Animals, Why Should We Care?

So, back to the killing and eating animals topic.......


I was just talking about the similarities between the way we abuse our fellow humans and the way we abuse animals. I concluded that there is little or no difference between the two. I also said that we don`t get away with our assumed right to kill and eat animals because on some level we know we are doing wrong.

I can hear some of you protesting that you certainly don`t feel any guilt whatsoever !!!!! Hmmmmmmm....So what do I mean then, if people are eating meat and feeling quite comfortable with doing it?

I think that the issue is not whether any one person feels guilt or not, consciously or not, I think the point is that the guilt is buried deep inside us and that all of us carry the guilt of us all, for us all. In the same way that we all carry some guilt for the holocaust, for example, where of course we are none of us directly responsible, but because somewhere within us we know that we have all held prejudices, grudges, hatereds for people, we know that our darker impulses are part of the Nazi murder of Jews. This similitude is embedded deep within our psyche, we have all felt these feelings, maybe acted upon them, certainly we`ve watched others get bullied and done nothing. Of course, we don`t all take these urges to hurt to ultimate animal conclusions, but we often have difficulty resisting our need to hurt others.

We have discussed in other blogs how groups ask us to support them at the expense of outsiders, and often against our better judgment. They ask us to be accomplices and absolve us as reward for our loyalty. Where there is a group, such as the extreme example of the Nazis, evil is compartmentalised, and all member's defuse guilt for each other by convincing each other that their behaviour is acceptable. Where most Nazi soldiers were not guilty of murdering Jews, they were all complicit as part of the Nazi machine. Underlings may not have choices in regard to whom they hurt, but they are all part of the guilt nonetheless. A group is an organism, it supplies all needs for itself within itself and little people who don`t want to be caught up in evil when required to, invariably do so to at least some extent.

In the same way that the entire German nation was complicit, actively or passively, in the murder of Jews, all groups are capable of doing harm to others with a diminished conscience because of the dissipation of guilt within the whole. We talked about the Catholic church a while back and that even priests who are innocent of involvement in child-abuse are complicit as part of the group that has child-abuse within it. They too carry guilt for their guilty colleagues; it plays a part in their behaviour, their relationship to church goers and ultimately in religious practice and religious doctrine (I want to come back to this point in a future blog). Though we tend to separate(need to)the guilty from the not-guilty, the two are linked symbiotically as part of the same body.


Where we see in our societies higher moral values, spiritual pursuits, sensitive attunement to the more "feminine side", we see represented our capacity to turn away from the more animalistic drives that inhabit our human selves. Personally, I would tend to define a schism between our higher nature... let`s be controversial and call it our divine soul(!)... and our existential/animal selves, our animal soul. I use these terms not because I adhere to any religious values at all, but simply because this distinction has always helped me to understand the force of one of our drives against the other. The concept has also enabled me to see the game play of the divine soul versus the animal soul; how we are the servants of one, on one level, and how we have higher needs on the other. I have seen, too, how our intelligence as a species can quest us towards fulfilment in our "divine" aspect, yet also how our intelligence can be hijacked by our animal soul in order to furnish its needs.

So, given that our cruelty towards animals and people are part of the same instinct, I think that, just as our social groups carry collective guilt for all these deeds, so they do for eating animals, animal cruelty and experimentation. It is precisely that our guilt is carried and diffused by the group that we are able to abuse animals. As a higher impulse, the more sensitive amongst us will see injustice, cruelty and unfairness manifoldly in our societies and will attempt to move the rest of us to behave according to higher values, but often we don`t like to hear about our guilt and we run from it. In the end though, I am certain, inhumanity towards our fellow humans cannot cease until we stop hurting, and yes, eating, animals. The reason for this painful conclusion is that our ability to compartmentalise our guilt, hide it from ourselves as individuals, and the large-scale version of this where we dilute it by hiding it in our larger social groups, means that there is always some guilt or other creating a guilt -avoidance action. In other words, one thing enables the other.


I will be back onto this topic very sooooon........

Socially Acceptable Forms of Abuse, 4: Boarding Schools.

This blog discusses boarding schools and is continued from the previous blog:


Let`s look at the way children are typically treated and regarded in society as a default:



Children are treated from an early age, at least to some degree, as if they should be controlled and broken in, tamed into behaving suitably.This belief can even underpin the family life of loving, generally caring parents. Children are taken to nursery even if the child is caused to be desperately distressed, they are weened off breast milk prematurely because continuation is seen as giving in to their demands and being over indulgent. Generally, children are often subjected to lessons in life that are centred around some notion that kids need to be treated harshly in order to toughen them up (!!!!) and they need to be threatened and punished in order to make them behave.

This misregard for children is not only practised by the masses, it is reinforced by the system. Because most people are treated this way as they grow up, they instinctively treat the children around them in the same way. Many people don`t think that children will behave correctly if they are given too much respect, that they will not detach from parents and family in their own good time without being forced to do so, and that they wont learn unless they are compelled to do it. This notion is of course Victorian, and fits well with child labour and canings in school and a harsher, more severe lifestyle. So why do we still believe it?

The answer is that parents are typically brought up this way and simply don`t often question their behaviour. Other parents do the same, the same attitude exists in schools and there are just very few enlightened or introspective people who relate to children as equals. The result is that a conditioning exists that says it is okay to treat children in this way and the huge numbers of people who are conditioned determine that these attitudes are acceptable .

When we come to consider whether boarding schools for young children are a form of abuse, we are already up against a brain-washed mainstream that believes that raising children is all about disregarding their feelings and their rights and that forcing a child to detach is a "cruel to be kind" gesture of love. In so many ways the fact that families in home education are more likely to respect their children and attune themselves to the needs of the child, frightens people who know deep down that they pursue a "force the child to do it, and it`ll be good for the child in the end" method.

So we saw in a documentary recently how parents, and school staff involved in the rejection process young children have to go through, were desperately trying to find justifications for knowingly being cruel to their children. The child`s rejection would benefit the child in the end, so the whole thing is worth doing, approach. The very idea that non- disciplinary nurturing of a child can make a confident, independent child and that non-coercive learning also produces well educated, examination-replete, intellectually adept young people, without all the cruelty and the disrespect, seriously frightens people because it destroys their floundering justifications for treating their children the way they do.

In Part 3 of this blog I want to go on to cogitate the real cause of indiscipline in children and the benefits of not following the pack.

Socially Acceptable Forms of Child Abuse.

After talking to a friend about the way his teenage son is treated by his ex wife, I feel so strongly that I must set out some thoughts here...

Let`s extend this into a general case: A boy is failing in school, is tending towards unwanted behaviour and is evidently unhappy. He lives with his mother who grew up in an abusive family and we find that she exerts the same kind of behaviour upon her son,systematically, as was inflicted upon her when she was growing up.
The boy`s personal possessions, including a computer, have been taken away by his mother as a punishment. He then is anxious for his father to get him a sophisticated mobile phone. We surmise correctly that he wants this phone to raise his self worth materially, since he has been dispossessed of material parts of him by his mother.

How do we analyse this situation?

Well, firstly, it is typical that children who are abused in any way learn this behaviour and may inflict it on others when they grow up, particularly on their own children. As we talked about before, a mode of relationship is learned and then enacted. If children learn that relationships are about power and punishment they will certainly often do this to others, by instinct.

So why don`t adults think about the way they were treated, how it felt, their unhappiness, and steer their own behaviour away from the example of their parents? Well, of course many do, where they have the ability, intelligence or just sensitivity,to reflect and to delete these destructive behaviours. But not all adults have the facility to do this and they blindly go on just as their parents did, causing hurt and humiliation and permanent damage in their own children. What is more, they are so caught in this acquired behaviour that they do not realise that they are causing the very aberrant behaviour that they are punishing their child for. What is actually happening is that the parent, the mother in this case, is disrespecting her child so much that she is creating an unhappy, disaffected and depressed child who behaves badly out of a depressed sense of self protection. Moreover, not only does the child find it difficult to function against a wall of negativity, but actually being disruptive and failing academically becomes both a weapon of self defence and, perversely, a twisted gesture of "love" for the parent: the child is being the way the parent wants him to be. He loves his mother and, unconsciously, pleases her by taking this role.

Just a minute you might say, what are we saying? Well, it`s hard to believe, but the child, in a sense, fulfils the "wishes" of the parent in his need to fight back. What? "The wishes of the parent"? Surely we are not saying that a parent who is angry with a child for being a failure or for being naughty, actually wants the child to be this way? Well, yes, in an unconscious way they do. ... and this is why:
The parent grew up in a family where love was supplanted by bullying, so that the only "love" she knew was a bully- victim kind of love. We all experience "love" relative to what kind of treatment we received when we were small children. If it was nurturing and kind and accommodating, that is what we feel is love, if it was bullying and punishing and based upon a bully-victim polarity, then that is what we know as "love". We can then go on to replicate this precisely in our adult relationships.

In our general example, the mother, unwittingly enough, is reproducing the kind of relationship that is familiar to her from her early years...and in that sense is safe and comfortable with it..... She diminishes her son and creates a victim whom she can blame for bad behaviour, just as her parent/s performed a guilt-shift on her for precisely the same reasons. This time, however, she is the bully and HER child is the victim. And this is why this unconsciously manipulated drama is attractive to her: When she was a child, she was the victim, humiliated, powerless, with a screaming soul unable to find release, now HER release from her prison is her own child, who symbiotically enables her some peace by "allowing" her to switch roles.

When a parent humiliates a child, systematically, in this case by invading him and stripping away all his self worth and the precious territory of his personhood, this is psychological rape. It inflicts the same pain and humiliation as a physical rape and does the same kind of mental damage. Just as in rape as we know it, it is difficult for a person to recover from such violation, the damage of psychological rape is hard to heal, particularly since this kind of damage isn`t so apparent to observers.

Taking away these possessions, things that are extensions of, symbols of, a child's core being, is a power message to the child that says that every bit of them is owned and controlled by the parent. There is nowhere for them to go, not even in their own mental space. Just like in physical rape, the parent penetrates the child with sadistic vigour and relishes the power they have over them. The message is you cannot run, you have to submit, and if you fight me I will destroy you until I win; I will even destroy you with your own fight-back. This strategy is very sophisticated, so much so that the instinct of the mother puppets the child into behaving badly so that he even despises himself right into his inner being. As this scenario plays out, the child behaves more and more badly and the mother tightens her purpose. She "knows" that the child will take her negative regard for him into himself and will have an enemy within as well as without, just like has happened to her. Ultimately, the self-injury that is failure and bad behaviour may turn to more disturbed self harm. You see, the mother has a tendency to self harm.

This is unconscious psychological warfare, it is a subtle and deeply pathological game. Ultimately......and not all kids are going to be totally broken by this insidious game, I hasten to add, ultimately, the parent needs to murder the child from within. This is why degradation is so important and bad behaviour is elicited: As every agent of psychological torture knows, you must destroy the person on the outside with all manner of demeaning tactics, in order to destroy them on the inside. The unconscious aim is to turn the victim in upon himself so that even he feels himself to be a bad person. Then you have won.

As a digression, I just want to mention that I am mindful of a book I read that made a very deep impression upon me: "The Stolen Child" by Keith Donohue.......... The tragedy of the story is that hobgoblins who live in a forest, who were once abducted children, watch and wait and study children in our world until a time when they can substitute themselves for a child they abduct. Only when they can steal another child can they achieve the freedom to go back into the world themselves as real children in a normal family. The emotional pain for me in reading this book, was that one child`s pain could only be assuaged by inflicting the same pain upon another child. You get my point I am sure, the situation we are discussing in this blog is in part one person`s pain, the parent, being released by the infliction of pain upon another, the child.

Well, this is how bullying is inherited and why many adults need to bully in order help themselves. Instead of them as children being the victim, the guilty one, they make someone else guilty instead.

In my next blog I want to talk about this again and to address the question of what we do about the child in this terrible circumstance. How we look after him and try to prevent the mother creating a clone of her psychological make up and how we deal with socially permissible abuse.

Compartmental Conscience.

I describe our human ability to have a selective conscience as "compartmental conscience". This term enables us to visualise the way we put bits of our conscience into different boxes in our minds, separate from other boxes, and the way we take things that we don`t want to have a conscience about and set them aside into another box. This process allows us to function even when different boxes/compartments have contradictions with each other.

Lets look at some examples:

I was prompted to write this blog after seeing video footage of youths tempting a swan to the riverbank with some food, only to viciously kick it in the neck, killing it outright. The TV program then showed a vet operating to save the life of a swan that had had it`s wing broken in another savage attack. The bird lay on an operating table and the vet amputated the wing. The swan`s blood triggered my mind to visualise a similar scene where the bird would be a turkey or chicken being prepared for eating and I imagined that the vet would happily sit down to a roast chicken, yet was here using all her skill to save a bird. This is an example of compartmental conscience. In one mental compartment she is eating a bird, and that compartment says that it is OK to do so, yet in another mental compartment she strives to save a bird. It is the compartmentalising of conscience that enables these contradictory actions to take place, the closedness of each compartment in the mind allowing guilt-free actions in one mode and conscienceful actions in the other.

We see this pervasively in the relationships around us. Someone may bully a friend or a spouse, or whomsoever, on the one hand, and be decent and kind and morally upright on the other. One mental compartment will justify being abusive to one person whilst the another compartment will not allow such behaviour at all. Indeed, it can be the very nature attached to one compartment that propels the moral or immoral behaviour of another. A typical situation would be the compartment we make when we want to justify being unkind to someone: We may be respectful and kind and loving to this person most of the time, but when we want to be unkind we create a compartment with a label of justification...Something like,
" so- and- so forgot my birthday, so I am justified in not speaking to them."

We as human beings want and need to be in a mental compartment that is comfortable and approving of our actions..We see this in religious practice, for example, where people cleave in order to furnish approval for themselves, both from within themselves and from the community in which they live. But where there is one area where we obviously strive to be good, there are others where we are less than good people. Religion can be excellent propaganda for us as "good people" and can help us to feel good about ourselves, yet it can also convince us that other bad actions are acceptable/allowable given that we are so good in this one area. And this we see all around us, a sort of trade-off between compartments, that lets us off the hook as far as guilt is concerned.

So what consequences are there, in the broader picture, of compartmentalising our consciences? Well, cruelty, discrimination, racism and bullying, demonisation and witch hunting, are all products of compartmentalising. We see it in the Nazi ability to demonise Jews whilst they maintain normal, non-paranoid, relations with their families and fellow countrymen. We see it in gang-mentality where violence can be inflicted against "outsiders", or other gangs, but not towards their own. We see it in criminality where a compartment allows shoplifting or burglaries. We see it in society wherever we look.

Bullying..... and I mean all types of bullying....compartmentalises the one to be bullied by some judgment that will enable bullying to take place without there being conscience to prevent it. You have to put someone in a box as "different from others" in order to allow your conscience to get away with it. We thus see that doctors, for example, can be exemplary towards most of their patients, and yet will put a patient whom they don`t like or maybe have damaged in some way, into a separate box labeled "problem patient". The placing of this patient into another category will enable the conscience to switch off in regard to this particular person and the doctor can be rude or even medically abusive without any conscience at all.

We need to be aware of compartmentalising in our interpersonal relationships and in the wider world. Whilst it has many damaging affects, it can also enable our better nature to thrive and function normally.