Source
r/Vystopia•
Solegate

Everyone is sick

My heart breaks for the innocent animals who are being slaughtered every second for some stupid pleasure. What's happening now is one of the most horrible things in history. This is truly sick and horrifying. I hate how humanity doesn't care about other living beings at all. It's only about themselves and their species. An average human endorses animal cruelty every day and no one seems to have a problem with it.

What the hell is wrong with people? Why is systematic violence accepted at all? How dare they mutilate and kill animals in the first place? What makes us so important? What makes us more important than any other living being? Nothing. Humanity is sick to the core.

Posted Oct 29, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

559
Fuanshin•

Entropy will liberate all conscious beings sooner or later, if that's any consolation.

13
SolegateOP•

I really hope so. This place is a miserable horror for a lot of living beings.

2
tiptoe_antics•

I empathize with how you feel. My heart hurts too.

And we are not alone. The existence of this sub, of veganism, of myriad pacifists, animal rights activists, poets, artists, and philosophers throughout history whose hearts have also ached and who have tried to be a light in the darkness are proof that humans are also capable of beauty, sensitivity, and compassion.

I understand your need to express the difficult - nearly unbearable weight of despair of seeing the brutal side of humanity. But it is also true that to use absolutism, for example including me and yourself and the entirety of every human past and present in a summary charge that our entire species is and will always be “sick to the core” is ultimately to feed a regressive pathology.

Without discounting the horrific acts of violence and equally horrifying callous disregard you mention, it is incumbent on those with eyes to see to nurture the seeds of goodness as much as to denigrate moral failures. Because words matter. If we only ever paint a bleak picture and allow no room for growth, it tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In my view, even if it is too late, even if the future is hopeless, the virtuous path is to use what time we have to look to the light, imagine possibilities of goodness and transcendence and try to enact what we imagine until our last breath, and to spread as much of that light as we can to inspire others.

5
SolegateOP•

I get what you are saying, but there's literally no chance that everyone will be vegan in the future. I support helping and reaching out, but we can admit that it's ultimately futile.

Little acts of kindness do matter, but there will always be animal abuse, cruelty, and violence. All the good things we have done never justified the horrors. If this is the price for it, then it's way too high. It's a fact that the basis of humanity's nature is actually sick and terrible. Violence, mindless consumption, and agression are inherent in our nature.

If we consider it from other sides. It's not at all surprising. It's not really humanity itself that's the problem. It's the fact that violence and destruction are inherent in life. This planet was a mindless slaughter from the beginning. For billions of years, wild animals had to endure horrible amounts of suffering for nothing at all. It's quite terrifying.

1
tiptoe_antics•

The fact that you have a mind that thinks and a heart that feels is proof that goodness is and has always been latent within life’s journey. The most significant emergent breakthroughs in evolution always begin with a tiny minority of slightly higher depth in a vast majority of lower span.

What is significant about the human pattern is its capacity for consciousness. The ability for one being to mentally take the perspective of another - to empathize by putting oneself in another’s shoes, so to speak - is an extraordinary emergent property of evolution. For this capacity to come online at all required those billions of years of slow, arduous, entropy-defying, sometimes beautiful and yes, often horrible development.

All of that toil and effort, surviving dangerous conditions, protecting offspring from predators, nearly starving through cold winters - all of that effort ultimately allowed the complex pattern you know as “me” to exist. Every stage of atomic, molecular, chemical, biotic, and semiotic emergence was its own kind of battle and yet still found a way to unfold and enfold into a coherent integration that allows you to have the thoughts you are having.

That evolutionary process is alive in you now. Deep down, you are that process. You are the big bang. There is literally no separation. It is one unbroken lineage of self-organizing patterns of information and energy taking temporary forms. The utilization of energy and matter to propel this process has always been bigger organisms consuming smaller organisms, birth and death, agency and communion, freedom and suffering.

But the fact that you and I think is proof that it is anything but mindless. For you to declare from such an elevated height after billions of years of toil that it is all purposeless, meaningless, and horrible is perfectly within your rights, as you after all are not other than that very process.

But I suggest that such a nihilism is ultimately a betrayal of the future that all beings have been struggling toward and all the organisms who even now are maintaining your form. As inheritors of evolution’s awesome legacy, including the capacity to think and contemplate its nature at all, it is ultimately up to us to decide whether life is good or not.

I choose to believe life is good.

1
Mangxu_Ne_La_Bestojn•

It's only about themselves and their species.

Technically many people also care about species they have been conditioned to care about, such as dogs. Many people have the opportunity to enjoy their unique personalities, perhaps if it was common for farmed animals to be companion animals, exploiting and killing them would be seen as animal cruelty as it should be.

5
derederellama•

same. i spent my whole childhood on the borderline of misanthropy and now veganism has pushed me over that edge.

5
Effective-Tap-5494•

Could you elaborate? How did Veganism influence it?

0
derederellama•

knowing that the human enslaves and tortures animals for their own benefits, even after it's been established that doing so to to our own kind is wrong... the speciesism is unreal and it makes me hate people so much.

2
BeanBr0•

I feel that .

3
Ramblin_Red_Rose•

Do you think it's humanity or the people leading it? As advances in tech reveal more opportunities to understand and modify human behaviour on a mass scale, I think it mostly matters who's in charge, their moral system will be reflected in everyone

2