in general because the idea that it is acceptable for an advanced species to eat animals is fundamentally not true, and when you consume meat, you consume the right to tell yourself that lie. Stopping eating meat cannot stop you lying, but you can never truly stop being being dishonest whilst you eat meat because you have to be fundamentally dishonest with yourself in order to justify eating meat.
I cannot avoid all meat, but I strive to eat as little as I possibly can until it is possible for me to eat none.
It is open to everyone to begin to change humanity in the most powerful way imaginable with this smallest and most liberating of personal choices.
