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........

Does Society Need Victims ? 2

In order to address the question of whether society needs victims, I want to look at what having victims/scapegoats, or whatever we want to call them, does for the group that creates them. In simple terms, what would be the gain?
Interpersonally,for example, if we look at why someone would want to victimise their marital partner, or something such, we find that they are enacting acquired behaviour towards the other person and that this, even in a perverse way, makes some gain for them. The gain is the transfer of guilt. We all feel a lot better if we either don`t have much guilt or we get rid of it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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We saw previously that compartmentalising enables someone to single out another person into a separate mental box so that abuse can occur. This very "guiltification" is a "symptom" of abuse, the very act of guilt transfer is evidence of a compartmentalising of conscience taking place. So, I think that when we look for the mechanisms of witch hunting in our wider society, we have to be vigilant for guilt transfer. For this reason I see the growing phenomenon of the "presumption of guilt" in this society as being both a marker for the mechanism of witch hunting taking place, and as a signal that the larger group is finding it`s burden of guilt too big to handle.

A while back I was talking about home education and there being a big drive to have home educating families inspected. Originally ...before government needed to disguise their motivation.... home education was deemed to need to be inspected incase there should be child abuse in families where children didn`t go to school. Ostensibly, the concerns about children were paramount ahead of the almost sacred territory of "presumption of innocence". The imperative of whichever case we examine seems to render the presumption of innocence a mere barrier to the prevention of some possible or imagined crime. Whenever presumption of innocence is devalued in this way, we need to be deeply concerned because we know that an enthroned presumption of guilt tells us that a compartmentalising of conscience is taking place in order to justify actions that are really unjust, and, as we have seen before in compartmentalising, "justification" is the loophole that liberates guilt.

In order to convince a large number of people to persecute certain others, any group has to demonise them. Demonising them makes them "other than like us" and makes it possible to exert cruelty, discrimination, etc, without remorse.

If we look at history where there are mass drives to "guiltify", or down the slippery slope, demonise, certain sections of society, we find that the presumption of guilt enables demonisation and persecution to occur. It is a state of mind that takes hold in a group and feeds upon it`s own spiralling guilt-shift. That is, the more people who believe the particular attributions aimed at these certain people, the more they have to believe it in order to avoid their guilt: with this trap tightening in a large social group, demonisation will become more organised and greater justifications will be sought.
I think that is why there is always a serious danger of any demonisation getting out of hand. I am mindful of political moves in recent years to have people with certain mental illnesses categorised as "guilty of violence" before an act of violence has ever taken place: for example, where it was postured that people should be locked up based upon, what was in affect, a demonisation manoeuvre.... In Nazi Germany demonisation of Jews grew from one man`s personal paranoia about Jews, into a group intoxication where no one questioned the "guilt" of Jews.


Personal standards of rightfulness and established judicial practice, become the enemy of those who seek to do injustice to others. Indeed, frighteningly, those that subordinate such central tenets of a civilised state, convince themselves that it is the place of the new rightfulness to overthrow the very civil liberties that prevent their demonisation crusade from it`s mission ( example present day demonisation of muslims). I use the oxymoron "demonisation crusade " with particular attention because it must be emphasised that the fervour that propels a mass drive to hurt others by defaming them, is pursued with the same blind, self-righteous impulse as a religious crusade. Both are delusional.


A demonisation drive can though, as we were saying, grow out of societies need to get rid of guilt that it collectively holds. Over zealous crusades in the name of right can lead to innocent people being swept up with the guilty, as is already happening in the case of child abuse. The fact that innocent parents can have their children removed forever from them, is something that is the true cost of a group drive that demonises people before it considers whether people are innocent or not. Much of this.... in it`s essence a group intoxication to get rid of societies guilt onto anyone they can attach it to..... has much to do with group survival. Those in any group who are getting brownie points for seeking out the "witches", so to speak, in this case child abusers, have a feel-good factor themselves and this state of well being bonds and enhances their group.

So the essential thing that creating victims does for the larger group is that it divests collectively the dominant group of guilt and thereby helps it to thrive: Guilt is known to damage the immune system so a group guilt-shift makes for better health for group members. I also think that just as the compartmental conscience enables the individual to function, so does the group compartmental conscience, there is little difference really. I suppose that the group compartmental conscience creates a large-scale guilt-box for the ones impugned. The main difference is that the scale of the operation exculpates everybody, regardless of whether they are guilty or not, and bestows upon all those who conform to the group-need, approval and position and well being. It`s something that groups do for their members by instinct and, of course, conversely, the folks oppressed with the imposition of guilt would be "expected" (this is an unconscious intention) to do less well.


I want to come back to this topic soon.There are many examples of sections of society that are being demonised as part of a deliberate campaign.

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.