Good morning!
This is your Random Truth bulletin with your random fact.
Evil. What is it? Does it exist, or is it the invention of religions to scare people into submission? Is it an abstract term by which we label things we can’t understand, things that scare us and confound us?
Is it a philosophical way to describe whatever is beyond our grasp, whatever contravenes our moral understanding of the world at any given time?
Is it relative, changing with the times, with the knowledge attained and the state of the world? Or is it absolute, unmitigated and pure, non-relative, no matter how one frames the picture?
Let’s answer the question with an example. Harming something that can feel pain, subjecting it to wanton suffering and cruelty, and doing so with impunity on a large, industrial scale, could be classified as evil.
This means that animal farming, by default, is evil. Its very nature is wicked, relying on the abuse and exploitation of animate life. We subject animals to systematic cruelty for our benefit, penning, milking, and slaughtering them at will.
Of course, one has to eat, so we can argue for the potentially relative nature of evil — that some suffering is necessary, at least in the eyes of an intelligent, aware life form. For life to progress and grow, other life has to be sacrificed, or so our farming ethics postulate.
In other words, we have to live with the burden of harming others. It’s the way life operates, right? With great knowledge comes great accountability, both personal and collective, an awareness of the pain inflicted on others in the name of survival, which the perpetrators try to come to terms with through intense rationalization (it’s necessary and inevitable), desensitization (don’t care, get over it, grow up!) and distraction (what? who? huh?).
Then again, not so easy. Some things can’t be simply swept under the rug.
The bitter truth is that the human species doesn’t need to cull this many animals to survive. But we do it anyway. It’s not about our basic needs anymore, hasn’t been for a while now. Farming as we know it is a product of maximalism. It’s all a function of trade and affluence, the accumulation of benefits at the expense of other life forms. We no longer hunt to survive, or farm to survive. We hunt and farm and crush other animals to make a killing and be able to afford a better life. We destroy life in order to augment ours. We subject animals to treatment that is straight out of horror stories, and we do so not only with impunity, but by turning a blind eye, pretending it’s not happening.
That is truly, utterly evil. A systemic, informed application of pain and suffering on conscious life in the name of trade, all of it done at will, all while we rationalize our actions, calling them industrious, necessary, inevitable, natural. We raise ourselves to the highest pedestal with blade in hand and counterargument in mind, anointing ourselves the pinnacle of evolution, while at the same time we raise our youth on stories of compassion and dignity, teaching them the necessity to be just, fair, kind.
See the conflict, the gross contradiction? The hypocrisy?
We are legion, and by that I mean terrifying. The callousness of our collective consciousness as a species, our overall MO, is reflective of a brutality unparalleled in history, all on the backdrop of a self-imposed ignorance-cum-cruelty that is, at best, idiotic.
In real terms it’s psychotic-slash-monstrous-slash-demonic.
Perhaps this is the ultimate definition of evil. Humanity. The actions of a selfish-idiotic life form that results in the systematic harm of others, all in the name of trade.
But that’s just an opinion.
We, at RANT HQ, occasionally deal in opinions, but we prefer facts.
Fact is, humanity is inflicting unparalleled harm on other life forms, our behavior bordering on the abominable. The stuff of horror movies. It takes place everywhere, on everyone’s behalf, in places far away where we can’t see what’s going on and in places too close for comfort. It takes place both in the name of primitive ways of thinking as well as modern, postmodern, progressive ways of life. For the world to function in the way we demand it to function, billions of animals are tortured and killed annually.
Fact.
Stay tuned.
From RANT HQ,
Have a nice day!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6gBWXZU74g [WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGERY!]