Compassion Fail: How Militancy Hurts Veganism

In 1971, Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, conducted one of the most controversial psychological experiments that's fairly-well known as The Stanford Prison Experiment.

You can revisit the details of this now famous experiment here. This experiment was pivotal in our contemporary understanding of power. Power corrupts, and this experiment showed how abominably true this is among people.

This experiment was also illustrative of the way conformity or a cultural idea of a 'norm' can keep us from speaking up even when we know something is obviously wrong. The simple matter of sounding like an outsider or saying something no one else is acknowledging feels like a heavier burden than simply staying quiet and doing your thing like everybody else.

Critical Mass and Social Justice

Many social justice movements started with only a few loud voices that were passed on through generations until they ripened into a critical mass, which then had better resources, social credibility, and pathways to massage their manifestos into a society that would be a tad more receptive.

While a plethora of issues still circle around us, from war crimes, to poverty,  patriarchy, and child labour,  just to name a few, most of us can feel comfortable in taking a fierce position against these commonly accepted ills, at least in opinion.

A large majority of the world will agree that slavery is bad. Rape is bad. Child abuse is bad. This opinion has been formed, crystallized, and transmitted in different ways throughout history, and its conformity stems from its social acceptability and the fact that people want to feel ‘good’ about themselves.

So, in theory, we’d say we like the idea of fair wages and safe working conditions for all factory workers. Everyday though, we consume from a market so complex that we have no idea where our clothes and goods are coming from and frankly don’t have the headspace to think about the working conditions and wages of the people who made them.

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with vegan militancy, let’s get into it. Let's call these type of vegans purists from here on end.

Militancy in Action

This past week I witnessed a couple of vegan purists who started bashing a person on fb because he questioned veganism on intellectual, philosophical and marxist stances. There were some merit in the questions he asked though I didn’t agree with many of his points. That said, all his questions were respectful (although unrelenting). But these vegans could not go past the same rhetoric of accusing him of being a mass murder. Once they calculated that this person would not ‘change’, then they started to  insult his looks, insult his regional roots, cursed his mother and father, and downright bullied him with homophobic slurs. Their justification? What does language matter when the animals are suffering? When I commented, telling them they were hurting the movement, they pounced back with the ‘oh but you are a vegan apologist’ and did everything they could (Which was limited to one tedious rhetoric) to discredit me. Even though I am ‘vegan’ myself.

Of course after chuckling at the absurd logic of it all, I started thinking it through a bit. So not only were they ok to go against every value they stood for when it came to animals, but they thought their oppressive bullying was justified when it came to humans.

This cheesy message brought to you by good old Dr Seuss. Although, did you know he was kind of a big-ass racist himself?

I’d go on to say, the more fundamentalist you are the less the cause's scalability matters to you. It’s the idea of being in the ‘right’ or having the ‘authority’ of what is right that attracts this kind of rhetoric. And it’s downright dangerous in any movement.

The sad thing is that vegans are a tiny part of our population. And in that very tiny population, only a small minority of these people resort to dogma. But they are the loudest and they are voices that get imprinted on the rest of the world. Making the rest of us prone to insensitive jokes and silly questions from the rest of the world about our ethical choices.

The Legitimate Need for Awareness

Again, I am betting that most people reading this don’t like the idea that meat and dairy today come from animals that are literally tortured and kept in unfathomable conditions. We don’t want to acknowledge the fact that like the west, factory farming is becoming a reality. Today, we’d rather not know, because knowing gives us the burden of doing something about it, and doing something in this era means doing something absurd like going vegan, right?

Awareness about the absolute truth is what vegans advocate for, and yes awareness is needed. But the core of the vegan activist framework calculates your compassion through one metric. If you care about the horrendous (and growing) reality of animal conditions and practices, then you're going to have to go vegan. Get on it now or else you are an compassion-hating douchebag, especially if you’ve seen the youtube videos. 

This weekend, I’ve been reading my favourite vegan activist’s new book, How to Create a Vegan World - A pragmatic Approach. Tobias Leenaert has been a vegan advocate for almost 20 years (20 years!) but he remains controversial in some vegan circles. The vegan purists can’t wait to slay and accuse him of being a vegan apologist. Purists send him hate mail accusing him of holding no integrity to the cause and pandering to the ‘non-vegans’.

His book basically aligns with my own approach to veganism, what it should mean to all of us, and how we all can start doing something about it. If you read the book you'll find one recurring theme, which is if we start to appreciate smaller changes and relax the understanding of what it means to be vegan, we’ll have far more impact and be able to create sustained behaviour changes that will lead to a much better world when it comes to animal rights.

Like I have suggested, it's the purists that are doing the movement a great injustice by relying on self-righteous ways of getting people to care. What do we know about fundamentalists in general? Let’s take quick stock:

1. They are rigid and married to a narrow perspective idea of the world and how it ought to be
2. They will reason, intellectualise, and proselytise their belief in depth to the public but when challenged or questioned, they resort to name calling, guilt-tripping, character assassination, and ad hominem responses.
3. They rely on manipulating emotions in order to reinforce their ideas. If you fail to ‘act’ accordingly they will dismiss or discredit you
4. They feed off each other, eroding their own personal values, and resort to abuse if their attempt to discredit an alternative view challenges them beyond their prescribed rhetoric

There is a reason for fundamental thought and ideology to thrive. No matter what the cause is, most fundamental ways of looking at things make it exclusive. Exclusivity has a social charm. Unfortunately that charm is a perception of power. Vegan fundamentalism holds tight to its moral authority, then uses it potently to dismiss you if you can’t get on board.

Militant Conversion Works (But Poorly)

Because humans are a diverse lot, we’ll always have a certain section of society receptive to one kind of solution. One part of the population will always see merit in it, have the temperament for it, or simply be wired to see how a particular idea seems easy or logical.

This is why vegan activism using traditional methods (graphic images, telling people we are raping cows, using animals as objects etc) will absolutely convert some people. But for the masses, these techniques simply won't work. If veganism was as simple as showing the world how terrible our system is at the moment, then we’d have millions and millions of vegans all over the place. So what’s the problem here? For every few people that are converted through this measure, many more people will actually be repelled by veganism because the only memory of the term they will take home is that they are personally responsible for this mess and that they are inhumane for not making the change.

Then they are thrown right back into the normal world where no one is making a fuss over this, and will thrive in the safety of this cocoon. Their dissonance with veganism meanwhile, has just increased. It's largely evident that a single-solution doesn’t work, because we are human, and humans are complex creatures that love to feel comfortable.

I’d argue that when we live in such capitalistic times, it’s really hard to see the multitude of ways we are supporting animal abuse from agricultural farming, animal testing and of course,the meat and dairy industry. Any large dairy or meat company will jump on any chance to serve vegan customers if they see a critical mass ( just 3% of the Indian population would present a huge market opportunity, a percentage that we are very very far from) which means that simply ‘going vegan’ will not stop big industries from exploiting animals, they will simply push forward new products to serve vegans.

This is already happening in the West where dairy companies are selling almond mylk because it’s profitable and there's a significant population that are either vegan, lactose intolerant, or weary of milk products (but eat meat).

Vegan ice-cream from a company that will always make profits from dairy

Hypothetically, if more vegans cropped up, we’d buy a bunch of vegan products from non-vegan establishments because, hello, accessibility!  At the same time, the constant demand for regular non-vegan products by the rest of the populace would ensure that these product manufacturers would do nothing on the grand scale to reduce their exploitation of animals.

We could, of course, then nix everything: be the hippie, anti-capitalist, anti-big industry, anti-consumerist and make everything at home. But then we wouldn't have the numbers and most people would never switch because it wouldn’t be a realistic way of living.

In fact I advocate (right now) for vegans buying ‘accidentally’ vegan products from non-vegan companies like Amul (dark chocolate), Oreos etc, just so people can see that there are plenty of ‘vegan’ foods out there. Companies won’t advertise them as vegan because they don’t have a big enough market to make the effort. So at the cost of making a concession, I think that the more accessible and easy it is for people to find vegan products that give them the comforts and satiety they are used to, the more likely people are to consider veganism, or at the least, reductionism. The issue of the market and its eventual ironies will emerge no matter what.

Get your hands on this

In this era, getting people to think about a ‘vegan world’ shouldn't be limited to demanding people change their lifestyle. I'd rather encourage people to deconstruct the merits of our moral foundations: why are we making such mindless choices when we know sentient beings are suffering in ways that would make you sit in a corner and sob till sundown?

Going vegan isn't something that will happen en masse or suddenly, given the way we do things at scale. But thinking about it? Acknowledging the problem? Trying to see where our own inconsistencies lie, talking to our children about the fact that we all ‘feed ourselves a little bit of bullshit everyday’? These things are for everyone. These things are essential to set up the scaffolding for an era where we can start to manage the damage we’ve done.

My objective is to move the needle - how do we start to work on this effectively in this lifetime? We can’t solve it, but we can be productive about it.

Slow Opinions & Fast Morals

How to Create a Vegan World talks about the value of ‘slow opinions’ in a world that tells you to make fast judgments. Sometimes it’s best to let one idea develop in your head and see it from many angles before making a complete decision. When related to veganism, we must acknowledge that there are many core challenges in the system, and even if someone is very compelled by the vegan perspective, it may take a whole lot of time for the person to see how they best fit in this narrative. The answer is not always going vegan.  But it could mean other amazing things like: reducing consumption in a huge way and openly telling people they have reduced their consumption (which makes more people responsive to smaller changes themselves). It might mean someone investing money in vegan ideas and products. It might mean someone making executive decisions on where their meat is sourced from (and yes, we can’t be moral absolutes in a time like this, some action now rather than none sets up the world for much larger impact). Over time, small changes might lead a person to go vegetarian or vegan after years. The value of the slow opinion is unsurmountable and critical to creating a world that doesn’t depend on animal life for our everyday.

Social media and politics in the age of Trump and Modi illustrate how divisive we can be. How our allegiance to one political agenda often results in us taking sides to more conservative or liberal ideas accordingly. This means we’re not taking the time to see the massive gaping holes in our preferred ideology as well. Why do you think I can be vociferous with my liberal opinions when it comes to politics on the internet? It's because there is a critical mass of people who think along the same lines as I do when it comes to human issues, because people are responsive to thinking further on things that already matter to them.  Even when you have a critical mass that cheers your solution-driven opinions,  you have big time risks of contradicting your own values. So no matter where you are when it comes to animal rights, remember that your thoughts on the issue can always evolve, and that evolution relies on constant engagement and awareness.

Most Of Us Care. We're Limiting Engagement By Giving An All Or Nothing Verdict

Like I’ve mentioned before, humans want a better world. Despite our differences, despite our diverse life experiences and circumstances. We want better. But vegans can limit engagement by asking for an all or nothing approach.

In fact many vegan purists think that the job is over when they get people to become vegan. Leenaert mentions in his book that in the U.S.A 84% of people who went vegetarian or vegan go back to their original diet. Why is that? Most possibly because the main driving force of vegan propaganda is to make a quick change based on quick moral judgement.

Purists might have created the idea that you don’t count unless you are invested in being vegan. I see it otherwise, I see you as much in this story. Got social privilege? Then you can do something, even if it’s talking about the issue, educating yourself more about it, or making a new trackable change. And this brings me to the social privilege.

Social Privilege Counts

I am writing this today because of many (often unaccounted) social privileges. I have an education, the ability to read, research, and formulate my thoughts in English. I have the health and the time to think,watch, read, and not worry about critical emergencies. I live in an urban city with access to supermarkets, healthcare, housing, and a reliable amount of money to spend. I have a ton more, but if you are reading this, suffice to say you probably have a lot of the same social privileges as well.

Those who have social privilege have the onus of making ground change. We have the onus to be the most informed.

Veganism in its current format makes no sense being applied to the rest of the world straight up. There are common sense reasons for this: accessibility to veganism’s  language of choice- English, accessibility to information,accessibility to widespread substitutes, and a wide variety of human rights issues.

This not to say that animal rights is not a worthy enough cause to be given priority. In fact I think the very opposite, the day humans all over understand the value of animal life, I can go out on a limb to say that we would have also come to terms with a lot of our human oppressions. I believe all oppressions intersect and carry stories of our ability to turn our heads away when it is most convenient to us. When we can turn our heads away so easily at a system of oppression that allows for such torture every single day as we lead our ‘normal’ lives, is it so hard to make the leap and see why so many other oppressions exist as well?

Kids are far more intelligent and receptive to our adult contradictions. It's far more effective to talk about our human failures early on and acknowledge that we are a part of it. Kids make these connections faster than we do (imho)

There is value in being overwhelmed with the world and slowly finding new answers every day. My own journey towards adopting a vegan lifestyle took an entire decade. And I very much think that I will stick to it because it came from a long process of self-evaluation. The path to a more compassionate world is not simple, rigid, or short.

This is why thought leaders like Leenaert will be highlighted in later years with profound appreciation. It's precisely why vegans who think of the movement holistically and inclusively need to speak up more. This is why non-vegans shouldn't feel threatened, weird, or embarrassed to engage with the vegan movement in other ways- whatever way that is. We want to work with you. At least I do. Any movement is shortsighted without new perspective and unexpected helping hands. We’re specks in this grand old mystery called the universe. We’ll need all of us to get to that better world. Jump on and keep moving.

Did this essay resonate? Read my previous blog that talks about the problem of singular solutions: I am Vegan But Veganism Is Inconsistent and Arbitrary.

I highly recommend anyone who found this essay compelling to buy How to Create a Vegan World. It talks in the most inclusive and intelligent ways about the issue and how we are all capable of working through this problem in tangible, effective and most importantly inclusive ways. Tobias Lennaert has been at this for 20 years and his perspective and empathy is riveting. Buy it on amazon .