Is Freeganism a Positive Form of Advocacy for Legal Animal Rights? | Ishkah Vs. Trashcarcass

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Here’s the full debate:

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And here’s a condensed text version of the discussion below:

Table of Contents

• Debate Proposition
• My Opening Statement
• My Main Arguments
• My Opening Summary
• Choice of terms
• What Is the Effectiveness of Advocatng Animal Rights At Food Not Bombs Stalls
• Treating animals as a commodity
• Cannibalism comparison
• Do animals worry about events past their death?
• More ethical uses for the rescued animal material
• Slippery Slope
• Devaluing the homeless by offering them less valuable options
• Grey areas and not coming off as dogmatic
• Appendix – Formal Arguments
• References

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Debate Proposition

Stone: We have Ishkah and Trashcarcass here for this debate. Ishkah is going to be taking the view that “using rescued animal products at food not bomb stalls has been a positive form of advocacy towards the goal of attempting to end all unjustified captivity” and Trashcarcass is going to be taking the opposition.

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My Opening Statement

Theo: So the main thing I’m gonna be arguing is that when discussing ethical grey areas to veganism I think it’s important not to look like dogmatists, so I’m going to try and ground the discussion around using rescued animal material in the real world of food not bomb stalls.

And, we might descend into an abolitionist vs. welfarist debate, where I defend harm reduction, but I’m also going to argue that abolition can coincide with welfare reform, such that food not bomb stalls should be viewed as the revolutionary vanguard of the abolitionist movement for creating radical grassroots communities that are principled, serve the needs of people worst off and so, can rival carnist culture.

Finally, it’s going to be a niche philosophy debate, but hopefully it will give people the tools to defend rescuing animal material and so, to stay open to lots of strategies for bringing about a vegan world.

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My Main Arguments

Theo: Firstly it can be great animal rights advocacy in rare circumstances like so; by setting up a Food not Bombs stall in the town centre and putting up a vegan sign in front of a big pan of vegan stew and a freegan sign infront of rescued bread. The vegan sign can provoke lots of interesting conversations about the ethics of breeding and killing animals. While the freegan sign can get people talking about a further layer of if it is true that harming animals for their meat, milk and eggs was necessary to feed the population, how come so very much meat, milk and eggs ended up rotting in supermarket skips instead? Which can provoke further conversation about the evils of producing such an energy intensive product like meat to just become food waste, while people are starving around the world.

Secondly non-human animals we farm don’t experience a worse quality of life worrying about whether they’re going to be eaten by other humans after they’re dead, humans do as a species norm.

Thirdly there exists healthy human cultures in which humans being eaten by non-human animals after they’re dead is seen as a positive, for example in Tibet, having your energy transferred into that of a bird is seen as a beautiful thing or green burials where your body can more easily become nutrients for both animals and plants. So then, healthy human cultures in which non-human animals are eaten by humans is also likely possible.

And finally, even if it’ll be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by animals products (in the same way as if no one ever felt pressured by sexist beauty standards to shave their legs again), that doesn’t mean that it’s not morally permissible to consume some of those animal products at the moment i.e. it’s not comparable to cannibalism where you’re causing worse quality of life in other humans by normalizing it or normalizing the standard that women should have their genitals mutilated as neither the choice to shave your legs or eat thrown out animal products necessitates violating anyone’s rights or causing harm to anyone.

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My Opening Summary

Theo: So, to go back to the food not bombs stall example that we’re debating. Here’s a bunch of topics that come up on on a lot of food not bombs stalls which make it a positive form of animal rights advocacy:

We cooked vegan soup, so no profits needed to go to an industry which breeds and kills animals.

Here’s some freegan bread with milk powder in it which was rescued, so no harm to animals and it’s carbon negative.

Isn’t it amazing they kept those cows captive and milked them only for it to go in the trash. So that’s one sign farming animals isn’t necessary to feed the population, if so very much meat, milk and eggs end up rotting in supermarket skips instead.

Isn’t it sad that politicians subsidize such an energy intensive product like meat to just become food waste, while people are starving around the world.

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Choice of terms

Stacy: So, firstly I have a problem with the term freegan and that would be because it so closely relates itself to the word vegan and I don’t think they have anything to do with each other. There’s other words for example like frugivore, why does it have to be freegan? Because if you say that to somebody it sounds like it’s similar to veganism in that if it’s free, it’s okay, and still vegan. And I would say in most situations it wouldn’t be. Veganism is a moral philosophy.

Theo: I actually think it’s really positive to promote freeganism as a term for helping explain veganism because if we go by the colloquial definition of veganism meaning ‘an animal products boycott’, it does include freeganism. And it gets back to the historically accurate reason for why the vegan society came about. It would also have broader appeal for other liberation causes like anti-racism and anti-sexism to see it as a strategy of action which is useful for their struggles also.

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What Is the Effectiveness of Advocatng Animal Rights At Food Not Bombs Stalls

Stacy: I’ve worked next to food not bombs people, I’ve worked at feeding the homeless and I happen to know that the majority of people that come there are indeed homeless, but there are some people that just come there because it’s free food. And some of those people, if not most, don’t really care what it is, so having these moral discussions with them, I’m not really sure how far you’re going to get with that.

Theo: Well, I would just counter that if done well, it can be a real community building exercise. You can get people joining learning to cook and put time into rescuing all this amazing food. People have time to read political material you put out while they’re eating their food. And I just have had lots of great conversations and made positive connections.

By showing slaughterhouse footage, we’re making people sad, even though we wish we didn’t have to. So, by doing food not bombs stalls as well, it’s this really important counter balance of showing the positive side to what you can gain from this community.

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Treating animals as a commodity

Stacy: You say ‘look at all this waste, why did they breed these animals for it to go to waste?’ I think you’re only going to reinforce the idea in their head of how they need to be feeding animals to humans. ‘It’s not going to waste’, as you said, ‘if you are feeding it to humans, it’s okay.’

Theo: Well, that’s an environmental point, but I think it does tie in positively to both human and animal rights, in that I’m talking about the evils of producing such an energy intensive product like meat to just become food waste, while people are starving around the world and while wildlife habitat like the rainforest is getting torn down to produce these products, when we could just eat plants for less land use, so, protect and rewild habitat for more animals to be able to express their capabilities in.

So, yeah I just disagree with the idea that trying to get people to believe ‘it’s always wrong to feed animals to humans’ will help us get to a vegan world faster.

You have to explain why you think it would be against ours or animals’ best interests.

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Cannibalism comparison

Stacy: Vegan footsoldier made this analogy comparing freeganism to cannibalism about how these cannibals were killing these children and eating them. And some human rights activists caught up with them, but when they didn’t get to one of the children quickly enough and the child died from their injuries he went home with his leg and ate this child’s leg so they wouldn’t go to waste.

And then you came back with an analogy that had to do with human rights activists and female genital mutilation, I’m not really sure if I followed because they didn’t leave with a body part at the end, so I would think that would make more sense for a freegan analogy.

Theo: Yeah Footsoldier made the same point, about how he thought the story should end with the human rights activists performing genital mutilation on their own child to be a fair comparison.

But, if I had ended the story like that it would have just been the same story almost word for word with the same effect of implicitly shaming people for actions which could mistakenly be attributed to furthering a harmful culture. So, for his story analogy, carnism/speciesism & freeganism, but in mine sexism & girls pressured into shaving their legs.

With the video I made I wanted to make explicit that you can have all the same intense disgust reactions to an evil action done without people’s consent like killing children to eat them, and similarly with genital mutilation. But that the comparison to eating rescued human meat doesn’t follow for all rescued animal products because you can have healthy human cultures rescuing animal products in which no one is suffering a worse quality of life worrying about their interests being disrespected after their death. In the same way as you can have people choosing to shave their legs without harming anyone regardless of if there exists a harmful patriarchal culture which pressures some people to do it, like with forced genital mutilation.

So you can imagine that the parents getting FGM performed on their daughter is one trajegectory the parents could have gone down if you like, but my story diverges into a tale about how instead they simply had to deal with their daughter asking to be able to shave thier legs, and how it’s different in the same degree to genital mutilation as freeganism is to cannibalism.

Stacy: Well, I think the way a culture of cannibalism differs from freeganism is because eating animal products is still the norm, and I think in all these instances it is a decision by a human being whether it be upon another human being or another animal it’s still humans making these decisions, it’s never the other animal making this decision in any of those cases and therefore I think this is a human-centric view.

Theo: Right, but the sexist culture of women being emotionally pressured into shaving their legs is also the norm and yet women can still choose to do it for reasons that don’t have to do with being emotionally pressured into it. So, in that way being a freegan in a carnist culture is more similar to choosing to shave your legs in a sexist culture, than it is to cannibalism.

And again there is no mental capability for animals to make a choice about how they would desire other humans or other animals treat them after they’re dead, so there can be no issue of fairness or justice either way. Animals do make the decision to eat human flesh. And we even encourage it in Tibetan culture. So, that’s a sign that we’re not necessarily promoting a culture of devaluing animals by eating animal material when there exists cultures valorising animals eating us. We are when we kill them because there is a clear going against their interests, but there are no interests to go against in the case of what they would desire other people or animals do with them after they’re dead.

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Do animals worry about events past their death?

Stacy: You made a point about how you think ‘animals aren’t worrying about events past their death, they aren’t suffering a worse quality of life imagining they’ll be eaten by humans after they’re dead’. Well, actually I think that non-human animals do worry about being killed all the time, they have an instinct to fear being preyed upon and far more so than humans do.

Also, we don’t worry about humans eating us after our death, I know I don’t sit around worrying about my death or what’s going to happen to my body after I die, so would that be reasonable grounds for somebody to kill me?

Theo: So, definitely animals worry about being killed, for instance, if you were cutting into a deer corpse and eating the raw meat in front of another deer, then I’m sure it would provoke a fear response in the deer.

I’m not talking about it being ok to unjustifiably kill or keep animals captive and I’m not arguing that every single situation involving eating rescued animal material is ethical, the same way you can be buying plant material and still be doing something unethical in specific situations.

The reason for me to never eat human meat is because someone in the world could experience anguish on a long-term basis worrying that would happen to them after they’re dead, even if it’s irrational. For instance, say a friend had to have their arm amputated and I asked for the severed arm to cook it up because I thought it was a funny thing. If I did that in a hypothetical vacuum I think that would be fine, but I wouldn’t do that because I understand that we live in social contracts and other humans could experience anguish that I would treat a human like that and then worry what might happen to them.

I don’t think animals are experiencing worry on that level, they worry that they’re going to be killed, they might experience fear if somebody was eating another animal right in front of them, but I don’t think they’re experiencing this worse quality of life worrying about what’s going to happen after the dead.

Even if it’s just one person in 7 billion. It would be against my interest to possibly cause that one person harm, but the fact that it just can’t happen in animals means that it’s not an ethical issue for me, as long as I’m it’s virtuous in that it’s carbon negative, like less land needs to be taken up for growing edible material, and if I’m accounting for all these externalities like being strong willed enough not to fall down a slippery slope of habits.

Stacy: Again, I just think probably animals are more concerned about what happens to their body than humans, just from the way that we treat our own bodies, you know we smoke cigarettes, do drugs, we do all these extreme sports that can cause bodily injury, we live like there’s no tomorrow, especially when we’re young.

These animals live in constant fear for their safety, especially the animals that are preyed upon and it’s instinctual for them. I think we can’t possibly know what they are thinking, so to assume that it’s okay to use their bodies after they die, I don’t really think that’s an argument because like I said I don’t care what happens in my body after I die but I can make that decision I have that autonomy and I don’t think it’s fair for us to make that decision for them.

Theo: Ok, so there’s a scientific experiment called ‘the false belief test’ where they’ve discovered only recently that great apes can have theory of mind, in that they can anticipate complex thoughts another animal is having in rare circumstances.

They originally did this test on toddlers to see what age we start to individuate. It’s hard to explain in text, so I’ll just link a short 2 minute video on the experiment:

Anyway, this is only something that chimpanzees can do and a few other great apes, it’s called theory of mind. Where you understand what other people’s intentions will be other than your own & they’re only thinking about this in rare circumstances. And we aren’t relying on theory of mind for most of our physical interactions throughout the day, so it is this rare development. We do much more predicting what other people are going to do based on stereotypes of patterns we’ve observed or what we would do when presented with similar situations.

So, all this is to say that we plan for after our death, we have gravestones and we do all these things because we know how we want to be remembered, we’re planning for our legacy and how we want to be respected and how we want to plan for that to happen, but animals just aren’t doing this on that level.

They fear for how they might die, so we’re definitely right to be vegan and not unjustified kill animals and not unjustifiably keep them captive which hurts their well-being, but we just don’t need be concerned about their non-interests, unless we’re talking about our own interests, and whether it’s for our own dignity whether it’s self-harm for us.

We don’t need to be worried about something which animals are literally incapable of doing in terms of worrying about other people’s intentions after they’re dead.

So that’s what I think the science says.

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More ethical uses for the rescued animal material

Stacy: Why not feed rescued animal material to wildlife or stray animals that have no moral agency? Or put it on the compost?

Theo: That is one option, but what about having moral agency should stop us from eating rescued animal material, why is it morally wrong?

Also for some items like bread which you might eat anyway, you’re getting more pleasure out of the material specifically designed for humans, than an animal would. And you’d be saving the environment more by putting that energy to good use in consuming it yourself and using a compost loo, than just putting it straight on the compost.

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Slippery Slope

Stacy: I had a goddaughter who used to dumpster dive and eat roadkill with her boyfriend. They both considered themselves vegans and I said it was a slippery slope, it was going to lead them back to thinking it’s okay to eat flesh and sure enough the next thing you know they’re eating from fast food restaurants. So, I think it’s the same with food not bombs stalls.

Theo: So, yeah definitely in the psychology of habits that can happen, but it can also go the other way, for instance, if someone is really into cheese because cheese has monosodium glutamate crystals, which is like opium, so if someone wanted to become vegan, and they have no aversion to eating rescued cheese, then it could be a helping hand in encouraging them to stay strong in their decision to go vegan, by just slowly tapering it off. I know I was completely stripped of the value of baked goods, like croissants and doughnuts when they existed as this mountain in the kitchen of a squat I lived in. Knowing it was this sugar crash I could have whenever I wanted, I stopped seeing it as such a hot option. Like some people on diets have a set time where they can eat one treat a day that they can look forward to, whereas before they would eat sweets whenever they wanted.

Stacy: But, what if you go from thinking it’s okay to eat it from a food not bomb stall to eating some birthday cake at friends’ party because otherwise it might get thrown in the bin, I mean when does it stop? I wouldn’t because it’s a moral philosophy I’ve got to stick with.

Theo: But, what is the principle behind the reason never to eat animal products, just that it’s a slippery slope?

The principle argument for why I’m an animal rights advocate is if the wonder that we experience in viewing wild animals is not ‘how similar to us they are’, but their ‘real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value’ and one sufficient reason we grant this freedom at least to a basic extent to humans is they have a desire to achieve what they find valuable then; the fact non-human animals experience this desire too means we ought extend these freedoms to animals.

So, a holistic world-view of not wanting to reduce both the quality and quantity of positive experiences humans can have with animals, as well as animals with other animals for low-order pleasures such as taste/texture.

So, just because I might use rescued animal products as a form of advocacy for animal rights, doesn’t mean I can’t also get my friends to respect the principle reason I’m an animal rights advocate by not buying more cake on the pretense that I’ll not want to see it wasted. The same way just because I showed an interest in horses, I would still be capable of making sure to let my friends know not to book any horse riding holidays, and even if they did like with the birthday cake, it’s just a rare situation of friends getting confused and an opportunity to help them get a deeper understanding where they didn’t have one before.

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Devaluing the homeless by offering them less valuable options

Stacy: You’re kind of treating homeless people as scavengers, like they’ll take what they can get and perhaps that is true, but is it really fair to put them in that situation? I’ve actually met some homeless people that did not like the fact that they couldn’t choose to be vegan, so I think that does hurt human dignity in that sense to not just give them the vegan food.

Theo: Well, I see the meaning behind veganism is that it’s an animal products boycott. I think people can go further in being animal rights advocates. But, so I wouldn’t be able to relate to why a homeless person desired not to even eat, for instance, rescued bread with whey in it. So, it would be like meeting a homeless Hare Krishna who didn’t want to eat garlic or onions. If it’s that rare, and I would feel comfortable eating it myself, I wouldn’t feel the need to cook food with those rare people in mind. Even if that trace amount of whey was unhealthy for me, it would be to the same extent I’d desire to eat dark chocolate.

Stacy: But, hospitals are not looking to get you better, because they want to keep you as a customer. People get stuck in these systems of being ill all the time, keep going to the hospital, then they owe everything that they earn to hospitals and pharmacies and it keeps them poor and that cycle gets pushed on to the next generation and over and over again. Now, if we’re pushing unhealthy animal products onto homeless people is that fair?

Theo: But, it’s just such a minute amount in that bread, it’s a binding agent.

Stacy: But, where’s the line we draw? It’s a minute amount in that bread, but what if you found a quiche, you’re gonna tell me it’s okay to throw away a quiche, but it’s not okay to throw away the bread?

Theo: The line is it would be against my interests to eat that quiche because it’s unhealthy, so I wouldn’t offer it to other people. The same way there’s one line with plant products, in that I encourage people to boycott animal products because it’s one easy way people can avoid profiting an evil industry, but there will be 1000s of other lines it would be good to draw also around plant foods like an Israeli boycott and just avoiding luxury foods, so that you can spend your money better elsewhere.

And it’s one way of helping the environment by being carbon negative and freeing up more land for wildlife habitat.

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Grey areas and not coming off as dogmatic

Theo: I think it’s really important to be open about grey areas where we have exceptions to the rule. Like I know people who have gone out to Syria to fight ISIS and this is a really extreme gray area where they’re vegan and they tried not to eat any animal material out there and they wanted to go out there to help fight ISIS and free people and from that tyranny, to save people from being harmed in that way and they’ve had to resort to eating animal material because the militia hasn’t rationed enough plant products, so they’ve had to eat like spam out of a tin.

So, that was a way of achieving more well-being in the world by fighting other other liberation causes in this extreme situations, so I think it’s good to acknowledge these things.

Stacy: Well, I don’t blame the people in the andes that were in the plane crash for eating people that died.

But, when we take something that came from someone who was murdered, I think that that’s wrong, if we are able to make another choice, I think that it’s the wrong choice to take a product of murder.

Theo: What about roadkill then? Would it be ethically wrong to do that?

Stacy: If you don’t have to you shouldn’t. If you were stranded and there’s nothing around, I wouldn’t be mad at you for eating roadkill.

Theo: But, so whether the animal was killed unjustifiably isn’t relevant then.

I just think it’s important to admit grey areas, as it helps show what ideal situation we’re working towards.

I think people come off looking insane when they bite the bullet on some grey areas like for instance when some vegans say they would rather accept a 30-year lifespan if the vegan diet was really harmful to them.

Stacy: I say that and I would stick by that, but that’s for me, I’m not saying that I would judge somebody else if they were in a survival situation.

Theo: But, if you want to be the change you want to see in the world, and people are looking to you to understand where is that intuition coming from, why is that a desirable thing for you to take that stance?

Stacy: It’s my own moral choice for myself, it would be a spiritual choice I guess.

Theo: Okay, well I mean the way I advocate that people become animal rights advocates, is that they can join this community and political movement which seeks to gain collective legal rights for animals to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren’t subject to human cruelty. But, I’m fine with my definition being softer on for example subsistence hunters. I’ve got a video on my channel of Penan tribes people in Indonesia explaining how it would be repulsive to them to keep animals in captivity to farm, and I think this is great animal rights advocacy.

So, I just think we should be working towards this world where we’re able to preserve and rewild more habitat for wild animals to express their capabilities in and live full lives. And it’s good that we’re moving towards a situation where where we can design diets and live really healthy lives with less land use, but the reason hunting would be against my interests is it would be a form of self-harm for me to kill an animal when I know that I can eat plant foods, but if veganism only gave me a 30-year lifespan, that would be more self-harm to me to not hunt animals, so long as they’re living long life in the wild. So, I just don’t see how this intuition is compatible with the ideal vision that it’s useful to advocate other people invest in.

Stacy: Actually, I’m more of a misanthrope, so I would say just get rid of the humans.

Theo: Well, yeah that’s all I’d say, when you’re taking these stances against rescued animal products and being willing to die at 30 if the vegan diet was that harmful, I just don’t think that’s appealing to people in terms of advocating veganism and animal rights, so that’s why these grey areas are important I think.

Stacy: That’s because humans have human interests or self-interests.

Theo: But, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Stacy: My philosophy is more altruistic in that I’d rather the human race die out and let the animals live their lives.

Theo: But, we could ideally be good caretakers, like rescuing and releasing wildlife who were injured. So, we can play this really positive role in the world for our own self-interest and for other animals’ interests by staying alive and working towards this vision of looking after ourselves and also providing wildlife habitat for animals, which can include using rescued animal material in our animal rights advocacy. Anyway, I’ll end it there.

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Appendix #1 – The Animal citizens Critique of Freeganism

I found this cool paper critiquing freeganism after the discussion called The freegan challenge to veganism.

My response would be I understand the basic intuition that you wouldn’t like to be gaining sustenance or pleasure from a domesticated animals remains where you would have liked to consider that animal a kind of citizen of your community who you would like to give funerary rights to. But, I think it’s more respectful to think of them like their wild ancestors, where it would be normal for other animals to eat them after they’re dead.

Any legal rights we fight to afford domesticated animals should be shaped by a long-term vision of letting them go extinct in habitat where they can best express their capabilities, choose their social relationships and are protected from predators because we were the cause of their hereditary deformities that make them more vulnerable to predators.

To this end, if a person desired to eat rescued non-human animal flesh and it was healthy for them to do so, then it would be a positive character virtue on their part to do so because if it had gotten eaten by less intelligent animals like maggots which can survive on any food like rotting vegetables or even just composted, then:

1. It would be much less dignity than you could show the animal by putting that energy to use in the value of the happy flourishing you could achieve yourself and in how you would be setting an example for others. And…
2. It would be treating the animals’ final remains more similar to the way the animals’ wild ancestors would have been treated after death. So, with more dignity than the way we bred infantile traits into them and with more dignity than the toxic relationship we would be perpetuating by anthropomorphically infantilising them as infant humans who could have grown up to be people who could suffer a worse quality of life worrying about how other people might intend to treat their body after their death.

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Appendix #2 – Formal Arguments

Here’s my formulation of an anti-freegan argument which is IMO unsound:

A1) Kant’s Indirect Principle Against Advocating For Freeganism

P1) If I accept Kant’s axioms then I accept the indirect principle established in the groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals

P2) If I accept the indirect principle established in the groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals then I would agree that treating non human animals without dignity would harm myself

P3) If I accept the indirect principle established in the groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals then I have a moral duty to not harm myself

P4) If I agree that treating non human animals without dignity would harm myself and that I have a moral duty to not harm myself then I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

P5) If I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should reject consuming animal products (as it is the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

P6) If I should reject consuming animal products then I shouldn’t promote freeganism (as to do so would constitute promoting self-harm)

P7) I accept Kant’s axioms

C) Therefore I should be against freeganism

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Through most virtue ethics & consquentialist frameworks it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the ethical issue with eating animal bodies is when you fund the industry which breeds and kills these animals, cutting short their interests to express their capabilities to their full in the wild. And that if non-human animals aren’t experiencing worse quality of life worrying about whether they’re going to be eaten by other humans after they’re dead, then there’s no ethical issue to freeganism.

Through some deontological frameworks however, you might think you should reject consuming all animal products on principle as you feel it is the antithesis of treating animals with dignity.

So the arguments I’d suggest you use on such a person is firstly you could use a simple comparison to argue the way the person is applying dignity is a category error, like I do in the story analogy by saying:

It probably will be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by thrown out animal products. And it would be great if no one ever felt pressured by sexist beauty standards to shave their legs again!

But at the end of the day, it’s not like cannibalism, where you’d be causing worse quality of life in other humans by foretelling a gruesome ending. And the same goes for normalizing the standard that women should have their genitals mutilated. Both ideas are barbaric, and rightly rejected.

Neither the choice to shave your legs or eat thrown out animal products necessitates violating anyone’s rights, so I don’t really see why people ought not do it.

And in formal logic terms:

A2) Rejecting the utility of culturally specific disgust reactions

P1) Non-human animals don’t experience a worse quality of life worrying about whether they’re going to be eaten by other humans after they’re dead, humans do.

P2) IF there exists healthy human cultures in which humans being eaten by non-human animals after they’re dead is seen as a positive (for example in Tibet, having your energy transferred into that of a bird is seen as a beautiful thing or green burials where your body can more easily become nutrients for both animals and plants) THEN healthy human cultures in which non-human animals are eaten by humans is also likely possible

P3) There exists healthy human cultures in which humans being eaten by non-human animals after they’re dead is seen as a positive

P4) If non-human animals don’t experience a worse quality of life worrying about whether they’re going to be eaten by other humans after they’re dead, humans do AND healthy human cultures in which non-human animals are eaten by humans is likely possible THEN even if it’ll be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by animals products (in the same way as if no one ever felt pressured by sexist beauty standards to shave their legs again), that doesn’t mean that it’s not morally permissible to consume some of those animal products at the moment (i.e. it’s not comparable to cannibalism where you’re causing worse quality of life in other humans by normalizing it or normalizing the standard that women should have their genitals mutilated as neither the choice to shave your legs or eat thrown out animal products necessitates violating anyone’s rights)

P5) IF (even if it’ll be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by animals products, that doesn’t mean that it’s not morally permissible to consume some of those animal products at the moment) THEN (IF I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity THEN I should not reject consuming animal products [as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity])

P6) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

C) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity, and I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

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Or secondly without even challenging their gut disgust reaction to thinking it would be treating the animal without dignity you could try something close to a consequentialist argument:

A3) Refutation of P5 of A1 using Tom Regan’s worse-off principle

P1) If I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should promote freeganism on rare occasions where it’s an effective advocacy tool at encouraging people to stop buying animal products because the principle that I should avoid very minor self-harm in the disgust it brings to mind when advocating shouldn’t override the principle that it’s immoral to pass up easy opportunities to encourage people to stop buying animal products (which leads to the breeding and killing of animals) because I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which everyone passed up on those opportunities, so I should act according to that maxim by which I can at the same time will that it should become a universal law

P2) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

P3) P1 entails if I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

C) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity, and I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

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Or thirdly you could you could try challenging the necessity of the disgust reaction:

A4) Kant’s Indirect Principle For Advocating For Freeganism

P1) If I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity THEN I should promote freeganism on rare occasions where it’s an effective advocacy tool at encouraging people to stop buying animal products because although killing an animal isn’t treating the animal with dignity, eating an animal to prevent waste is, because you’re eating food that would otherwise have been thrown out, so less food needs to be produced, causing less harm to the environment AND if it had gone to the landfill it might have gotten eaten by maggots which can survive on any food like rotting vegetables, but it would be much less dignity than you could show the animal by putting that energy to use in achieving happy flourishing yourself and setting an example for others.

P2) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

P3) P1 entails if I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

C) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity, and I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

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Or finally you could try nudging them away from deontology with a kind of virtue ethics argument a la W.D. Ross:

A5) Refutation of P5 of A1 using W.D.Ross’s principle of prima facie duties

P1) If I accept W.D.Ross’s theory of prima facie duties THEN I accept any felt obligation is a prima facie duty, though it can be overridden depending on the circumstances by another one, that doesn’t mean that the original obligation disappears, it simply means that it’s defeasible and it usually continues to operate in the background.

P2) If I accept any felt obligation is a prima facie duty, though it can be overridden depending on the circumstances by another one, that doesn’t mean that the original obligation disappears, it simply means that it’s defeasible and it usually continues to operate in the background THEN I accept when I have a felt obligation that talking positively about the consumption of animal products is disgusting and would be an act of self-harm to myself AND I learn about people using freeganism as an effective advocacy tool in turning people vegan who wouldn’t otherwise have considered it, such that I now feel a stronger felt obligation to do the same that the duty to do the latter is overriding, but I’m going to work extra hard to advocate for veganism such that I can know I’ve contributed to a future world in which no one needs to talk about the positive effects of consuming animal products, because the initial obligation still operates in the background even though it was overridden.

P3) I accept W.D.Ross’s theory of prima facie duties

P4) P2 entails if I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

P5) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

C) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity, and I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

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References

Re; ‘Freeganism Is Evil’ – A Pro-Freegan Story Analogy

The idea for the analogy came from this great video called Thoughts On Freeganism by Catherine Klein:

“I understand that shaving my legs and my armpits and everything is a sexist double standard, why are women expected to be completely hairless in order to be seen as attractive? It doesn’t make sense and I think it’s totally badass when women break this norm and go all natural. It does make me question my choices like I probably should be like fuck the patriarchy and stop shaving, just like I probably should be horrified by my leather boots and throw them out because one could argue that shaving your legs is an example of internalized oppression, but at the end of the day, neither of my choices here are causing direct harm to anyone, so I don’t really see changing my ways as a moral necessity.”

Freeganism article

Freeganism video catalogue

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Case Revisited – Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s Lingering Influence in 2021

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Kelley and I discuss the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and his life. We discuss how his anti-technology beliefs and extreme outlook resonate with events and radical, anti-government movements in this current day and age. And finally we explore what lessons can be learned by looking at this case in hindsight.

See the full video and transcript below. I edited the text slightly for clarity’s sake, just to remove filler words and put anything I forgot to say in.

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Index

• Intro – Who Is The Unabomber?
  • Some key life moments
  • Separation From Parents As A Baby
  • Loneliness After Being Moved Forward A Year At School
  • Psych Experiments For The CIA
  • Sex Change Plans & First Desire To Kill (A Psychiatrist)
  • First Parcel Bomb
  • Plan To Kill A Date Who Broke Off Their Romance
  • Offer to stop bombing for newspapers publishing his manifesto
  • Arrest
• Contents of the manifesto
• Ethical justifications for guerrilla war
• Theory vs. Action
• Primitivists, Conspiracists & The Fascist Creep
• Dogmatism
• Prison Reform
• What lessons can we learn about how to do activism better?
• Extra Details We Didn’t Have Time To Cover
  • More Details About The First Parcel Bomb
  • Relief At Being Able To Kill People With His Bombs
  • Court
• Further Reading

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Intro – Who Is The Unabomber?

Theo: The unabomber was the nickname the FBI gave to an unknown serial killer who started out by sending mail-bombs to universities and airlines, so first letter of university, the two first letters of airlines, plus bomber to get unabomber.

He’s called a homegrown terrorist because he targeted places in the country he grew up, and:

“over the course of 17 years he planted or mailed at least 16 bombs. He killed 3 people and wounded 24. He wasn’t a religious fundamentalist, but he was a fundamentalist. His enemy was, essentially, modern society. He grew up in Chicago, attended Harvard, but he wound up living alone in a remote cabin in the Montana woods. He was arrested in 1996 after one of the most notorious and longest manhunts in history, and he was sentenced to life in prison.”

And I think he’s 75 now, so still alive, still pumping out letters and books, propagandizing for the primitivist revolution.

Kelley: Now, I’m really excited to kind of get into a little bit of what was going on inside of his brain, I’ve kind of unceremoniously titled this in my own head; ‘true crime meets political activism and how Ted got it wrong’.

So, there are some really good bones in what he has to say, but overall I dissected a few things and was really curious to get your opinion. But how did his life start out?

Theo: Well, he was privileged to be born into a middle class family in suburbia, and he had a family who really valued academic achievements and gave him lots of love and affection and put him on a path. He was very intelligent and scored really high in IQ tests and did well at school. Struggled a bit socially and we can go through different periods of his life where that gave him some trauma.

Kelley: Yeah, so let’s start there, like him as a baby because I didn’t know that part and I have some thoughts on that too, but I found that really fascinating.

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Some key life moments

Separation From Parents As A Baby

Theo: Yeah, so this is a hard one because his mum tells this memory that’s really important to her that the baby Ted had hives and was very sick with it, so he needed to be in the hospital to be looked after, but because the nurses were short staffed and they couldn’t be looking after visitors coming in and out and making sure that the visitors were going where they need to go and stuff, they literally just did not at that period in time let visitors in to the baby ward.

So, he spent at least a week in hospital where he was getting seen to by nurses like changing and feeding him and stuff, but was not allowed to see his parents, he wasn’t allowed to even hear their voices and they said that he came out of that experience very emotionally withdrawn and rejecting them in terms of the emotional connection.

We have no way of knowing for sure if this had a lasting effect and it might just be a mothers worry that they did something wrong when their son was a baby and so at their most vulnerable.

Kelley: Well, I think she does use this as a way to try in her mind to explain some of this, but I did read a Washington post article where she had been talking about how:

“She can still see the photograph [mental picture] of her baby son, pinned down on his hospital bed. It offered what she now sees as a clue into how her oldest son grew into the troubled man he would become.”

He was terrified, spread-eagled so doctors could examine what they believed was a severe allergic reaction. His naked body was blotched with hives. His eyes, usually normal, were crossed in fear.”

So, you think about that time period and I think someone in the documentary series was saying that essentially “that if a baby is not able to bond with the mother” and Ted was only nine months old I think, then “there’s a chance of developing the psychopathy, so as a coping mechanism,” you know ‘I don’t feel anything, I don’t experience trauma’, but of course we know that’s not true, trauma is often the root of psychopathy forming in the first place.

So, that very well may have a small role to play here, but I mean it seems legitimate.

Theo: Yeah, definitely and I mean what’s interesting to think about is that that could have been traumatic for the parents as well, to have a baby rejecting you and it would take a skilled parent to not show that fear in their emotions with the baby and not have it create a lasting effect in your relationship with your child, every time the child rejects them as they get older, to not read into it that they’re withdrawing from them, and so there could be a shutting down there.

So, when you’re young it’s really important to form a secure attachment and if it’s not formed then it can be an insecure attachment in the form of avoidance or it can be insecure in the form of too clingy to their parents and rejecting the world, so there’s all kinds of ways that it could have manifested.

For example, there’s a really heart-wrenching psychological experiment researchers will do with parents and babies to in part to see to what degree the baby can form this emotionally secure attachment, and it’s that the parent will pull a completely blank straight face showing no emotion, and the baby will usually do everything it can to get the parents attention again, until it starts to look away because it can’t bare seeing the blank face anymore, to then trying to comfort themself by sucking their thumb, to finally when the parent re-engages emotionally, the baby usually crying out of stress relief and being reminded of the secure attachment available again.

So bringing that back to Ted, it must have been stressful for that week at least, having a rotation of nurses faces you don’t recognize just briefly engaging with him to feed and change him as a baby.

Kelley: Yeah and I do think that him growing up and from what I was learning about even just in primary school is that this was a super smart kid where there already feels like there’s the possibility of abandonment issues and a lack of trust, so I feel like what you’re gonna walk us through next is kind of Ted’s feeling of not belonging, not being like everyone else, it seems to be something that it can be traced back to that time in the hospital, the feeling of abandonment, not trusting you know he kind of already feels like an outsider and that’s also another kind of textbook description of how psychopathy forms.

Theo: Yeah or even just that it was a strained relationship with the parent, that the parent really wants to be attached, so as to never – in their mind – betray the baby again and to be able to have this really secure attachment, so being clingy and then if they ever saw any signs of Ted being problematic to people that they would play it down because they just really wanted to make sure that he was safe and developing okay, so in their mind they would justify some of the things they’d see as he just needs protection.

Kelley: I do think that it was the form of her making excuses for him, you know I think there was clear anger, there are certain stories that the brother David tells about you know some really jarring incidents that happened and I think there is that denial by at least the mother that it doesn’t have a deeper meaning and that she somehow is responsible for making him feel safe or I don’t know that could just be my opinion.

Theo: Yeah for sure and it’s just about teaching parents to know how to be open with their children, it’s problematic that she felt like she wasn’t a good parent, and it’s problematic that the kid maybe was picking up on that in a way, and so maybe he wasn’t developing a secure attachment, so I don’t know, it’s complicated.

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Loneliness After Being Moved Forward A Year At School

So his parents were teaching him a lot, making sure that he was doing well at school and this was a source of pride for him to just focus all his mind on studying.

Then at some point the school just said we should put him forward a year because he’s obviously a lot further ahead than the pther kids and so he was skipped one year ahead and just went straight into another year above.

And, in his diaries or in interviews he always says that was really difficult for him, like an already socially awkward kid just not fitting into a year above him and so some alienation from society and the institutions that he was part of as a kid.

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Psych Experiments For The CIA

So, moved forward a year in secondary school and then before he even finished school, he got accepted a year early into Harvard, the most prestigious school in the country, so he was arriving two years younger than most students in Harvard.

He was like having picnics on the grass on his own and just not really knowing how to make friends with people there. So, then he entered this psychological experiment with the most impressive psychology professor there, which wasn’t advertised as a psychology experiment, it was advertised as a place where you could debate professors and have your ideas received and reviewed. So he thought he was going to get a chance to have his ideas genuinely evaluated.

So he didn’t have many friends or any really strong friends at all at Harvard, but for the whole three years he was at Harvard he had these really intense sessions with professors which through his dedication to study, he really admired and valued them.

And they were testing to see how to play mind games with people in order to do advanced interrogations, it would later get used in Guantanimo Bay, they were studying how to break someone down and make them say what you want them to say, or make them say things you think they want to say deep down, but just madness. Basically the professors’ objective was to humiliate the student for the philosophy they held as most important to them.

Kelley: So, basically the intent is to make them question themselves on things that they feel they believe strongly.

And I mean part of me wants to know if his intention for you know being involved in the experiment in the first place was to maybe learn a little bit more about himself and his own social issues. And this ended up just compounding that and making it worse and adding to his feelings of humiliation or ineptitude which also then to me I found like a pattern that through his writing too that made me think of that.

But, do you think that this… well, I mean I don’t see how this could make a positive impact on a person, but I mean we have to study these things somehow, but he wrote a lot, he was super smart, he was so mathematically intelligent that it makes me feel a little nervous because I have a bad relationship with mathematics…

Theo: Yeah, he was excelling at maths and sciences because it was something you could do on your own and just really dedicate all your mind to. And he probably wasn’t reading political theory books, so he had some funny beliefs about, well to me, funny beliefs about primitivism and about how less less technology is good.

And he hadn’t yet decided that like we needed an anti-tech revolution or anything, maybe at this point he was against big cities and very systematized, atomized society, he liked the suburbia life that he came from and he didn’t like big metropolises.

Kelley: Something just sprung into my head and this is extremely personal, but I came from a home-schooling background and it was extremely oppressive, and then I got into college, I somehow was able to make the right score to get into college and that’s totally due to my older sister, but once I was there I cannot tell you…

I’m not going to draw a parallel between myself and Ted, but coming from somewhere where I had so much isolation, once I got to college, it was the most traumatic experience I think of my adult life because I had to suddenly have a roommate that I didn’t know who this person was, I didn’t know how to study for tests, I had only taken one test in my whole life, all of these things compounded around entering university for the first time that I think has exacerbated all of my personal anxieties.

And I feel like that is possibly a huge catalyst when you know you’re told that everybody’s social, you need to go out, you need to put yourself out there and let me tell you that’s one of the worst things I ever did for myself because I was like maybe you just don’t know what fun is, maybe you just need to put yourself in these uncomfortable situations because that’s what everybody else is doing.

And as somebody who’s an introvert it was not a fun period of life and it was constantly feeling inadequate in social situations, so I can sort of see a glimpse into the mind of someone who kind of wanted some normalcy but just couldn’t quite get there, I don’t know that just jumped in my head.

Theo: No, for sure, like he didn’t know whether he fitted in and he probably had the same feeling of wearing feeling like he was wearing different people’s clothing, like trying out different identities. So, with the professors, he would have been asking questions that maybe come from a naive place, like we’ve all just lived through 4 years of Trump where he would do things like suggest injecting bleach into your body at a news conference, so people have these weird ideas where they haven’t fully thought through the consequences. And he was probably connecting that to psychology and why he didn’t fit in, and why he felt alienated.

So, he would have been using these arguments to test them out with the professors and see what they thought and all that time he was just on a highly regimented program, where they’d pretend we agree with you for a bit and then we’re gonna tear you down, so yeah just not nice to say the least.

Kelley: I mean the whole idea of a university setting, it’s also jarring when you know I think a lot of his early ideas could have been formed in that moment, probably more strongly than others as far as everybody kind of looking like sheep, you know everybody does the same things, everybody’s a part of this system and one that he didn’t feel a part of and one that he maybe felt alienated from and started to resent. I think those ideas probably started to really solidify during this period.

Theo: Yeah and what friends he did have in university would say that during different periods of the experiment he would just never eat dinner with them or if they would try to sit down with him he would just be so angry with himself and the people around him that he’d just take himself off back to the room and spend as little time as around people as possible.

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Sex Change Plans & First Desire To Kill (A Psychiatrist)

Theo: Ok, so next if you like we can talk about dates and romance, and how that affected his emotional development.

To start with there’s one example of him chatting to a woman in the university library and her giving him her number, but then he’d write in his diary that he couldn’t get up the nerve to call, so his defense mechanism for being so anxious, trying to call and not feeling like he was able to, was to chastise himself for spending so much time worrying about connecting ‘with some dumb woman’, so his feelings of inadequacy projected onto an identity class of less powerful people like women and later gay people.

Then he started to have sexual fantasies of becoming a woman, I think because he didn’t know how to have relationships with women, so he wanted to explore desires for women which he hadn’t had the space to learn to understand. I definitely don’t think it was out of any felt emergence that he was a woman. They’re called autoerotic fantasies, where you get turned on imaging how other people will view you in different situations, and it can be as common as when you’re imagining yourself in a situation where someone is admiring a specific item of clothing you’re wearing that make you feel confident.

So anyway, he made an appointment to go see the university psychologist and at the last minute decided he didn’t want to talk about having a sex change or his sexual fantasies.

And he writes in his diary that this is when the first desire to kill happened;

“I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. . . . So, I said to myself, why not really kill that psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate. . . I will kill, but I will make at least some effort to avoid detection, so that I can kill again.”

So the psychology experiments for the CIA and this humiliating experience with the psychologist, turned into hateful resentment for a society that he felt had made him confused and depressed.

Then a desire to carefully plan his murders and pick targets he thought some people would intellectually admire him for picking, as in his eyes the evilest people deserving of fighting a guerrilla war against. Which could be seen as a way of getting the validation he didn’t get from friends as a child on his own terms, for being special and intelligent enough to have discovered all these connections and go after the worst offenders.

As well as a desire to rebel against social alienation and mediocrity, a fear of the harder task of finding meaning with others, that there’s no special meaning given to your life for just being you.

Kelley: And I think it’s interesting that he did write so much because I think there would be a lot of unanswered questions if we didn’t have a lot of his writing. And I think part of that confusion is… I think one of his neighbors or somebody in in the documentary had talked about how he just clearly hated women and I think it all comes back to that theme of inadequacy and self-loathing and those patterns that he seems to have turned on everybody else at this point in in his writings that I find very interesting.

Theo: Yeah, and we see that today with InCel (involuntarily celibate) terrorists driving their van into people and having this whole worldview they’ve built where they gather on places like 4chan and reddit, where there’s these ‘Chads and Stacies’ and how they’re oppressed because women aren’t traditional enough anymore, so yeah it’s a weird phenomenon.

Kelley: And a way of deflection, as well. So, I mean I’m always talking about mental health like any time that I can and growing up with someone who’s schizophrenic and extremely abusive it’s one of those things where you can see the pattern and you can see it worsening at a certain period of time in life, where there’s certain some traumatic event.

And just thinking about the person that I knew before and during and after it’s like if only that person had gotten the help that they needed, you know he seems to be such an intelligent guy with deep feeling, but extremely damaged. So, I think we as a society are getting a little bit smarter about catching these things and being a little bit more open and embracing of handling our issues with mental health and therapy and things of that nature.

Theo: Yeah definitely, if only people had felt able to be open about their mental health problems like this would this would have been a time when people it would have been like it would have been like the worst thing in the world to come out as having depression even. You would worry about your social standing among your neighbors, that maybe you wouldn’t be invited around for dinner parties.

As well, I’m jumping forwards a bit here, but he gave a letter to his brother that explained how he had thought about killing this other woman and his brother just thought it was like a psychological break, he thought it wasn’t serious. So there’s not enough understanding about mental health and the mental institutes and prisons I’d imagine were even worse back then, you would never want to do that to your brother, make the police aware and then put him through that system, if you don’t think he’s gonna be violent in the future, if you make that judgment, then it’s a scary thing to think with our past or even current system that you’d have to turn someone over to exist in this horrible prison system.

Kelley: Well, not just that but I do remember his brother David saying how his mother had told him the story of Ted as baby and how she had kind of put responsibility on his shoulders as well, to always look out for and take care of and protect his brother. And he was always just like ‘well yeah, I love him, why would I not’. So there is all of this enabling being done by his family.

And of course that is a time like both of my parents grew up in, where talking about mental health was taboo, which is why my mom has still been completely adamant about not admitting to anything and not seeing someone for help. It’s like this ultimate shame to have to admit that there’s an issue there, so then you have all these people around you enabling you, it’s kind of giving you free reign to keep going.

Theo: Yeah that’s really sad. So, yeah I mean the brothers had a really interesting relationship, the connection between siblings in general is something really unique, there was a weird case of sisters running in front of traffic that went viral and it was because they had schizophrenia and were spending lots of time around each other, confirming each other’s psychosis beliefs. And then there’s the case of the marathon bombers, where the older brother encouraged the younger brother into throwing his life away at a young age. So these are examples at the extreme fringes, but it just shows to me how powerful sibling relationships can be.

So Ted and his brother David would spend a lot of time with their dad out camping in the wilderness from a young age, and they’d been taught in bushcraft, so they saw survivng by their own wits as a really special experience, and would go off to camp on their own at a young age and eventually both build cabins, but at opposite ends of the country.

And then David started to settle down and not visit his cabin as much, but Ted’s idea was always to move move permanently off grid and he hoped that David would do that as well and would justify it for the same reasons of being anti-tech, but at some point their ideas split.

One interesting example of this was after he came back from Harvard David noticed this difference in Ted, where before they were bouncing ideas off each other and being very interested in what each other had to say, but that after the psych experiments maybe he was just very dismissive and very ruthless towards his ideas and putting them down.

So, I mean it’s a good thing there was a split in terms of David not following his path, but it would have been more ideal if Ted had not had followed David.

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First Parcel Bomb

Kelley: Well tell me a little bit more about his early ideology and let us know how this whole manifesto ended up being published and then we can go into more of our own personal thoughts about his ideology.

Theo: Sure, so we’ve talked about how he valued wilderness and surviving on your own, and then how he justified his desire to kill after seeing the university psychiatrist about his sexual fantasies and feeling humiliated in that place, so connecting psychiatrists to the psychology experiments maybe and anyone else he hated, so institutions like university that he felt had betrayed him and what universities stand for in terms of intellectual and technological progress.

Then, he took on a professorship in order to earn enough money to go and build the cabin in Montana and he once he’d been living out there for a bit, he told someone in a prison letter that he wrote in his diary the reason he first planned to kill through building a parcel bomb, so he just talks about gong for a walk and wanting to be at peace in the wilderness and enjoying all the sounds of the forest, but then coming across a new road being build close to his cabin which enraged him, so he wrote in his diary:

“[…] and then I returned home as quickly as I could because I have something to do!”

and then he in the prison letter to he wrote:

“You can guess what it was that I had to do.”

Which was getting scrap from neighbors garages and building these pipe bombs in his cabin.

So, he’d gone from having sexual fantasies about becoming a woman to provide him some relief at the frustration at not being able to find intimacy with people, to writing about and realizing fantasies about killing people to provide him relief at people setting off his insecurities and making him angry, in this case not letting him find peace in the wilderness.

That was his first parcel bomb, and it’s really weird, it was found in the car-park of a University with the return address of an Engineering professor their, so maybe he had walked around the university wanting to enjoy soaking in the experience of the place he was taking revenge on, but why it was left in the car-park and why with a return address I don’t know, because obviously the person would know they didn’t send it, which is what happened, he reported it to campus police who opened it and received minor injuries.

And he would travel by coach out of the cabin in order to place these parcel bombs because I think he knew that the postal system could be tracked, so he was posting the package in random places around America they they wouldn’t be able to connect back to the cabin or him.

And in this first trip out of the cabin to place this bomb he visited his family home, as well to earn some money to sustain him living out in the cabin, he worked at the same foam-cutting factory where his father and brother worked.

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Plan To Kill A Date Who Broke Off Their Romance

Theo: He briefly dated a female supervisor at the factory, but the woman cut off the relationship after a few dates. Ted responded by posting crude limericks about her on sticky-notes all around the factory walls.

His brother Dave, who worked part time as a night supervisor, confronted Ted in the storage room. It was a turning point in their relationship.

Dave remembered this as a really tragic event, where he said he remembered Ted ‘looking at him like a friend’, but that “by the time I got done speaking to him, he was all shut down.”

So, David was saying to him, if you put any more of these notes up you’re going to get fired.

And the next day, Ted walked up to the machine where Dave was working and posted another insulting note right in front of him and said

“Are you going to fire me now?” Ted defiantly asked.

Heartbroken, Dave replied, “Yes, Ted. Go home.”

Ted did, shutting himself in his room for days. Dave worried he had forced some sort of “psychological break.”

Ted eventually knocked on Dave’s bedroom door and handed him a letter. “I’ll show this to you, only on the condition that you don’t discuss this with me,” Ted said.

It was a note Ted intended to send to the woman, explaining himself. It was an apology of sorts, but it also contained the disturbing claim that Ted was so enraged that he had waited in the woman’s car with a knife, planning to mutilate her. In the end, Ted wrote, he couldn’t do it.

Attacking someone face to face proved too much for him.

Kelley: And once again I think that probably made him extremely angry, if that is true and if indeed he did sit in the back of her car and wait for her and then sort of chicken out, that would add more to the fuel to his fire of feeling inadequate and like he just couldn’t do anything, so I think that could also play a part.

But, I was going to ask you, so going forward from that point, what is the basis for the targets that he chose because of course we know about his overall arching mistrust of technology and the industrial revolution, so how did that play a role in who he chose to send bombs to?

Theo: Yeah, so I can tell you about what he talked about afterwards in prison, about what he’s propagandizing other people do now, and then I can backtrack to maybe what he was thinking then, like now he’s arguing that people should take down electricity grids and target the scientists at the cutting edge of like biotech & nanotech science and engineering because they’re leading progress in technology and so they’re symbols.

But, he talked in an interview about how at the beginning of his bombing campaign, he didn’t even know there were environmentalists out there taking direct action. So, I think he was thinking that he was picking really good targets that some people would intellectually admire him for or at least he admired himself for picking, but it wasn’t political for him, it was anti-technology, it was about destroying the technological system. For example, even though he might have desired to be a hermit in the forest, he knew that the furthest back we could reasonably get to would be a level of technology akin to what we had in the middle ages of people with swords and arrows.

So, that’s where he focused his critique and action, on desiring to destroy assembly lines & electricity grids to make it so people are forced into a situation of survival where it’s not reasonable to try and rebuild electricity grids and factories.

So the environmentalist journals like earth first monkey wrenching manuals and newsletters he’d find on his travels were in part a convenient post hoc rationalization. His early bombs, like the attempting to blow up a jetliner because of the frustration he felt with planes flying over his cabin were more akin to the plan he had to kill a romantic interest. They couldn’t in any way be rationally thought of as strategic targets even for the evil goal he propagandizes for now, and according to his pen pal John Zerzan he renounced that attack, for that reason.

It is rationalized by eco-fascists groups that he inspired, some of whom are now extinctionists and just leave bombs in public places with the desire to wipe out all humans for being ‘species traitors’ to other animals and the wild. And it’s interesting no note that Ted in prison has critiqued the sometimes random attacks of these groups and argued to the extent they are organizing with others should be working to bring about a primitivist revolution in going after riskier targets like electricity grid stations. But it’s almost as if these groups feel being able to do random attacks is what’s owed to them by being free and that to listen to Ted now would be helping serve his needs as a theorist from prison, to the detriment of their own desires.

And he does have a lot of similarities with these eco-fascists, like he’s talked about how he thinks primitivists should reach out to groups like al qaeda and see if any co-operation can be found there, which is similar to a white seperatist talking point, in that they can have their little backward mono-culture dictatorship over there, and we can have ours over here. And he’s acted as a stepping stone for left-anarchist groups to go from the far-left to the far-right.

Kelley: Well lead us up to because I have some choice things to to say about what I read of his writing that really struck a chord with me, but I was curious to see the timeline from there until he got caught and then what his demands were. I don’t want to jump the gun or anything, but over how many years did his bombing campaign last?

Theo: 17 years, yeah because he had a break for a long time, but yeah 17 years in total.

Kelley: So he did a relatively decent job at covering his tracks for a while, so what ended up being kind of the downfall of that.

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Offer to stop bombing for newspapers publishing his manifesto

Theo: Yeah right, so for anyone who didn’t know, he offered to stop bombing if newspapers would publish his manifesto.

He’d already written papers to universities advocating this anti-tech philosophy under his real name, but the FBI were still chasing leads imagining that he was some kind of wood fetishist, not that he was this primitivist wanting to take down the leaders of technological progress.

But, he wanted a wider readership, so he made this offer to stop bombing if newspapers would print his manifesto. I don’t think it was a genuine offer, he had made a bomb after they’d already published it. So, I think the bomb making was his anger and frustration and that was always going to carry on, he wasn’t gonna be able to keep his word. So, I don’t know whether he even made the offer genuinely believing he would stop making bombs.

Anyway, he wrote a letter to the New York Times saying, well, this is his propagandizing, he’s putting on like a voice of a revolutionary. He says:

“We are getting tired of making bombs. It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb.”

That’s him trying to mislead the investigation as well, like he would write letters to victims owning up to being the perpetrator, and dropped hints to throw the FBI off, for example pretending to be a person who hadn’t gone to university, but luckily the FBI saw through that and only helped their profile of him, that he was more likely university educated than not.

Kelley: And part of an actual movement, ‘we’re this group of people’.

Theo: Yeah, that’s a funny & sad irony because he was so alone. Anyway he said:

“So we offer a bargain. We have a long article, between 29,000 and 37,000 words, that we want to have published. If you can get it published according to our requirements we will permanently desist from terrorist activities.”

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Arrest

Theo: And that led to his arrest because as a result his brother recognized his writing in the manifesto, and of course his borther knew where he was because he had helped build his cabin.

Like we talked about earlier he lived a life close to nature himself, but wasn’t fundamentalist about it in the way Ted was and so Ted had written lots of ranting letters to him about his wife having changed him and how he felt betrayed by that. He’d also written lots of diaries which were at his parents home and an earlier draft of the manifesto, so as soon as the FBI profiler got that, they knew they had the right person. Through a new science of linguistic comparison.

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Contents of the manifesto

Theo: Shall we talk a bit about what manifesting contained?

Kelley: Yeah, that would be great.

Theo: So, it starts with “the industrial society and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race” and then that pretty much is the motto of the whole essay.

It lays very detailed blame on technology for destroying human scale communities,

So, referring to how our psychology is still linked to hunter-gatherer times, where a tribe would maybe split into bands of 150 people because it was the only way we could maintain healthy relationships with all those people.

He contends the Industrial Revolution harmed the human race by developing into a sociopolitical order that subjugates human needs beneath its own. This system, he wrote, destroys nature and suppresses individual freedom. In short, humans adapt to machines rather than vice versa, resulting in a society hostile to human potential.

He indicts technological progress with the destruction of small human communities and rise of uninhabitable cities controlled by an unaccountable state. He contends that this relentless technological progress will not dissipate on its own because individual technological advancements are seen as good despite the sum effects of this progress. Kaczynski describes modern society as defending this order against dissent, in which individuals are adjusted to fit the system and those outside it are seen as bad. This tendency, he says, gives rise to expansive police powers, mind-numbing mass media, and indiscriminate promotion of drugs. He criticizes both big government and big business as the ineluctable result of industrialization, and holds scientists and “technophiles” responsible for recklessly pursuing power through technological advancements.

He argues that this industrialized system’s collapse will be devastating and that quickening the collapse will mitigate the devastation’s impact. He justifies the trade-offs that come with losing industrial society as being worth the cost. Kaczynski’s ideal revolution seeks not to overthrow the government but the economic and technological foundation of modern society. He seeks to destroy existing society and protect the wilderness, the antithesis of technology.

Kelley: Yeah, I find it super interesting because for instance in the documentary series there’s a gentleman I think he was some kind of scholar or professor who was talking about how if you were reading it on its own it’s not necessarily going to be something that’s going to start shocking you immediately, there’s some really good points being made. But, I got through the first three pages and had so many notes I was like well I can’t just dissect this whole thing because there’s just not enough time, but I do I agree with the gentleman that there are some really good points that are made and valid points that if any other individual were making them wouldn’t seem shocking.

So, in a sense I agree with his sense of urgency to act when he’s talking about how technology is speeding up the process of the destruction of the natural world around us. For instance, in his introduction he articulated, pretty intelligently I think, that “technology has greatly increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in advanced countries, but they have destabilized society, made life unfulfilling, subjected human beings to indignities, led to widespread psychological suffering” and then he also said “it will certainly subject human being to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world.”

All true, all very true okay, but what I start to have problems with in my opposition to that would be that technology is going to continue to progress, it’s progressing extremely quickly and I think that we have to turn our attention to utilizing technology to turn some of these things around and to help salvage our planet because we’ve come this far, no one is just going to go back to that monastic lifestyle and drop all of technology and just live off the grid, we already know that there’s just no way that that’s gonna really happen, so I don’t know what you think about that?

Theo: Yeah, well the world could only possibly sustain a 100 million people as living as hunter-gatherers and we’re at seven, almost eight billion now, so it’s an argument for genocide basically, but, yeah technology is this pandora’s box, you can try to force one country not to have some technology, but if there’s no inherent harm to it, and other countries are using it to out-compete them in efficiency, democracies are going to cave to that pressure, so I think better to regulate it, than try force no one to use it.

So, primitivists can have lots of good critiques about psychology and social alienation, and it can be very tantalizing because it’s this all encompassing simple principle that you can apply to all things, but then they apply that critique even to every single other strategy of moving away from this status quo, so they’re incredibly self-destructive to every political movement they’re a part of because they will critique even the most ardently principled far-left utopian as not being principled enough in desiring to set aside ‘only’ 50% of the planet for wildlife habitat or something, and ‘only’ not allowing cars within cities. They’ll critique that as still oppressive towards people’s individual freedom, imagining that anyone who would even want to live a low-tech lifestyle is indoctrinated.

So, yeah I see lots of holes in the argument for primitivism, for instance ‘Kaczynski’ says that primitive man can deal with the harsh realities of primitive life stoically, but there’s no reason why we can’t just deal with technology stoically and so, find ways of having a balance between living a low-impact lifestyle, but also being able to pour our passions into a technical job if we if we desire to do it and if it’s a democratically organised workers co-op with low work-hours, etc.

Kelley: Well I think one thing that really strikes me is, well, I try my best to stay away from politics because most people don’t love my politics, but when he says that; “this is not to be a political revolution, its object will be to overthrow not governments, but the economic and technological basis of the present society.” To me, unfortunately I think he’s viewing this from a perspective that’s purely from the 90s and before because if you look at today’s climate and everything in this current stage of history we find ourselves enmeshed in both a political and economic related revolution.

At least here in the states anyway and I’m sure everywhere big business interests invest so much money in buying our politicians, just look at the whole Joe Mansion scandal with the oil industry recently, all that news is coming out, but just knowing that it’s so enmeshed that you really can’t separate the two, and so any revolution in my head would have to look like a complete dismantling of the way money is allowed to be used in government decision making.

So, there’s too much corruption for us all as citizens to be able to go live lifestyles like he was living, it’s still not going to stop corporations, it’s not going to stop people from working for these corporations. Kaczynski believes that a violent war should be waged against big industry and technology, but I see the root of much-needed change needing to be made in our political system first, taking the big money out of politics, the bribery, lobbying and corporate donations, etc. That’s where we should be focusing our energies and motivations to change it, instead of becoming angry withdrawn and anti-social. There’s a way to get our voices out there to make change happen, but the system that we’re in right now it’s making too many people comfortable at the top that it’s not going to change if you send bombs to people, it’s just going to solidify that stronger for them.

Theo: Yeah, it’s a recipe for provoking fear in even the working class, and fear leads people to want protection and so will even desire more punitive policing.

So yeah, there’s all kinds of like philosophical justifications that people will like fall into to think this way, like for Ted it was that the longer you leave technology developing, the worse the collapse will be when it comes, so, if the collapse is inevitable, you need to provoke it to happen sooner as a kind of altruistic act, so ends justifying the means logic.

But, yeah I just see that causing more chaos, so more environmental inefficiency and then and even if you could bring down electricity grids worldwide, industrial revolutions happening again and causing even worse environmental problems.

Kelley: Well, one last thing that just stuck out to me as an overall theme to his writing is how he views leftists as emasculated, self-loathing pansies and to me therein lies the danger of lumping all of the radical left into the same category because there’s so many different tendencies, it’s like a web.

It’s something that we do very well as a society, we like to put people in boxes and groups, and categorize them all as the same thing and I think he hits correctly identifies important problems within the left, and he knows it so well but more because it’s a reflection of his own feelings of inferiority towards himself.

So when he says:

By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.

All of that just seems like you’re just taking a quick look at yourself and writing it down because I think people who tend to be damaged in this way have a difficult time of seeing that within themselves, but everybody else has that problem.

I think though that some of it does ring true and that’s the last thing I’ll say about the manifesto is that I see kind of the opposite coming out and it’s giving me a lot of hope for the future, which you can see in people like Bernie Sanders or AOC or Rasheeda Talib, among many, many others I see recently who have a strong and passionate voice and are unyielding to corporate greed and these powers that be. They’re finally putting their their money where their mouth is and that’s important, we need more people like that to be filling up our government spaces, but you know that doesn’t seem to be just a load of self-loathing pansy who think they have to be politically correct you know? I think you have on both sides irritating things that people tend to fall back on and political correctness on the left, you know everybody has to be validated, but I do think it’s one of those things where he may have a slight point there, but I’m a little curious about where he would come down currently about what’s happening in the world, or at least the united states in the past year to four years, like where would he be in all of this, I have a few thoughts but what do you what do you think?

Theo: Yeah I mean I just think far-right, I mean it’s a weird one, fascism is this psychology of hate, it’s not theory-based, have you heard of atom-waffen division, it’s this weird neo-nazi terror group who want to attack nuclear power stations in order to cause enough chaos in the world to have everything go to shit, so that can build up their new thousand year Reich from the ashes they really value Kaczynski because they’re envisioning this primitive life that they’ll have to lead to which will refine them in such a way that they’ll be the best ones to lead people out of the chaos they created.

And that’s very similar to many primitivists, it’s this contempt for the disabled and the people that will die in a primitive world. So, they both have the same founding premise that there are this large segment of the population who are holding back another segment, they just focus on scape goating different groups.

As for the ‘sensative left’ accusation, that can be harmful, but I’m also seeing that be pushed back against with the so called ‘dirtbag left’ using comedy in debates as a weapon again. Also, as well as no bullshit socialist politicians, the more inter-connected we get, the more we’re getting news from and travelling internationally, the more brave campaigners internationally are feeding into our politics on the left. So, I’d like to see Ted try to form an argument critiquing the Internationalists who went out to fight with the Kurds against ISIS.

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Ethical justifications for guerrilla war

Kelley: I can’t help but think about… there’s something that I saw that you had written that made me think in this direction… you were talking about how if someone had been able to assassinate Hitler early on, it goes into that… do you want to explain that thought that you had?

Theo: Yeah, so depending on different time periods you live in, people can be more or less sympathetic to different direct actions, so for instance, I think most people would agree that anyone who took it upon themselves to assassinate Hitler a day before the break out of WW2 would be seen as committing an ethical act, no matter who follows, because throwing a wrench into the cult of personality spell built around Hitler would be a significant set back for the fascist state’s grip over the people. And given all the evidence pointing to the inevitability of war, such an act could easily be seen as a necessary preemptive act.

So, yeah there’s a whole spectrum of justifications for direct action going from civil disobedience, to revolutionary direct action and sometimes it is a slippery slope, where there’s groups who have bought into like some dire election tactics here and then because of Kaczynski’s writing have begun to feel fine being a terroristic force, because maybe they think the state is terrorizing people like in Guantanamo Bay like or even going back to Vietnam, dropping white phosphorus on villages, so saying if the state is going to be this terrorizing force against people, then people should be allowed to act as a terrorizing force back against those state actors.

But, so long as there are ways to inspire people to your cause during democratic peacetime, I think you have stick to those non-violent tactics, as soon as you start to see people as the problem, instead of the systems that create people, then you’ve gone over to the right, in that you think the only solution is to hurt one group of people, to save another.

Kelley: Yeah, and when I think about what the practical reality of Ted’s vision would be like if it existed and the closest thing that my mind can think of is a dictatorship much like North Korea, where everything is shut down, we don’t know what’s going on, there’s a certain stringent story that everybody is being told and everything is highly regulated in that you’re not allowed to be seen using advanced technology, so to me I think it correlates a little bit with North Korea.

And I’ve read that we have people like spies or military in place there, that if we so desired we could take out Kim Jong-Un. So, with that in mind, it’s like well everybody wants to ask why don’t you do it right now? But you know, in addition to all of the complexities that that would kind of kick off, even if that is the right thing to do, I mean you’ve got people starving, you have people you know being mass murdered, it’s almost like another holocaust happening, but we just don’t know the extent of it. I’m sure our government does know, but it’s just so locked down, I think one thing that we can’t disregard is the fact that the US specifically, we’re not going to act upon a moral imperative and I’m not trying to sound super depressing here, but we’re not going to act on a moral imperative of bringing down oppressive dictatorships due to the fact that taking action would save lives, it’s gonna be more of an economic thing. If they don’t have oil, it’s not something we care about, so we like to use this moral imperative ‘well we had to invade Iraq because of blank blank’, no it’s it comes down to middle east equals oil, and we want that oil, so what does he have to say that’s going to explain all of that, that I think our society is forever driven by not just technology but by money and what we can get out of it.

Theo: Yeah and the CIA had a report where they advocated that we put the Baathist party back back in power after we’d taken over, their advice was that the problem with the Baath party wasn’t that it was a horrible, authoritarian regime, it was that Saddam Hussein wasn’t doing what America wanted them to do, so remove Saddam, but keep all the people who carried out his evil commands in power.

So, Ted is cheer-leading ISIS and the kind of reaction that comes as a result of these imperial blunders, but it’s not cheer on a useful opposition to America for their own people, who can create a better society, it’s cheer just chaos in hopes of getting back to primitive hunter-gatherer life.

Kelley: That’s what it seems like to me and that’s where my confusion lies because it’s hard to imagine that if chaos were allowed to just tear everything down, then somehow we’d get back to a better way of living, it just sounds like a dystopian nightmare. I’d rather live in the walking dead than that.

Theo: Yeah, it’s weird, people will get bought into this ideology by getting scared of the news and being sure that a collapse will come and it’ll just be inevitable anyway and so they need to prepare and they need to encourage other people to hold this philosophy, and hold this like idea of needing to get ready to defend their area from starving masses.

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Theory vs. Action

Theo: For Kaczynski, how he rationalizes it is he definitely didn’t like mass movements, he had a disgust for the university elite’s ideology disconnected from the world. Had the desire to share with the world some useful philosophical theory and some not so useful action killing various people to do with technology, but because his childhood was about being forced to conform to an ideal of academic success at the expense of mental health and community, he thought he was only one of few people who had woken up to the downside of this conformity, so no mass movement of people breaking with the system was possible.

But I think that idea in itself reveals a naivety about human potential and a naive optimism about an elite underclass who will always be willing enough to risk their lives to tear down industrial society, to even stop it re-emerging if it ever could be destroyed.

To an extent social movement membership is tied to events which are hard to predict, like the children who grew up in the formerly fascist countries after WW2 formed the most active left wing militant movements, which can be understood to be in part an anger at their parents generation for buying into fascism. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just about learning those lessons, to counsel people to take only the actions which are ethical and the consequences they are comfortable living with, to make the movement as sustainable as possible.

And obviously sometimes getting caught isn’t a total loss to the movement, the publicity received for a worthwhile act of civil disobedience, like for a Nelson Mandela can be a net gain, but it does have to be a struggle people can sympathize with.

I just don’t see people being inspired by primitivist terror attacks ever catching on as this even minor movement.

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Primitivists, Conspiracists & The Fascist Creep

Kelley: And with primitivists in general, what do you think is the most important thing for people to know about his beliefs in that department.

Theo: Well, just that it’s a really bad rabbit hole to get down, like you get techno-skeptics and conspiracists on all sides of the political spectrum, and you can even get centrists conspiracy theorists who just think everything would be fine and we could go back to the normal centrist status quo, if only it wasn’t for this big tech shadow government.

But to the extent there are these irrational rabbit holes people can fall down anywhere on the political spectrum, they can act as a kind of wormhole which fast tracks people to diametrically opposite political positions.

So how this can happen on the far-left is if you’re struggling with the contradictions of having say a personal trauma which leads you to primitivism plus a kind of far-leftism which isn’t inherently against people finding value in highly technical work. So, you might be worried that you could be overthrowing the current government, but will still be socially alienated from a demeaning factory work job, that is just slightly more democratic. And then from that point, find more common cause with anarcho-capitalists for just desiring to hoard what they can and kill anyone who comes onto their property, or fascists who want to hoard all the wealth for white people say.

So yeah and that’s definitely happened with the Unabomber inspiring groups to jump from left to fascist far right terrorists.

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Dogmatism

Kelley: Well before we talk about prison reform real quick, I do want to just say, I see a lot of what he talks about through here, as stuff that I saw as pretty accepted thought processes for a lot of the families that I grew up with in the home-schooling community. Where they became more isolationist, and just had a total mistrust of the government, and the whole concept of the quiverful movement I grew up in where it’s about having as many kids as possible to raise up for god’s army.

And the whole implication behind that is what he’s talking about is to rise up, and a lot of people don’t see the evangelical right as being a big problem, but they’ve gotten their roots in deep and when you have people who are living off the grid. I know a family that had like 12 kids and the mom never went to the hospital for any of the kids, they were all born without birth certificates, one of them is grown up now and he was talking about that process and it was just incredible to me that this kind of extremism and I feel like his words are kind of precursors to everything I saw and their fear of y2k and the bunkers, and I’m like this is insanity, they’re preparing for something and nobody who would meet these families would think these people have a bunker and they’re getting ready for this weird war or for the apocalypse or whatever.

It’s a strange thing once you’ve been around people of that extremism, to ignore it and to discount it in any way because I see it as being still pretty strong and I’m just surprised that well I’m really lucky that I got out of it but there’s just a shocking amount of people who I know of who this would speak to really deeply, like they would really connect with these ideas.

Theo: Yeah there is that really strong us versus them in some parts of the world, especially with religion, kids growing up with the fear that even doubting your own community would be an insult to god. It’s a hard one, like we really need more auditors checking kids are learning to a high standard if they’re being home-schooled and are not just being indoctrinated. But, also just leading by example in forming home-schooling networks and meeting other families at gatherings where other parents can hopefully be inspired by how emotionally and intellectually developed your kids are and what’s working for you.

What’s at the root of a desire for a primitive way of life is often a desire for a more innocent time in one’s childhood,

Some activities connecting you to feelings you had as a child can be absolutely essential though, like the joy of experimentation where you can more easily enjoy the wonder of a forest by making up which path you’ll take as you go along.

Part of recruiting people to our political side on environmental protest sites, was turning the camp into an action playground with low down walkways for people to practice on, for people to get in touch with their younger/animal self again.

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Prison Reform

Kelley: OK, so yeah I’ve talked about prison reform before on our podcast and it’s something I feel really strongly about, so I mean it’s not the least important thing we’re talking about, even though it is sort of the last thing we are covering, but what are your thoughts about how this story kind of plays into that theme.

Theo: Yeah, so I mean I thought it might be interesting to end on where he is at the end of his life, to just think about how he’s still alive, he’s still where he is now and question what his life is like?

He said a really interesting thing in an interview which was that he worries that he will acclimatize to prison life and it will just become his new normal. And I wonder, I would love to see like psychological evaluations on him in prison and over the years and whether he has found more peace of mind or not.

So, he wanted to be a hermit, who could read a lot of books undisturbed in a very small 1 room cabin and take short breaks to bathe in the beauty of the forest. Now he had a perfectionist mindset about desiring to find mental well-being in the forest, which was never being disturbed by other people. So it’s interesting to note that short of buying vast acres of wildlife habitat for him, guarding it so no one can get in and not letting planes fly over head, we’ve pretty much helped him achieve the next best thing in a prison cell as far as he is a manifestation of his traumas.

The same is true for violent people who get to extort and be violent with other prison inmates without much consequence.

And I think that presents a really interesting problem for conservatives who like to think prison is retribution, because sometimes prison can be what the traumatized person desires, so they don’t have to wrestle with as much choice. And that although that may only be true of a minority of people, it can be reflective of emotional states of mind within the majority of us.

So the only real solution for me is not to be satisfied with giving traumatized people to an extent emotionally what they want, but to heal the trauma and learned patterns of behavior that lead them to that point in their life.

Kelley: I like that you put it that way because in my mind what I’ve just been seeing so much of and learning about at least the US incarceration system is that most people see it as a punishment whereas the whole idea of prison is supposed to be reforming people and putting them in a place where when they are released they’re not going to go back and continue on that same path that there’s going to be other options, but we’ve done it in a way where it’s not about that anymore it’s about purely just putting someone away, punishing them and like ‘you get what you’re deserved’ and then that doesn’t help the recidivism.

How they’re pretty much set on a path to just repeat rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat and we don’t give any thought towards their mental health or you know really using this as an opportunity to impact. Some people of course are so violent or just so far gone that they’re not really somebody who’s ever gonna live in society again, like there’s certain things that I understand can’t happen, but it is such a problem and there is such an issue with even prisoners rights, we’re seeing that right now with covid, all these stories coming out now about there not being heat or people having heat strokes in the summertime.

I think there’s like a prison in Texas that doesn’t have any air conditioning and the warden sees it as a ‘well this is what you deserve’ even though they could afford to do it. So, we’re just treating them as less than human beings, so what do we expect in return, you’re kind of pushing them continuously further in the direction that brought them there in the first place and that’s a huge issue that I don’t think we like to talk about.

Theo: Yeah, slavery is still legal in in the constitution for incarcerated people, which tells you everything about what status we treat these people as, people are pressured into work in prison which pays a lot of money because they can undercut the market because they can get their products made so cheaply.

So, yeah there’s really simple holes in people’s arguments when they think like even for liberals who think we’re sorting out the trauma in temporarily holding them in prisons, like yeah okay, you’ve solved temporarily them not hurting as many people, but are you actually going to do anything to heal the trauma? Are you going to put any therapeutic measures in place as preventative measures or not because your economy can’t see the short-term benefit in helping people, but if you actually look long-term you prevent way more crime and create a more healthy robust society because you actually get people on a good path.

Kelley: One thing I just urge everybody to watch and think about and digest is the HBO series called ‘The Night Of’ by J Gandolfini, it was the last thing he produced before he died, but it’s basically about this guy who’s a taxi cab driver and an immigrant from the middle east who ends up taking the cab out for a night trying to impress a girl, they both take drugs and he ends up being accused of her murder, and he has no idea if he did it, the whole time you’re not sure, but it takes you on a journey through the prison system and how it turns somebody who possibly was not guilty of this crime into worse than he was before and just how this prison system and our incarceration system is not meant to rehabilitate or to fix what’s going on.

It’s mainly to just shove somebody somewhere and it’s like you’re in here forever or you know if you do get out you’ll most likely repeat again, but it just blew my mind that you know our system is like that, where before a person’s even necessarily been deemed guilty they can be put away in that form or fashion and you see this evolution of this guy that seems pretty likable becomes something that’s not likable and even if he ends up being completely exonerated in the end his life is ruined, his life is done.

Theo: Yeah its in auch desperate need of regulation. America is funny because it’s really invested in court room dramas because I think politics is so money bought already, so in watching court cases, they think they’re getting more of a fair and balanced situation where all their facts are being presented, but yeah the system is still rife with people getting pressured into plea deals because they don’t think they can afford a decent lawyer to defend their case and lots of people spending years in prison crimes they didn’t commit.

–

What lessons can we learn about how to do activism better?

Kelley: Well, we we’ve talked about a lot of things today, everything needs to be fixed, well as a way to end, how would you recommend people kind of take what we talked about today and maybe hopefully turn it into something a little bit more positive or educational?

Theo: In terms of campaigning?

Kelley: Or anything anything the average person can do to make a difference in their own part because that’s the thing it’s like we have lots of people shouting, but we need to make sure that we as individuals are you know really supporting the causes that we find important and not just talking about them, we can talk all day, but how do people get involved in some positive stuff.

Theo: Well, the organization I love the most is food not bombs, but just any dual power campaigns where you’re seeing a problem in your environment, for instance it can be food deserts, where the nearest shop that people have to buy their food if they need to walk there is a garage which only has candy bars, rice and lots of processed food that’s not good for you, no fresh vegetables or fruit.

So, you see a situation like that where the neighborhood is constantly walking back and forth to the shop because it’s easy and not getting very good food and you put up urban gorilla gardens and greenhouses, if you search edible and greater gardeners, you can try and find groups in your area already.

Just try and connect to some groups in your region where you’re having this effect of meeting the needs of the poorest people and then either that becomes a really beautiful thing and you’re swapping seeds and helping each other out or in part it it shames the leaders of the state or local council into seeing that they are not providing for this area.

So, through your publicity, through your advocacy you’re showing them that they’re not meeting people’s needs and then you can organize that mass of people around voting in more left libertarian candidates that are willing to put funding into these under-served neighborhoods that will help everyone out because they’ll become more educated, become more skilled and live better lives and contribute more to the world.

Kelley: I agree completely and it reminds me of Charles Booker’s campaign to unseat Rand Paul where I’m from in Kentucky and I saw his campaign ad where he’s talking about these under-served communities and I want to see more of these people in places of power who care about their communities and know they come from these under-served areas and they know what suffering means and they’re willing to fight for what we as a you know general collective people need versus what we’re seeing right now.

And I think the whole lesson to be learned from any story like this is that there is a lesson to be learned and it’s something that we should take and not just listen and consume, we need to start putting some real action behind things, so if you do feel any kind of urgency in helping the environment or helping people around you I think that that’s something I take comfort in is that people can still care about people and our environment and that’s where we each have a role in our responsibility to play, but Theo I know you’re a big activist and thank you for what you do.

Theo: Well, your channel’s amazing advocacy, like it’s really inspiring to listen to your expertise in child psychology and where home-schooling culture can be improved.

Kelley: Yeah, I mean there’s stuff everybody can do, we can’t save the world on our own, but we can do stuff on our own to support people who can get that done. So, in whatever way you can, whether you can donate, whether you can spend some time physically volunteering, there’s stuff that all of us can do, so we just have to find our form of activism that we can really invest some time and energy into.

Theo: Actually on that, I sent my book to to Dawn Botkins, the person that Aileen sent all those letters to who we talked about in the last episode. So, that’s something that she could do from home which was just mental health support of a prisoner going through a tough time and she did an amazing job, she was a great friend, so I’m glad I got to organize those memories into the story of her life and hopefully that brightened up her day.

Kelley: That’s fantastic, and remind me of the title of of the book.

Theo: The Unfinished Autobiography of Aileen Wuornos.

Kelley: Awesome, we can all make a difference in whatever way we can. So, thank you for walking me through that case today.

–

Extra Details We Didn’t Have Time To Cover

More Details About The First Parcel Bomb

Kaczynski’s first mail bomb was directed at Buckley Crist, a professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University. On May 25, 1978, a package bearing Crist’s return address was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The package was “returned” to Crist, who was suspicious because he had not sent it, so he contacted campus police. Officer Terry Marker opened the package, which exploded and caused minor injuries.

In answer to a letter sent in to him asking ‘how/when did he decide to bomb people?’ Kaczynski answered:

It would take too much time to give a complete answer to the last part of your ninth question, but I will give you a partial answer by quoting what I wrote for my journal on August 14, 1983:

“The fifth of August I began a hike to the east. I got to my hidden camp that I have in a gulch beyond what I call “Diagonal Gulch.” I stayed there through the following day, August 6. I felt the peace of the forest there. But there are few huckleberries there, and though there are deer, there is very little small game. Furthermore, it had been a long time since I had seen the beautiful and isolated plateau where the various branches of Trout Creek originate. So I decided to take off for that area on the 7th of August. A little after crossing the roads in the neighborhood of Crater Mountain I began to hear chain saws; the sound seemed to be coming from the upper reaches of Roaster Bill Creek. I assumed they were cutting trees; I didn’t like it but I thought I would be able to avoid such things when I got onto the plateau. Walking across the hillsides on my way there, I saw down below me a new road that had not been there previously, and that appeared to cross one of the ridges that close in Stemple Creek. This made me feel a little sick. Nevertheless, I went on to the plateau. What I found there broke my heart. The plateau was criss-crossed with new roads, broad and well-made for roads of that kind. The plateau is ruined forever. The only thing that could save it now would be the collapse of the technological society. I couldn’t bear it. That was the best and most beautiful and isolated place around here and I have wonderful memories of it.

One road passed within a couple of hundred feet of a lovely spot where I camped for a long time a few years ago and passed many happy hours. Full of grief and rage I went back and camped by South Fork Humbug Creek.

The next day I started for my home cabin. My route took me past a beautiful spot, a favorite place of mine where there was a spring of pure water that could safely be drunk without boiling. I stopped and said a kind of prayer to the spirit of the spring. It was a prayer in which I swore that I would take revenge for what was being done to the forest.”

–

Relief At Being Able To Kill People With His Bombs

In 1979, a bomb was placed in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444, a Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C. A faulty timing mechanism prevented the bomb from exploding, but it released smoke, which caused the pilots to carry out an emergency landing. Authorities said it had enough power to “obliterate the plane” had it exploded. Kaczynski sent his next bomb to Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines.

This was done simply due to planes flying over his cabin bothering his peace.

These first few attacks against Universities and Airlines was how he got the name UnAbomber.

He was using match heads and other scraps he could find in people’s garages while they were out. So as he was still learning he wasn’t able to make any lethal bombs. He wrote in his diary that he wished he could get his hands on some dynamite.

After he read news of managing to injure an airline executive, he wrote in his diary “I feel better, I’m still plenty angry, I’m now able to strike back.”

After reading in a newspaper that his first murder victim, computer salesman Scrutton, had been “blown to bits,” Kaczynski wrote in his journal, “Excellent. Humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a thing. $25,000 reward offered. Rather flattering.”

–

Court

Told lawyers they could adopt any defence they like other than an insanity defence. And they ran only the insanity defence. So fearing having his bombings labeled the work of an insane man and potentially having to take anti-psychotic drugs which might change him, first he attempted suicide, then he accepted a plea deal. A year after the sentencing he said death would be preferable to life, but the reason he stopped the first attempted suicide was fear of just becoming brain damaged.

–

Further Reading

General Resources

• The Philosophy of the Unabomber (15 min philosophy breakdown video)
• The Unabomber: The Devastating Use of a Brilliant Mind (20 min biography)
• A brother lost, a brotherhood found (article)
• From the Unabomber to the Incels: Angry Young Men on Campus – Eileen Pollack Considers Their Rage and Our Responsibility (article)
• Children of Ted Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes. By John H. Richardson (article)
• Running to Do Evil (podcast with recorded snippets of Kaczynski)
• Unabomber – In His Own Words (2 h 55 min documentary series with recorded snippets of Kaczynski)
• Manhunt (true-crime drama)
• Rational Wiki Profile (wiki article)
• Unabomber: the secret life of Ted Kaczynski (book biography by his neighbour)
• Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unabomber and His Family (book biography by his brother)
• Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (book biography by the FBI profiler who caught him)
• Hunting the Unabomber: The FBI, Ted Kaczynski, and the Capture of America’s Most Notorious Domestic Terrorist (a new book biography on the case)

Effect on the left-wing

• The Left-Overs: How Fascists Court the Post-Left (30 min read time – history article)
• The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence (well researched book which covers groups inspired by the Unabomber)
• AFed statement on kneecapping of nuclear executive by Informal Anarchist Federation by The Anarchist Federation (article)
• Anarcho-Nihilism Review || The Ideology of Insurrection (15 min comedy/educational video)

Individualists Tending toward the Wild (ex-leftist, eco-fascist terror group inspired by the Unabomber)

• There’s Nothing Anarchist about Eco-Fascism: A Condemnation of ITS
• Not Our Comrades: ITS Attacks on Anarchists
• “Eco-extremism and the indiscriminate attack – The Church of ITS Mexico” by L (UK) (critique of wild reaction an eco-fascist group inspired by the Unabomber)
• Of Indiscriminate Attacks & Wild Reactions An Anti-civ Anarchist Engages with ITS and Atassa, Their Defenders and Their False Critics by Edelweiss Pirates – Text & PDF
• Against the World-Builders: Eco-extremists respond to critics (An ex-leftist defends eco-fascism)
• Comments on the communiques from Individualists Tending toward the Wild — by Último Reducto 20 pp.
• Apostles and Heretics by John Jacobi (Eco-fascist journal)
• The New Wave of Eco-Terrorism and Nihilist Militancy by Popular Front (podcast)
• Communiques of ITS — 132 pp.
• Interview with Individualists Tending toward the Wild — 9 pp.

Effect on the right-wing

• Inside the Unabomber’s odd and furious online revival plus pictures left out of the editors edition & response by the twitter eco-fascists called Who are the pines? – Wired article
• Eco-Fascist ‘Pine Tree Party’ Growing as a Violent Extremism Threat – Terrorist watchdog site
• The Dark Side of Environmentalism (Eco-fascism) (8 min video)

Ted Kaczynskis’ Writing

Theory

• • Industrial Society and Its Future – 120 pp. (manifesto)
  • Hit where it hurts — 17 pp. (call to violence written from prison)
  • Technological Slavery (book of essays)
  • Afterthoughts to Technological Slavery – 14 pp.
  • Why the Technological System Will Destroy Itself (essay)
  • Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (an updated version of the manifesto)

Key Life Events

• • How I Blew Up Harold Snilly
  • Letter to a Turkish anarchist — 27 pp.
  • An Interview with Ted Kaczynski — 16 pp.
  • The Communiques of Freedom Club — 34 pp.
  • Truth & Lies – Part 1 & Part 2 (Book written just after his sentencing, never published in print, just photocopied online)
  • Ted Kaczynski’s Comments on Timothy McVeigh — 7 pp.

Fiction Analogy

• • Ship of Fools — 8 pp.

Misc. Letters

• • Ted Kaczynski’s Interview with the John Jay Sentinel — 10 pp.
  • Ted Kaczynski Letter to an Anonymous German — 17 pp.
  • Ted Kaczynski Letter to A.O. — 5 pp.
  • Ted Kaczynski letter to M.K. — 9 pp.
  • Ted Kaczynski on Individualists Tending Toward Savagery (ITS) — 4 pp.
  • Ted Kaczynski’s Letter to the Saturday Evening Review (1970) — 3 pp.
  • Answer to Some Comments Made in Green Anarchist — 9 pp.

Misc. Theory

• • The Littering Ape — Apios Tuberosa (pseud. Ted Kaczynski) 3 pp.
  • Marcos Loves Modernization — 4 pp.
  • Morality and Revolution — 16 pp.
  • Progress versus Liberty — 21 pp.
  • The System’s Neatest Trick — 21 pp.
  • When Non-Violence is Suicide — 5 pp.

–

A Conversation with John Zerzan on Direct Action, School Shootings, Authenticity, Veganism & More

–

I reached out to Zerzan by email with 4 long questions to help prepare for a different conversation with an anti-industrialist, plus the suggestion that I could post our Q&A text interview around a few places to help clarify his political theory and promote my critique of primitivism. But he offered to voice chat instead, which was a pleasant surprise.

So I’ll post the video and transcribe our conversation here. I edited the text slightly for clarity’s sake, just to remove filler words and put anything I forgot to say in, but I ran the updated version past Zerzan and he’s happy his answers still suit the questions asked.

As well I posted it to The Anarchist Library & Anarchist News, so you can download it in a bunch of formats like a printable pdf on The Anarchist Library and see other comments on Anarchist News:

• The Anarchist Library
• Anarchist News

–

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How do you determine what direct action targets are justifiable today?

Ishkah: I’m interested in for example Ted Kaczynski’s effect on the world, I know that he partly inspired a lot of people on the left to take actions under the name Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. But, I’m a worried that he’s been a stepping stone to the anti-egalitarian far-right, like that he motivated an affinity group in Mexico called ‘Individualists Tending toward the Wild’ to go from committing arsons aimed at sabotaging evil companies and instead started to desire to have the wider effect of terrorizing people through fear of injury or death on the simple principle of being against technology and wanting to regress to hunter-gatherer societies.

Zerzan: Yeah, if in fact there really was such a group, that’s debatable I guess. They’re kind of a farce. But, whether it’s fictional or not, the fantasy still raises the same questions.

Ishkah: I know Ted Kaczynski has posited the conspiracy that the group is mostly a secret service effort to delegitimize radical groups. But I think for Kaczynski it’s likely a defence mechanism at not wishing such a group to be real and be associated with him or his political tendency.

But, for sure the actions taken under the name could be more reflective of a few individuals across the world who don’t know each other, so not even resembling a group. As well, many of the crimes they claimed to have committed so as to spread fear have been proven not to have happened, which is certainly true.

Zerzan: I’m much more interested in critique than I am in tactics, but to me what’s really at the base of it, as it usually is, is the question of violence. What is violence and what is not violence? And I think my position is rather simple, it’s not violence if it’s not directed at some form of life, in other words you can’t violate a building in my view.

I mean friends of mine might disagree, I mean they would say yes it’s violence and we don’t shrink from violence and that’s a position too.

So, I just think that in general there are a lot of targets and you know I don’t think you can get too far finding answers to that question in the abstract, but I could be wrong.

Ishkah: It’s a complicated problem, I know some websites try to put together an aims and principles list to explain what actions they’ll report on and then I think that can influence what actions people take and what actions people think are justified. [1]

You have people using slogans like ‘by any means necessary’ going all the way back to Malcolm X & Franz Fanon in the 60s, which I guess is an attempt to say we’ll go as far as we’re pushed, so be careful what state terror tactics you use on us.

I’ve experimented with writing up a list of principles for what direct action principles are necessary for different stages in history, in terms of peace time and when social tensions are at their height, [2] of which one principle is; during a non-revolutionary period “never physically hurt people in order to achieve political goals as it runs counter to our philosophy on the left that material conditions create the person and so we should make every peaceful effort to rehabilitate people.” So, what do you think about those as an important foundation?

Zerzan: Well I’ll just mention that Kaczynski did refine his own view on that, I mean he apologized for that early crude bomb on the jetliner, he renounced that. I think the targets were relatively more appropriate as he went along, as they became more lethal, on that level anyway, I think you could argue that that’s the case. [3]

And where is the effectiveness? I mean what success are you having or not having? I mean that can tell you something about what things to do or what things to avoid.”

Ishkah: And what would be the measurements of success for you do you think?

Zerzan: Well, I would say advancing the dialogue. I think that if your thing is mainly critique, it’s a question of the conversation in society, is there some resonance? Is there some interest? Is there some development going on there? In other words, I’m not afraid of certain tactics that people commonly shrink from. and they say well, ‘you’re just turning everybody off’, but sometimes I think you have to go through that stage if you will, I mean sometimes that comes with the territory, in other words, people will be defensive and horrified or whatever at first and then they won’t be. You know? Then it becomes part of the dialogue, you know then things change, they don’t remain the same. In other words, there can be shock at the beginning with some tactics, but that wears off, I think, I would assert that’s likely to be the case.

Ishkah: Right, and you’ve made the comparison between Kaczynski and John Brown in that way. The difference I would say for me though, in those two situations are that John Brown was six years away from the civil war and they were very much accepted at the time to be one of two sides fighting a guerrilla war, one for revolution and the other for conservatism. Kaczynski’s actions were in some ways asymmetrical warfare, but they didn’t have any snowballing effect, they weren’t strategic targets that scared people off from doing what they were doing.

Secondly, Kaczynski’s actions were taken during a non-revolutionary period in which I think physically hurting people to achieve political goals is bad. It’s bad precisely because the conditions weren’t right for revolutionary war.

For example, even if the revolutionary left got really good at assassinating captains of industry and getting away with it, there would be reasonable fears around the psychology of people who would take such an act against people who they could have grown up and been socially conditioned to be themselves, which would inexorably lead to a more authoritarian society and worse foundations on which to work towards a better society.

Zerzan: Well I was quite frankly surprised by the levels of sympathy that were spontaneously expressed in the US in the 90s, I was pleasantly surprised by that. Really, there was much much less horror, or there was horror at the bombings and stuff, but there was also a good deal of sympathy.

Like one case, my wife knew this woman at the business school at the university here, and this person commented on the media footage when they were taking him somewhere in Montana before they moved him to California. And he’s dressed, it’s a well-known deal, he’s got a sport coat on and you can tell he’s got a vest on underneath and he’s kind of looking up at the sky as he’s walking along. And her comment was; “why don’t they just put a cross on his shoulders?” In other words comparing him to Jesus for Christ’s sake, I mean that’s a little unexpected, especially from a rather ‘straight person’, who’s not an anarchist or anything of this sort.”

Ishkah: It was definitely a novel case, that’s for sure. I’m fascinated by Aileen Wuornos case, who was this hitch-hiking sex worker in the 70s, who ended up killing and robbing some of her clients, and it was this weird juxtaposition for the time because women were getting killed all the time by men and so it flipped the script a little bit that there was actually truck drivers who had assaulted or raped women on the road before, who began to be too afraid to pick up women because they were worried about getting killed.

On hearing news on the radio of a woman sex worker killing men, one woman compared the unbelievable experience to the first time Orson Welles’ radio-play ‘The War of The Worlds’ was received by a bemused audience. [4]

So, I’m fine with people finding a lot of value in his philosophy and he’s definitely an intellectual who has found a fairly good critique of modern civilization in 90% of his writings. I just worry that his effect on the world is is going to be a stepping stone and to the right for a lot of people, so in terms of discussing his legacy we need to figure out ways to lay down some principles and say that what he did was chaotic and wrong, and we need we need these solid principles for direct action today, to lay the stepping stones for going forward today.’

For example, I know you disagree with random bombings of the ITS tendency, but in terms of people agreeing with your philosophy on what kind of technology is likely bad which is very broad, this idea that any tool that requires a hierarchy of coordination and specialization is something to be avoided, are you not concerned that you could be promoting direct action which falls well outside ethical principles like the ones I laid out in my email to you, such that you run the risk of motivating someone to take direct action which makes your rebellion look insane and so lead people to wish to preserve the status quo or facilitate a move to a more authoritarian society?

I observed some important push back like the Anarchist Federations response to an Informal Anarchist Federation cell kneecapping a nuclear physicist. [5] Critiquing firstly, taking actions based on the conspiratorial anti-industrial beliefs in the over-exaggerated dangers of nuclear meltdowns in stable nations. And secondly, the terroristic nature of attempting to spread fear rather than building social movements and sometimes sabotaging what stands in our way, but always with the goal of winning strategic victories.

Zerzan: Well again, I’d say what is happening in terms of social movements now? I mean there’s very little right now, I could point to the anti-globalization years so-called, you know around 1999 to 2001 which was a pretty considerable thing, it’s kind of forgotten but I mean I don’t know, perhaps Kaczynski’s forgotten.

Ishkah: I still don’t think a strong argument has been given for justifying direct action which attempts to harm or kill people. And so, unfortunately I think for people who take this stance like yourself and Kaczynski, some important disclaimers need to be made whenever discussing your work if – as members of campaign groups, mutual aid networks and affinity groups – we want to recruit and maintain members or advocate others over to our political philosophy.

But, I’m open to you expanding more on this in the future, here for example are a collection of statements made that I take issue with the most, mostly referencing the Unabomber case and including one from this same interview:

“The concept of justice should not be overlooked in considering the Unabomber phenomenon. In fact, except for his targets, when have the many little Eichmanns who are preparing the Brave New World ever been called to account?. . . Is it unethical to try to stop those whose contributions are bringing an unprecedented assault on life?”

“They ain’t innocent. Which isn’t to say that I’m totally at ease with blowing them into pieces. Part of me is. And part of me isn’t.”

“I think the targets were relatively more appropriate as he went along, as they became more lethal, on that level anyway, I think you could argue that that’s the case.”

“I ended the speech with the suggestion that there might be a parallel between Kaczynski and John Brown. Brown made an anti-slavery attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in 1859. Like Kaczynski, Brown was considered deranged, but he was tried and hung. Not long afterward he became a kind of American saint of the abolitionist movement. I offered the hope, if not the prediction, that T.K. might at some point also be considered in a more positive light for his resistance to industrial civilization.”

“Bonanno, it should be added, has been prosecuted repeatedly and imprisoned in Italy for his courageous resistance over the years.” Bonanno was imprisoned for armed robbery and promotes the strategy of kneecapping journalists.

–

Would industrial society not simply re-emerge?

Ishkah: I’m sceptical of Kaczynskis’ confidence that a new industrial revolution wouldn’t simply re-emerge, especially with people passing down memories and books of all the benefits to modern life.

My concerns are that firstly, the harm to the environment would be much worse than us simply transitioning to renewable energy and rewilding areas as we depopulate, as is the trend in advanced countries. Secondly, I would argue the probability that we will achieve a long-lasting, mostly peaceful, technologically advanced, left-anarchist society is far more valuable to me than returning to an either never ending series of warring feudal societies or feudal societies that repeats the industrial revolution and has another series of world wars for resources.

Primitive life is more appealing to me personally than feudalism in that I could be born into a fairly egalitarian tribe like the Penan or even if I wasn’t I wouldn’t know any different life, or if I had some of the egalitarian ideals I have now, the possibility would be there to strike out on my own and form an egalitarian tribe. But, bar convincing everyone to be hunter gatherers, or the provision of technological incentives to have fair and democratic communication among societies who trade with each other – you just are going to recreate feudal era societies where you’d have to be very lucky to escape from conscription and tyrants, and where the environmental destruction in the long term could be far worse.

Zerzan: What is happening in terms of social movements? Perhaps Kaczynski’s forgotten. And to me his rigidly anti-tech focus kind of loses its steam. As you know, I’m anti-civilization and if you’re just stuck with only the anti-tech thing you get to this wooden position where you you lose a lot of potential it seems because the rest of it just flows.

I noticed in the notes you were saying well you don’t want to be stuck in some medieval deal without industry, well that’s right, there you get the problem, right? I mean there was a piece – not to go too far along with this, but there was a piece – in the American magazine ‘The New Yorker’ back in the 90s when the trial was still going on I believe, it was simply called ‘E Pluribus Unabomber’, it was kind of a funny little one page piece. And it posed that question precisely, precisely that, okay so you’re against modern technology? Does that mean you want the middle ages? And he never answered that question.

I don’t want the middle ages, hell no. You know, you’ve got to look back to see what this crisis is all about what has brought us to this stage. Otherwise you’re kind of stuck with this one note deal that’s really rather limited. He’s insisted over and over and over that he has no interest in anything but modern technology, I mean that’s almost silly, the crisis shows that it’s much bigger and much deeper than that.

It comes to a head with the technological society, and by the way he told me he got his ideas from Elull, it’s an American vernacular version of the technological society, that’s his great gift, that’s his great plus, he made it very readable, you know the original or the original translation in English is hard to read, it has that abstract classical mode of the way French are taught to write and it’s very off-putting I think in the rest of the world, the rest of the west anyway, the rest of say America. [6]

Ishkah: Yeah, and it’s interesting Ellul is a kind of classical Christian anarchist, who likes the anabaptist tradition of creating small communities within a federated society, so he’s very critical of this concept of technique, but he still wants to make accommodations for technology if we can view it as a tool.

But, yeah I think for most of the people who identify with Kaczynski’s philosophy, calling themselves anti-industrialists rather than primitivists is an optics move, in that they don’t want to be seen to be striving for something that most people see as impossible to achieve. Because an anti-industrial revolution is achievable if you can destroy the electricity grids and keep them from being rebuilt, and once it is thoroughly destroyed it will be harder to rebuild and easier to stop than at least other pre-industrial oppressive conditions like feudal tyrants.

Zerzan: Well sure, it’s less abstract, here we are so totally immersed in the technology and the alienation it’s brought is just frightful, it’s so palpable, it’s just you know utterly impossible to ignore.

So, yeah there’s the technology on all sides at every moment, so sure it’s obviously part of the problem of course it’s right up there, but that’s just part of it. To me it’s like the leftists who are only limited to talking about capitalism, well of course one’s against capitalism, but it goes much deeper than that, right? Look at the rest of it, look at how it emerges and why?

Ishkah: Yeah and I definitely like a lot of Bookchin & eco-feminist philosophy who write about the priestly classes throughout history, who even before there was capitalism were trying to keep people ignorant and regimented into hierarchies.

But, in terms of getting this global shift is it that you just don’t have kids and within a hundred years you’ve only got a very small population and obviously using some direct action to encourage people and show them the way?

Zerzan: Well yeah, it’s kind of hard to answer, I mean that’s the challenge, what would that look like? How fast could that happen if you change directions and start to imagine things so differently? I mean who can say? Whether it happens at all that is obviously an open question, we may not get anywhere with this, I’m not clear about that and no one can be I don’t think.

So, but you start to think about the emerging directions and the transition and so forth, but only when you get to that place can you start to pose those questions and think about specific practical parts of the picture, it’s difficult to speculate there and I have to some degree, but that’s a further question it seems to me.

Ishkah: Yeah it’s interesting, I like the critique in a lot of ways, like I talk about this concept of minimum viable use. Like we have a really nice culture in Europe of punk post, where if you want to talk to someone who’s on a camp across the country and someone’s going that way, then you write them a letter and that person takes it to them. So, rather than calling them you put the effort into the creativity of the writing to them and then that’s the minimum viable use technology needed for that task and then in doing that you’ve fulfilled yourself more than just a quick phone call. [7]

Zerzan: Yeah exactly, something technology is erasing. Now we just text, don’t even want to hear the human voice. I mean it’s just getting so monstrous, so fast, and maybe that’s of course the strangely silver lining in the whole thing, it’s just impossible to ignore the effects. And people are so miserable, I mean the immiseration is just almost unimaginable, but there it is, it’s the alienation, the isolation, there’s suicide among the young, deaths of despair, opioid crisis, on and on, and on, it’s just huge estrangement.

Ishkah: Yeah so that’s a good Segway to the next topic…

–

Do you worry that you validated and perhaps encouraged the irrationally violent desires of the school shooter who called your radio show through your shared desire for de-industrialisation?

Ishkah: You talk a lot about school shootings on your show and it’s such a horrific thing and it’s a sign of atomization, and culture being fragmented.

You had a weird case of someone phoning your radio show who years later committed a school shooting. And there was a CNN piece… [8]

Zerzan: Adam Lanza, yeah that was pretty incredible. He acted out the very thing that he was trying to raise awareness about, the chimpanzee attacked its owner in a very horrible way and you know he said that’s us, we’re forced into these impossible unnatural ways of being and people are gonna snap, like the chimpanzee and then he snapped. I mean talk about incredible irony there.

Ishkah: Yeah, I mean it’s a really difficult one, have you thought about how you maybe would have handled it if you had the amazing foresight of interpreting what he meant or what his state of mind was.

Zerzan: Well that would have been really nice, but he struck my co-host as kind of a quiet troubled high school kid, but picking up on on the reality of life in late civilization and how bizarre it is and the pressures one’s under.

We both said yeah exactly, thanks for the call, I mean it certainly did not occur to us that he was part of the very thing he was warning about and I guess that was about a year later that that happened. That would have been awfully nice, but we didn’t, we thought that that’s quite a good insight, that’s quite a good parallel that you’re making and you know that was it, there wasn’t any dialogue, we didn’t even… he was just trying to bring out that point and bothered to call and yeah, ‘thanks for the call’ and that was that.

If only we could have or seen that he was actually going in that very direction, it would have been nice, we could have tried to do something, tried to engage him in terms of where he was at, with how his life was, in his own life.

Ishkah: Yeah and I mean I know primitivists in my own life and I know a lot of them get a lot of value from it, when they get into the philosophy and they start an allotment and they feel more connected to the earth and all the stuff and maybe work on a food no bombs stall and stuff, they’re often very much part of campaigns on the left.

But, saying all that, I’m not a primitive so I know that if if I’d had that call I might have tried to challenge him a little bit on domestication and how inevitable violence is, even if you feel pushed to an extent through bullying in school or something, like whether I don’t know… I guess my fumbling over my words now shows that it’s hard and I wouldn’t necessarily have the perfect words to say, but I don’t know, I wonder if there wasn’t someone he could find with a shared philosophy of de-industralisation and he’d phoned up someone who had challenged him a bit, that it could have been a turning point.

Like with the CNN piece, the doctor of criminology they had on at the end said:

“the subtext of what he’s [the school shooter is] saying is violence is innate and instinctual to humans, and really should not be punished because it’s their natural basis, that’s the message I think he’s trying to get across, and the parallel to himself is obvious, he feels possessed by this need, this compulsion to commit violence.”

So do you agree with that? Do you think that he was saying something like that or…?

Zerzan: It sounds very, very off base, that people are innately homicidal, is that what he’s saying?

Ishkah: Well, I think the criminologist was saying that Lanza was bringing up the story because maybe he felt those impulses within himself because of domestication, because of like bullying at school, and so if there wasn’t domestication, it wouldn’t have happened to him, so then his violence is justified in some way.

Zerzan: Well yeah, that seemed to be the lesson of what he phoned the show about, you know that’s what you get, that’s why this chimpanzee freaked out and attacked its owner, I mean precisely because of the domestication control, the so unnatural and painful, and it just caused the animal to snap. And you know he was saying of course that corresponds to the situation in society, it’s so unbearable really and I bet there was quite possibly bullying in the picture. There have been other cases of mass shootings where there was in fact bullying and then that’s part of the you know the onerous life that somebody’s living and they… it’s intolerable so yeah…

Ishkah: I mean still I would have liked to try to challenge him or challenge anyone who talked about violence as somewhat inevitable, I would have tried to say it’s not acceptable the way schools are structured at the moment, the way bullying is allowed to happen, and the way we are domesticated by technology to a degree, but I just worry that because there’s a sect of like nihilist primitivism of the ITS variety, that think nature is violent in some way, rather than nature just being destructive, that think they are justified to do it, so if I came across someone like that, I would hope that I would try and talk them over to a kind of personal low tech lifestyle, but to see that like there’s a future in building better schools and not being justified to take violence in that way.

Zerzan: You have to see… I mean is somebody coming from an anti-authoritarian point of view or not? You know that’s kind of basic. Or to put it another way, is this person an anarchist? Are we starting out with the same sort of general approaches or values?

I don’t know, some of this stuff is just off the table, like this ITS stuff, that just strikes me as completely unworthy of making any contribution at all. I was just appalled that people like the Little Black Cart folks were saying ‘oh we can learn something from this’, really? Murdering random people? No, it’s not, that’s just sick and fucked up and if that’s what passes for being an anarchist, no thanks. You just have to distance yourself from shit like that.

Ishkah: Cool, okay yeah, definitely agree on that.

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Finally is primitivism motivated primarily by a desire to return to a more innocent time in one’s childhood?

Ishkah: So the last thing was, I read what I thought was a good book by Saul Newman on ‘The Politics of Post-Anarchism’, his take on where we should be going, he kind of values do you know ‘le ZAD’ in France, which means ‘Zone of Defence’, so mostly separating oneself off from cities, but still rebelling, just not in a storming the Bastille way. In the book anyway Newman critiques you I think by saying how the desire for a primitive way of life is often a desire for a more innocent time in one’s childhood:

“Where Zerzan’s argument becomes problematic is in the essentialist notion that there is a rationally intelligible presence, a social objectivity that is beyond language and discourse. To speak in Lacanian terms, the prelinguistic state of jouissance is precisely unattainable: it is always mediated by language that at the same time alienates and distorts it. It is an imaginary jouissance, an illusion created by the symbolic order itself, as the secret behind its veil. We live in a symbolic and linguistic universe, and to speculate about an original condition of authenticity and immediacy, or to imagine that an authentic presence is attainable behind the veils of the symbolic order or beyond the grasp of language, is futile. There is no getting outside language and the symbolic; nor can there be any return to the pre Oedipal real. To speak in terms of alienation, as Zerzan does, is to imagine a pure presence or fullness beyond alienation, which is an impossibility. While Zerzan’s attack on technology and domestication is no doubt important and valid, it is based on a highly problematic essentialism implicit in his notion of alienation.

To question this discourse of alienation is not a conservative gesture. It does not rob us of normative reasons for resisting domination, as Zerzan claims. It is to suggest that projects of resistance and emancipation do not need to be grounded in an immediate presence or positive fullness that exists beyond power and discourse. Rather, radical politics can be seen as being based on a moment of negativity: an emptiness or lack that is productive of new modes of political subjectivity and action. Instead of hearkening back to a primordial authenticity that has been alienated and yet which can be recaptured – a state of harmony which would be the very eclipse of politics – I believe it is more fruitful to think in terms of a constitutive rift that is at the base of any identity, a rift that produces radical openings for political articulation and action.”

Zerzan: Well I know Newman, I mean he’s a classic post-structuralist, post-modern character. It gets down to basic stuff doesn’t it? I mean if you feel like presence is just an illusion, most basically because there’s nothing outside of symbolic culture, right? “Outside the text, there is nothing” Derrida, right? Well what if that’s not true? What if there’s an alternative to symbolic culture? To the whole representational racket?

I mean I think there is quite possibly, there is that possibility. In fact in practice there was… hunter-gatherer life, pre-symbolic culture, right? For over a million years, you know face-to-face community, non-hierarchical, these are generalities here, but they did quite well without symbolic culture, without art, without the concept of numbers, without a lot of things.

So you can make the assertion and you know a lot of it’s traced back to say Derrida or others, but just because you’re saying there is no presence, that’s just a fiction, that the presence cannot exist because you can’t get outside of the symbolic, well that’s one point of view, but I don’t think that’s true.

That’s just, you know it’s part of the general surrender politically, in more or less reactionary times you get philosophies like that, which sort of take over. The whole backward aspect of post-modernism, it really is a way of… at a time when there’s pretty much no social movements you get stuff like that and that’s a crude way to put it, but that’s part of the picture I think.

Ishkah: Okay, yeah I take your point, I think obviously they would say that about some primitivists. But…

I guess I don’t know how they’re defining symbolism, my perspective is animals are using symbols and language going way back to parrots and primates, but…

Zerzan: Well I think that’s more… I mean that is tricky, it is an open question, animals do communicate, but I think it’s more signals than symbols. It’s not really representational, in the way of symbolic culture that the humans have just because they communicate, of course they do, birds, all sorts of animals, they have to for survival, but that doesn’t make it very symbolic, it seems to me, but anyway that’s… These definitions have to you know… they’re sort of problematic because we’ve used these terms in different ways or inelastic ways that then the whole conversation becomes a little confusing, so I don’t want to take too rigid a position, but you don’t have to have symbolic language for there to be communication. Anyway that’s obvious I guess.

Ishkah: Well, yeah it’s tricky for sure, I mean I get into debates all the time with people who want to use language like abolish work and abolish prisons and I guess it’s an attempt to reframe the debate.

But, just in terms of this term presence, whether we should desire an authenticity of a long period of our evolutionary history as humans. I don’t know, like I think potentially we could be suffering more now for sure, but it could be suffering that we we desire to take on if we can get to this left-anarchist, pro technology future. It could be a source of virtue for us, striving for these intellectual skills.

And then authenticity, as a concept it’s only developed recently, like we used to think of authenticity differently as like sincerity. So, the effort you put into helping your family would be an indication of whether you were being authentic to yourself, if you were being just and fair to your family in taking on your responsibilities.

So, I don’t know whether it would be authentic for me to desire hunter-gather life, I know I would desire hunter-gatherer life more than the middle ages, but I think rather than just settling for primitive life or just settling for the middle ages, I think we should try and be aspirational to this future world of still being able to use some technology, like printing presses and penicillin and stuff, so I don’t know.

Zerzan: Yeah, it’s needed these different steps, and one requires the other, I mean now technology comes around to promise to heal what it has caused in the first place, so where do you try to arrest that progression?

And what does it all depend on? You don’t have any technology really without the extraction, without the mining, the smelters, the warehouses. And who do people on the left assume is going to do all that? It doesn’t exist without all that? So that’s a form of slavery, but they seem to be fine with that, to have the wonders of technology resting upon what? I mean not only the ruin of the natural world, of the biosphere, but you know wage slavery for almost countless people, for that to exist. That’s not a very liberatory assumption.

Ishkah: Yeah, and if I believed that we were just going the way of machines and we were going to create artificial intelligence and terminate ourselves by just letting them take over or becoming more machine like ourselves I would definitely worry…

Zerzan: And deciding everything and people don’t understand how they work, I mean we’ve swept along in this whole van of the progress with a capital ‘p’ and look where it’s gotten us, it’s just becoming horrible on every front, it’s one large crisis where all the parts of it are kind of merging into a very, very bad picture.

Ishkah: Yeah I don’t know, like I’m still researching, maybe I’m being naive in just advocating for something where that is more likely to happen, but yeah I worry that if people take direct action and try to just separate themselves off from technology and cities, that we leave people to suffer, like we lose hospitals… I mean I don’t know how useful you think hypotheticals are, but so definitely if technology is this thing that just manufactures consent and we get towards robots then that’s definitely bad and if we have a reasonable high confidence that is the future then obviously I would be on board with just trying to collapse the system in order to try and get back to primitivism, but hypothetically…

Zerzan: These are big challenges, you know everybody wants community, right? I mean we can all agree on that, except what happened to it? Why did it go away? Why has mass society all but obliterated that? All but obliterated the face-to-face human contact kind of world? Which I think really did roughly exist before domestication.

You know, this sounded so utopian to me when I first discovered the literature that I first ran into by accident, the whole anthropological deal, but it actually isn’t and it’s just just well known a lot of it.

I mean a lot of it isn’t well known, I grant you we can’t know precisely, or even vaguely, what the consciousness was, how satisfied people were in their lives. We really don’t know that, but I mean there was some pretty good non-lethal developments apparently, you know some contacts that were worthy of lasting for quite some time.

You know domestication, I mean that’s like one tenth of one percent of our of human species, anyway you know all that.

Ishkah: Yeah I really value some nomadic cultures that I’m worried that we’re encroaching on. I think there was a story recently about loggers in the amazon taking away the tribe’s bow and arrows so that they wouldn’t shoot at them, but then leaving them to starve in this horrible way.

What was it gonna say, oh yeah so I don’t know how useful useful you think hypotheticals are but in terms of like, say we realized this hunter gatherer world, but there were still some people who had the knowledge to create assembly lines for things like penicillin and glasses and stuff, and they saw people who were disabled or injured, and they wanted to create some technology to help these people. Would that be a legitimate target for sabotage or would that just be a consent issue, where you let them do that even if you worry that it helps restart technological society?

Zerzan: Well, I don’t know, I think we’d have to, if everybody could pitch in and try to find workable solutions as we go, I mean I think there could be intermediate steps, you know we don’t want people unable to live without certain technologies to just simply die off, but at the same time it’s not clear to me that we need the worldwide grid otherwise you can’t achieve that. I mean I think there are other methods, some of which are just simple things like when you’re peddling a bicycle with the light, you pedal and it generates electricity to light your tail-light or your headlight. So why can’t you do that with somebody who needs a respirator? You know, you don’t have to have a whole world system going may be to fix, you know to to help people in different situations and as we kind of try to go away from the dependency which has been really pretty fatal.

You know something like that, whereas it isn’t just a blanket theoretical rejection overnight or you push a button and it’s something else, I mean that isn’t quite a fair characterization of the primitivist thinking I’m familiar with.

Ishkah: No sure, it’s just a funny hypothetical for like thousands of years in the future, like my ideal feature is a pro-tech society that conscientiously decides not to use technology badly and I know you don’t see that as possible, but I don’t know I see some value in labor movement philosophy of if animals finds a use value in the land that we can just give them large areas to re-wild. And I would want people to have the option of being able to live in bear country and risk getting attacked by bears if they want to.

Zerzan: Sure, but that doesn’t seem likely, that goes against the logic of domestication, the only thing that was left for indigenous people is the most inhospitable places on the planet and you know same goes for other species, that’s why extinction is is just running rampart and one species after another is either gone or threatened with extinction. That’s the logic of it, yeah we can dream up free spaces for somebody or another, but where would that come from? Where would you find the basis for that inside this system, which is so all enveloping, I would be in favor of it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just hard to see if there’s a solution within the system.

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Should we hunt animals in a peaceful world?

Ishkah: Okay yeah, so I’ve gone through all my questions, but I can give you one more hypothetical if you like. There was a podcast you did for Oak Journal on lots of topics like humanism and one thing that came up was veganism and then there was an interesting response by Ria who runs the website VeganPrimitivist.wordpress.com. They did a long response to some of the points that were brought up. [9]

And anyway their ideal future is people foraging plants and mushrooms only, and I think using fire, but just conscientiously choosing not to hunt animals. And I don’t personally think that you could plan that diet very well, with like B12, without fortified foods and stuff, I think duckweed we’ve found out now has a lot of B12, so if you lived somewhere there was duckweed, you could maybe do that, but another hypothetical that might reflect the modern world is…

If you knew that you could meet all your nutritional needs living this life, and you knew there wasn’t going to be warfare, and you knew you could maintain the skills of hunting if you needed to go back to that, would you hypothetically choose not to hunt animals? Just living a life where you’re communicating with them through seeing otters in the wild, but just choosing not to hunt, do you think that would be an ethical responsibility? What do you think if you knew that you could survive perfectly fine with low labor hours?

Zerzan: That sounds rather nice, yeah I wouldn’t argue against it. It’s conceivable, hunter-gatherer life was more gathering than hunting, maybe that would be more ideal. But still, if you’re trying to learn anything from the record, it’s a bit hard to imagine that in terms of our evolution, but it sounds nice, yeah.

Ishkah: Yeah it’s a nice dream. I just often come up against people who are really invested in like eating meat because it’s their culture and eating these horrible factory farmed animals, so I think it’s interesting, like I use the argument of we have all these glass greenhouses now, we have thousands of vegetables we can grow all year round to eat a varied diet, but even if we went back to primitivist life and we could still meet all our nutritional needs, I think there would be some ethical responsibility there too, just to embody this more compassionate lifestyle.

Zerzan: Right, I salute your values, I think that’s very worthwhile to think about.

Ishkah: Okay cool, that’s good, I think people will be interested in that.

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References

1. Some examples of anarchist or far-left campaign groups & news platforms adopting an ‘aims & principles’ charter:

https://www.bamn.com/about-bamn-2/bamn-principles/

https://www.a-radio-network.org/basic-principles/

https://greenanticapitalist.org/aims-principles/

2. An Open Letter To John Zerzan by myself:

https://activistjourneys.wordpress.com/2021/07/25/an-open-letter-to-john-zerzan-a-primitivist-philosopher-of-technology/

3. This reflects Kaczynski’s own grizzly diary notes in that after reading in a newspaper that his first murder victim, computer salesman Scrutton, had been “blown to bits,” Kaczynski wrote in his journal; “excellent. Humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a thing.” It was a method of lethal killing which he had developed after killing a romantic interest had proven too much for him. Kaczynski had “given his brother a letter he intended to send to the woman, explaining himself. It was an apology of sorts, but it also contained the disturbing claim that Kaczynski was so enraged that he had waited in the woman’s car with a knife, planning to mutilate her. In the end, Ted wrote, he couldn’t do it. Attacking someone face to face proved too much for him.”
4. Sexual Violence Against Women and a Woman’s Right to Self-Defense The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos by Phyllis Chesler:
   https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/sexual-violence-against-women-and-a-womans-right-to-self-defense
5. The Anarchist Federations response to an Informal Anarchist Federation cell kneecapping of a nuclear physicist:

http://afed.org.uk/statement-on-the-informal-anarchist-federation-tactics/

6. The Technological Society by Jaques Ellul:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society

7. Minimum Viable Technology by David Charles:

https://davidcharles.info/positive-constraints/minimum-viable-technology/

8. Newtown shooter may have called ‘AnarchyRadio’ show before attack:

https://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/16/us/newtown-shooter-possible-radio-interview/index.html

9. Response to Bellamy, JZ & Steve Kirk condemning vegan primitivism:

https://veganprimitivist.wordpress.com/2020/02/03/response-to-bellamy-jz-steve-kirk-condemning-vegan-primitivism/

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My Video Essays, Editing & Mirrors

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I try to write/record personal essays, political movement theory & philosophy. I’ve edited together footage of real-world activism in order to promote and archive significant political movement history. I’ve collated living and dead comedians’ discographies. And finally, I’ve been able to find and have great discussions on everything from philosophy & psychology to the legal animal rights movement.

(Previewing 3 videos per playlist, to see the full categorized list click here)

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Index

• Activism – Current Political Movements & Projects
• Advocacy – Human Rights, Animal Rights & Environmental Protection
• Philosophy – Ethics, Existentialism, Etc.
• Politics
• Veganism
  • Vegan Discussions
  • Vegan vs. Carnist Debate
  • Vegan vs. Vegan Debate
  • Deleted Vegan Video Archive
• Comedy
  • Andy Kaufman’s Full Discography
  • Captain Hotknives’ Greatest Hits
  • Captain Hotknives Full Discography
  • Captain Hotknives Footage
• Atheism
• Film Clips & Analysis
• Music
  • Kilnaboy – Prison Bars & Battle Scars Album
  • Fat Panthers
• Podcasts

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 Activism – Current Political Movements & Projects

• Terrier men digging out foxes for the hunt – Jan, 2019
• Jeremy Corbyn Listening & Speaking at Teachers Meeting on Education
• Campaigns & Remberences of Hêlîn Qereçox (Anna Campbell)

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Advocacy – Human Rights, Animal Rights & Environmental Protection

• How to simply explain what veganism is and argue for it – Part One
• How To Advocate To Pro-Vegan Leftists (Mock Vaush Debate)
• Is a Revolutionary Approach to Politics in Britain Possible? | Lessons from Rojava #1

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Philosophy – Ethics, Existentialism, Etc.

• Daniel Kaufman On Intuitionism and Folk Psychology
• Saul Newman: Post-Anarchism from Revolution to Rebellion [Mirror] (french and english)
• Stoicism & Existentialism; Compare & Contrast [Mirror]

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Politics

• Debate On The Ethics Of Direct Action w/ Walt Anderson
• Destiny vs. Sargon on Trumps Covid Response & Affirmative Action | Election Night

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Veganism

• Re; Veganism vs. Animal Liberation (Ishkah vs. Eisel & DxE)
• The bizarre case of vegan Neo-N*zis & deprogramming vegans who glorify violence
• How to simply explain what veganism is and argue for it – Part One

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Vegan Discussions

• Discussing Kalel-Gate with LayVegan, Critical Thought & BernieBro
• Tofu Godess & Catherine Klein discuss Environmentalism
• The Politics of Vegan Community /Movement Building | ABLC Digital Radio #1

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Vegan vs. Vegan Debate

• Ask Yourself vs. Unethical Vegan (Longer Version) | Ask Yourself Pirate Radio #1
• (Classic!) Gary Francione vs. Wayne Hsiung Round 1! | Go Vegan Radio #524 | Jul 2015
• (New!) Gary Francione vs. Wayne Hsiung Round 2! | Go Vegan Radio #615 | Feb 2018

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Vegan vs. Carnist Debate

• Vaush vs. Vegan Gains on Intersectionality and Veganism
• Stefan Molyneux Dodges Vegan Hypothetical for 2 Hours
• Earthling Ed vs. InfoWars | See what they included & cut out.

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Deleted Vegan Video Archive

• STEVEN RINELLA EVADES REALITY | The Critical Thought Archive #1
• THE ALIEN HYPOTHETICAL | The Critical Thought Archive #2
• JOE ROGAN TRIES TO COMPENSATE | The Critical Thought Archive #3

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Comedy

• The Light Side Of Psychosis – A Soon To Be Written Tribute
• Andy Kaufman raps everyones lines from the film Music Man – Scene Comparison
• Comedy Arguments – Andy Kaufman, ‘Rick & Morty’ & Captain Hotknives

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Andy Kaufman’s Full Discography

• 1. Andy Kaufman – College Theatre Performance (1969)
• 2. Andy Kaufman – Night at The Improv (Date Unknown)
• 3. Andy Kaufman – Having a sit down meal on stage + more | The Improv Club (Date Unknown)

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Captain Hotknives’ Greatest Hits

• Captain Hotknives’ Greatest Hits – Full Album
• #01 Mushrooms | Captain Hotknives’ Greatest Hits
• #02 Prejudiced Wildlife | Captain Hotknives’ Greatest Hits

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Captain Hotknives Full Discography

• Three Card Spread | Captain Hotknives
• A Bar In Ballina | Captain Hotknives
• John Lee’s Cooker | Captain Hotknives

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Captain Hotknives Footage

• David Attenbourough Is An Animal Voyeur | Captain Hotknives
• Smugglers Bold | Captain Hotknives
• Rolling With The Bible | Captain Hotknives

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Atheism

• How you know what you know with Mormons
• Attempt at exploring religion’s real world outcomes with kanadajin3
• The polite face of psychological warfare in mormon chat

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Film Clips & Analysis

• Ballad of William Worthy | Cover from the film Après mai
• Dead Man Analysis – Psychedelic Western, Colonialism & Spiritual Purgatory
• Last Cab to Darwin – Just the phone calls

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Music

Kilnaboy – Prison Bars and Battle Scars Album

• Kilnaboy – Prison Bars and Battle Scars (Full Album)
• Kilnaboy – Your Laws
• Kilnaboy – Days of our subscription

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Fat Panthers

• Into The Valley Of The Timberwolves | Fat Panthers
• Demented Pixie Music | Fat Panthers
• Walking Through Morecombe | Fat Panthers

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Podcasts

Philosophy

• Interview on Emergent Ecologies | New Books Network Podcast #47
• Do Apes Read Minds? Towards A New Folk Psychology | New Books Network #260
• Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life | New Books Network #39

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Human Rights

• Israel massacres 60 protesters, injures 1,360 with live fire | The Electronic Intifada Podcast #154
• Emergency Medicine Coordination & Conflict Research | Adventure Science Podcast #8
• The Rohingya Crisis with Francis Wade | Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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Socialist

• Islam and Ethnicity in the Kurdish Political Sphere in Turkey | LSE Middle East Centre
• War experiences with the Yazidi militia in Northern Syria & Iraq | Radical People Podcast
• Left-Libertarian Class Theory & Virtue Ethics | Mutual Exchange Radio

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Social Justice

• Sex Critical | Very Loose Women Podcast #155
• Orgasms: To Fake or Not To Fake? | The Vegan Vanguard #17
• The Kurdish Women’s Movement: On Revolution, Militarism and Body Politics | LSE Middle East Centre

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Vegan

• Veganism in an Oppressive World with Julia Feliz Brueck | The Vegan Vanguard #28
• Hurt Profits by Unionizing Slaughterhouse Workers | Food Sleuth Radio #258
• Interview with Unoffensive Animal | Scum Remover #9

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Freegan

• Interview with the Co-Founder of Food Not Bombs | Up Close with Chris Tinney #8
• Interview with Gleaning Coordinator Todd Johnson | Lexington Community Radio’s Bluegrass Bios #56

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Environmentalist

• On being a professional expeditioner and researcher | Adventure Science Podcast #9
• Interview with the director of Busch Wildlife Sanctuary | Talking Animals Podcast #13
• Fighting coal’s power from Germany’s ancient Hambach Forest | This is Hell! #930

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Comedy

• Hooking up in the age of climate change | Legally Crazy Podcast #17
• Interview with Andy Kaufman’s sidekick Bob Zmuda | WTF with Marc Maron Podcast #274

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Re; ‘Freeganism Is Evil’ – A Pro-Freegan Story Analogy

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Here’s some incredibly niche philosophy arguments encase you ever feel the need to defend rescuing animal products that have gone past the best before date like bread with whey in it from shops for free and eating it yourself or sharing them out:

Firstly it can be great animal rights advocacy in rare circumstances like so; by setting up a Food not Bombs stall in the town centre and putting up a vegan sign in front of a big pan of vegan stew and a freegan sign infront of rescued bread. The vegan sign can provoke lots of interesting conversations about the ethics of breeding and killing animals. While the freegan sign can get people talking about a further layer of if it is true that harming animals for their meat, milk and eggs was necessary to feed the population, how come so very much meat, milk and eggs ended up rotting in supermarket skips instead? Which can provoke further conversation about the evils of producing such an energy intensive product like meat to just become food waste, while people are starving around the world.

Secondly non-human animals we farm don’t experience a worse quality of life worrying about whether they’re going to be eaten by other humans after they’re dead, humans do as a species norm.

Thirdly there exists healthy human cultures in which humans being eaten by non-human animals after they’re dead is seen as a positive, for example in Tibet, having your energy transferred into that of a bird is seen as a beautiful thing or green burials where your body can more easily become nutrients for both animals and plants. So then, healthy human cultures in which non-human animals are eaten by humans is also likely possible.

And finally, even if it’ll be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by animals products (in the same way as if no one ever felt pressured by sexist beauty standards to shave their legs again), that doesn’t mean that it’s not morally permissible to consume some of those animal products at the moment i.e. it’s not comparable to cannibalism where you’re causing worse quality of life in other humans by normalizing it or normalizing the standard that women should have their genitals mutilated as neither the choice to shave your legs or eat thrown out animal products necessitates violating anyone’s rights or causing harm to anyone.

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Intro

Yo, so this is a response to Vegan Footsoldiers video entitled ‘Freeganism is Evil’. My understanding – extrapolating from his story analogy – was that he believes you can’t both be a great human rights advocate and not care about humans interests as a species norm during a humans life time, to then go against them by eating them. And that the same applies to animal rights advocates and animals. But basically I disagree, because animals aren’t worrying about events past their death, so they aren’t suffering a worse quality of life imagining maybe they’ll be eaten by humans after they’re dead.

He also wrote in the comments he uses Immanuel Kant’s indirect principle to justify calling freeganism immoral, so I’ll flash up on the screen my formal refutations of that now for anyone curious you can pause the video or come back to them later, 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5. [At the bottom of this post]

But the point of this video is I’d just like to tell a story analogy back, because I think narratives as intuition pumps are useful.

So here we go…

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The Story

Once upon a time the good people of London and of all Britain were horrified to hear that a girls genital mutilation ring was discovered in the capital city. A deeply abhorrent and unethical tradition from the land of their origin, the families and surgeons had forced children to have their clitoris’s chopped off. They tried to keep their terrible work secret and warned the children that they must never tell, and most of the children never did, and yet the story came out. One night the ten o’clock news reported that multiple children had been subjected to this horrible abuse.

The people of Great Britain were horrified, they shuddered at what was one of the most ethically repugnant operations continuing to exist in Great Britain. How could it be happening? Why were the children not saved? Was it still happening even now?

The people cried for justice, something must be done! Questions were asked in Parliament, what were the police doing to stop these heinous acts? Stirred into action by the loud clamour of the people, the police searched for information on where the genital mutilation was taking place.

Then suddenly, the surgeons, the elders and parents responsible who had been able to cause unquantifiable tragedy during its short existence thankfully all were arrested and charged by the police. Newspapers across the land carried pictures of their heads bowed in shame, names were named, details given. In the courtroom they all admitted guilt and were each sentenced to prison. Justice! Justice! The repulsed crowd of onlookers shouted as the perpetrators were escorted in handcuffs out of the courthouse and stuffed into the police vehicle.

Two human rights activists stood together gravely, feeling a sense of deep tragedy for the victims while shedding bittersweet tears of resolution knowing that the foul people responsible would be put behind bars where they belonged, where they would have the time to contemplate such heinous crimes.

Jane and Billy were their names. It was these two human rights activists who played the most important part in the story for they had taken it upon themselves to spy on the genital mutilation ring and alert the police.

They already knew what had been going on well before the media picked up on the story and having had little faith in the police to do something about it, thankfully Jane and Billy had become vigilantes to track down the perpetrators themselves Without the help of these activists it would have likely taken much longer with much more bloodshed until the perpetrators were finally brought to justice.

They had frantically run to the police station after having received word of the mutilation that would take place that day to alert the police and point out who the doctor and parents responsible were. The police had broken down the door to the secret location in the middle of the night. The parents had already years ago mutilated their two eldest children’s genitals and were in the process of mutilating the youngest two when the police stormed the building.

One of the children fortunately was unharmed but one wasn’t so lucky, the girl was experiencing massive blood loss and had gone into shock. She was rushed to the hospital accompanied by the human rights activists as they had been at the scene when the police made the raid.

At the hospital whilst the medical staff raced to save the injured child’s life the human rights activist waited distraught in the corridor just outside the operating theatre, Billy paced up and down. Furious at himself not having been able to bring the police to the location sooner. Jane sat with her head in her hands, if only they had been able to arrive just five minutes earlier, maybe even just one minute earlier. Never before had 60 seconds meant so much to either of them.

It wasn’t long before the surgeon walked glumly out of the operating theatre door and into the corridor where the activists waited now frozen, now unable to take a breath in anticipation of the news. Looking up from her chair Jane burst into a whale of tears even before those six heart-breaking words could escape from the lips of the medic, ‘we did all that we could’.

Billy threw his arms around Jane in an attempt to comfort her as she cried engulfed in sadness and regret for not having been able to have saved the girl from this terrible fate. They gathered their things, knowing there was a long night still ahead, the police would want statements. It would be many hours before they would be back home.

A week later, Billy and Jane, still reeling from their experience, were walking round the supermarket together when Jane got a text from their daughter Sam asking for a safety razor. She turned round to Billy to read out the text and they both looked at each other concerned.

Sam was 14 years old and had been a young advocate at school for girls not needing to shave their legs if they didn’t want to. For Sam, the point had always been that women should not alter their bodies to conform to cultural standards or gratify the male gaze. She’d often been teased at school but had always laughed it off. Had someone said something really mean to her for her to suddenly want to shave her legs now?

They discussed the issue some more, but decided they better get the razor as it was her decision and if she changed her mind again, she could always let the hair grow back. They could hardly fight so hard for girls to exercise their rights over a cultural norm like FGM and yet not trust their daughter’s judgement in the matter of shaving her legs.

When they got home they talked to their daughter, trying to find out if she was feeling pressured into shaving her legs, and worried that she was being influenced by advertisements or all the bullying over the years. They were relieved to find out that now it was summer she just wanted to try out shaving her legs to see what it felt like. Billy and Jane were glad to have talked it through and furnished her with her very own safety razor.

The next day was a Saturday and Billy and Jane were busy setting up a ‘Food Not Bombs’ stall in the town centre. They had worked hard all morning on a massive pan of vegan stew that could feed 500 people. Fragrant with cardamom and coconut oil, thickened with red lentils, it contained squashes and pulses, potatoes and vedge. Billy had rescued the crusty bread to dip in the stew from an overstuffed supermarket skip the night before. Jane noticed that it contained the tiniest amount of whey from cows milk, but because they were giving it away, she knew the corporations wouldn’t profit from their work.

They put up two signs on the table, ‘Vegan Stew’ and ‘Freegan Bread’. As well as tons of pamphlets and leaflets with helpful advice on living a low impact vegan or freegan lifestyle and the various campaign struggles in the city and internationally.

The vegan sign provoked lots of interesting conversations about the ethics of breeding and killing animals. While the freegan sign got people talking about a further layer. If it was true that harming animals for their meat, milk and eggs was necessary to feed the population, how come so very much meat, milk and eggs ended up rotting in supermarket skips instead? This provoked another conversation about the evils of producing such an energy intensive product like meat to just become food waste, while people are starving around the world.

So, when it came time to fold down the table and go home, a great day of advocating for human and animal legal rights, plus environmental protection had been had.

Driving home they got to talking about how years ago, Jane had used rescued cheese to help her stay strong in her decision to go vegan. Jane had got the idea from a documentary she’d watched which talked about a therapist who devised a technique in group therapy to help people quit cigarettes. On day one, they emptied bags full of cigarettes into the centre of the group circle, to show them the abundance, so that that stress about scarcity was dulled.

She had worried that she might have been weak willed enough to fail without the rescued cheese and convince herself that going vegan wasn’t for her. But she knew that probably that happens to a lot of people. If more people had access to animal products from a source that is doing no further harm to animals, it might help them in their transition to not buying it anymore. And that could only be a good thing.

Freeganism had had that same effect of re-aligning the value of junk food for her, getting rid of low-level addictions. When you see the mountains of packaged baked goods, croissants and doughnuts produced that day in the shop, stacked in a mountain all in front of you, you know you can get that sugar crash whenever you like, you stop seeing it as such a hot option.

Billy then remarked how interesting it is that buying cigarettes for that therapeutic technique is doing a little harm in the short term, buying the fags profits the tobacco industry. Yet the therapeutic technique serves a greater good long term.

And yet with freeganism not only is no harm being committed, it’s carbon negative because you’re eating food that would otherwise have been thrown out, so less food needs to be produced.

Then Jane said; I used to think it would be as simple as saying, “imagine if you grew up knowing that you were going to be killed for your meat!” Because of how compassion for our fellow human beings works, we couldn’t imagine causing them that fear. The harm would have this cumulative effect on the culture, our community bonds, and who we know we are. Like abhorring female genital mutilation.

But it’s not the same thing. Animals aren’t burdened by those questions, don’t know they’ll be killed for their meat, don’t live in fear of that end. But by buying animal products, we perpetuate the industry that profits from their killing, and contributes to the devastation of the environment.

Billy said, that’s the point isn’t it? In Tibet, having your energy transferred into that of a bird is seen as a beautiful thing, so funerals at the top of mountains and your remains left as a tasty snack for the vultures is not so unusual. He said; it would be a great thing to move away from graveyards with cold gravestones in rows. Imagine if more people chose to be buried at a memorial woodland site. A tree planted in remembrance of you, your remains feeding the tree.

Finally Jane said; Right, so culture can be good or bad, we have to look towards something more concrete like what brings us happy flourishing and go from there. Like, it probably will be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by thrown out animal products. And it would be great if no one ever felt pressured by sexist beauty standards to shave their legs again!

But at the end of the day, it’s not like cannibalism, where you’d be causing worse quality of life in other humans by foretelling a gruesome ending. And the same goes for normalizing the standard that women should have their genitals mutilated. Both ideas are barbaric, and rightly rejected.

Neither the choice to shave your legs or eat thrown out animal products causes harm to anyone, so I don’t really see why people ought not do it. Even though I want that culture without any more domestic animals or carnism, I still just see a win in the political act of rescuing animals and wasted food, building relationships with people that can benefit from those calories or companionship, where no positive change would happen otherwise.

“Here, here” they both said while enjoying a little laugh. And laugh they did.

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Formal Arguments

First here’s my formulation of Footsoldiers argument which is IMO unsound:

A1) Kant’s Indirect Principle Against Advocating For Freeganism

P1) If I accept Kant’s axioms then I accept the indirect principle established in the groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals

P2) If I accept the indirect principle established in the groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals then I would agree that treating non human animals without dignity would harm myself

P3) If I accept the indirect principle established in the groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals then I have a moral duty to not harm myself

P4) If I agree that treating non human animals without dignity would harm myself and that I have a moral duty to not harm myself then I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

P5) If I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should reject consuming animal products (as it is the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

P6) If I should reject consuming animal products then I shouldn’t promote freeganism (as to do so would constitute promoting self-harm)

P7) I accept Kant’s axioms

C) Therefore I should be against freeganism

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Through consquentialism it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the ethical issue is breeding and killing of animals, cutting short their interests to experience wellbeing. And that if non-human animals aren’t experiencing worse quality of life worrying about whether they’re going to be eaten by other humans after they’re dead, then there’s no ethical issue to freeganism.

Through deontology however, you might think you should reject consuming all animal products on principle as you feel it is the antithesis of treating animals with dignity.

So the arguments I’d suggest you use on such a person is firstly you could use a simple comparison to argue the way the person is applying dignity is a category error, like I do in the story analogy by saying:

It probably will be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by thrown out animal products. And it would be great if no one ever felt pressured by sexist beauty standards to shave their legs again!

But at the end of the day, it’s not like cannibalism, where you’d be causing worse quality of life in other humans by foretelling a gruesome ending. And the same goes for normalizing the standard that women should have their genitals mutilated. Both ideas are barbaric, and rightly rejected.

Neither the choice to shave your legs or eat thrown out animal products necessitates violating anyone’s rights, so I don’t really see why people ought not do it.

And in formal logic terms:

A2) Rejecting the utility of culturally specific disgust reactions

P1) Non-human animals don’t experience a worse quality of life worrying about whether they’re going to be eaten by other humans after they’re dead, humans do.

P2) IF there exists healthy human cultures in which humans being eaten by non-human animals after they’re dead is seen as a positive (for example in Tibet, having your energy transferred into that of a bird is seen as a beautiful thing or green burials where your body can more easily become nutrients for both animals and plants) THEN healthy human cultures in which non-human animals are eaten by humans is also likely possible

P3) There exists healthy human cultures in which humans being eaten by non-human animals after they’re dead is seen as a positive

P4) If non-human animals don’t experience a worse quality of life worrying about whether they’re going to be eaten by other humans after they’re dead, humans do AND healthy human cultures in which non-human animals are eaten by humans is likely possible THEN even if it’ll be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by animals products (in the same way as if no one ever felt pressured by sexist beauty standards to shave their legs again), that doesn’t mean that it’s not morally permissible to consume some of those animal products at the moment (i.e. it’s not comparable to cannibalism where you’re causing worse quality of life in other humans by normalizing it or normalizing the standard that women should have their genitals mutilated as neither the choice to shave your legs or eat thrown out animal products necessitates violating anyone’s rights)

P5) IF (even if it’ll be a better world when everyone is vegan and we’re all disgusted by animals products, that doesn’t mean that it’s not morally permissible to consume some of those animal products at the moment) THEN (IF I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity THEN I should not reject consuming animal products [as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity])

P6) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

C) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity, and I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

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Or secondly without even challenging their gut disgust reaction to thinking it would be treating the animal without dignity you could try something close to a consequentialist argument:

A3) Refutation of P5 of A1 using Tom Regan’s worse-off principle

P1) If I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should promote freeganism on rare occasions where it’s an effective advocacy tool at encouraging people to stop buying animal products because the principle that I should avoid very minor self-harm in the disgust it brings to mind when advocating shouldn’t override the principle that it’s immoral to pass up easy opportunities to encourage people to stop buying animal products (which leads to the breeding and killing of animals) because I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which everyone passed up on those opportunities, so I should act according to that maxim by which I can at the same time will that it should become a universal law

P2) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

P3) P1 entails if I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

C) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity, and I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

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Or thirdly you could you could try challenging the necessity of the disgust reaction:

A4) Kant’s Indirect Principle For Advocating For Freeganism

P1) If I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity THEN I should promote freeganism on rare occasions where it’s an effective advocacy tool at encouraging people to stop buying animal products because although killing an animal isn’t treating the animal with dignity, eating an animal to prevent waste is, because you’re eating food that would otherwise have been thrown out, so less food needs to be produced, causing less harm to the environment AND if it had gone to the landfill it might have gotten eaten by maggots which can survive on any food like rotting vegetables, but it would be much less dignity than you could show the animal by putting that energy to use in achieving happy flourishing yourself and setting an example for others.

P2) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

P3) P1 entails if I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

C) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity, and I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

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Or finally you could try nudging them away from deontology with a kind of virtue ethics argument a la W.D. Ross:

A5) Refutation of P5 of A1 using W.D.Ross’s principle of prima facie duties

P1) If I accept W.D.Ross’s theory of prima facie duties THEN I accept any felt obligation is a prima facie duty, though it can be overridden depending on the circumstances by another one, that doesn’t mean that the original obligation disappears, it simply means that it’s defeasible and it usually continues to operate in the background.

P2) If I accept any felt obligation is a prima facie duty, though it can be overridden depending on the circumstances by another one, that doesn’t mean that the original obligation disappears, it simply means that it’s defeasible and it usually continues to operate in the background THEN I accept when I have a felt obligation that talking positively about the consumption of animal products is disgusting and would be an act of self-harm to myself AND I learn about people using freeganism as an effective advocacy tool in turning people vegan who wouldn’t otherwise have considered it, such that I now feel a stronger felt obligation to do the same that the duty to do the latter is overriding, but I’m going to work extra hard to advocate for veganism such that I can know I’ve contributed to a future world in which no one needs to talk about the positive effects of consuming animal products, because the initial obligation still operates in the background even though it was overridden.

P3) I accept W.D.Ross’s theory of prima facie duties

P4) P2 entails if I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity then I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

P5) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity

C) I should live in a way which treats animals with dignity, and I should not reject consuming animal products (as it is not the antithesis of treating animals with dignity)

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References

The video I’m responding to is called ‘Freeganism is Evil’ by Footsoldier:

The idea for the analogy came from this great video called Thoughts On Freeganism by Catherine Klein:

“I understand that shaving my legs and my armpits and everything is a sexist double standard, why are women expected to be completely hairless in order to be seen as attractive? It doesn’t make sense and I think it’s totally badass when women break this norm and go all natural. It does make me question my choices like I probably should be like fuck the patriarchy and stop shaving, just like I probably should be horrified by my leather boots and throw them out because one could argue that shaving your legs is an example of internalized oppression, but at the end of the day, neither of my choices here are causing direct harm to anyone, so I don’t really see changing my ways as a moral necessity.”

Freeganism article on the Philosophical Vegan Wiki:

Freeganism video catalogue

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Response Video to ‘Veganism vs. Animal Liberation’

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Full Transcript:

Alright, this is going to be a response to Eisel’s video on ‘Veganism vs. Animal Liberation’ with a critique at the end about common arguments he uses in his videos.

So, as far as I know Eisel has never tried to come up with precise wording for what his preferred definition of veganism would be, so at a guess from watching his videos, I can imagine it would be something along the lines of:

“A personal duty to respect the dignity of animals & a desire to build a social movement to, among other things, lobby government for a higher percentage territory of managed wildlife habitat.”

And we can guess his argument for this philosophy being contained in the word vegan is that… its the best descriptive adjective for a human-centred movement. And, that the goal is to win over enough passionate people who are dedicated enough to take on the personal principle of avoiding animal products, as a basis for finding each other and organizing to making changes to our communities and institutions.

The person he’s critiquing would like to abandon the word vegan in favour of advocating the ideology of anti-speciesism, as an element of total liberation. So more like a social justice movement where anti-speciesism is one axis of oppression among other struggles like anti-racism & anti-sexism. Therefore an animal-centred movement alongside other oppressed-centred movements.

So, positives to Eisel’s critique are, by solely advocating for animals through a social justice approach, you just are going to get meat eaters being turned away from caring about animals because vegans look like deluded people who view animals as citizens.

As well as vegans feeling more justified in taking violent action for animals, who they start to view as members of our society. When in reality, like I said in my earlier video, animals can’t conceptualize a tactical war to achieve rights, so they can’t desire it.

We aren’t even able to alleviate their suffering like we could human prisoners with the optimistic notion that direct actions done in other places now, may one day lead to an end to their suffering.

Negatives are, he never acknowledges any better arguments for putting more focus on words like animal liberation.

I think we need to be fighting for incremental legal animal rights laws which make it less profitable to breed animals for food. And one philosophical and legal approach which is gaining more prominence is Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, which we can say is about liberating animals to be able to express their capabilities in the wild. Links below in the description.

As well, I think he’s wrong to claim Animal Liberation is primarily tied to Singer’s views on utilitarianism. The most common association people will draw it to is the Animal Liberation Front, which people already understand that if you have activists willing to liberate animals from cages, they obviously won’t also be buying animal foods.

I have nothing against veganism as a marketable word for a boycott identity, but in terms of explaining where the principle comes from, I think legal animal rights movement, says it really clearly in the name itself about how it’s a political movement, rather than veganism with it’s history and etymology in vegetarianism, which was simply a lifestyle society.

So in conclusion, I think as well as and even better than a vegan identity, we need to start thinking of ourselves as legal animal rights advocates also, which can encompass arguments for animal rights, liberation and/or welfare.

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Part 2

Alright this is the point in the video where I’m going to go into critiquing Eisel’s most commonly used arguments, if you never feel tempted to watch an Eisel video and couldn’t care less the effect he and people like him have, that’s okay, you can just click off the video now.

So, I watched Eisel’s videos for a long time because he talked about a lot of topics I care about like a rewilding habitat approach to advocating for veganism, nihilism and encouraging a pragmatic, social science approach to many questions.

But, even though I was grateful to be introduced to lots of little conflicts between different world-views that I wasn’t previously aware of, I felt his views on issues were somewhat simplistic.

Firstly, let’s talk about his habit of arguing against the worst arguments for a world-view in order to appear superior.

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2a. Arguing against straw-men

So, Eisel likes to make the argument that you can draw an association between the top academics making arguments for a particular issue and the ineloquent layman who got their talking points from twitter, then dismiss both their reasoning as equally baseless.

[Video Clip – Veganism vs. Anti-Capitalism (vs. The Vegan Anarchist] [3]

Many of the problems we have within the intellectual ghetto of 21st century vegan politics are basically the same as the problems you have with the rest of planet earth or western academia or what have you.

And doubtless this is true in many cases, but often he never proves conclusively the association and in my view simply enjoys teeing off against bad arguments which make him look good.

So to demonstrate, imagine two rooms of people, where in both rooms one person is advocating veganism and the other is raising concerns about how it may create problems for preserving and increasing the number of people who can speak indigenous languages and play an active role in the culture.

In the first room of laymen twitter users, we’re asked to imagine that the person raising concerns about veganism’s impact on indigenous culture would view the threat as being so detrimental, that they would rather stick rigidly to one conception of what indigenous culture entails and not accept any idea of the culture evolving over time.

So, the meat eater asks the vegan; “do you see nothing positive in these indigenous cultures? Do you see nothing worth saving in native tradition?” And so, having laid the premise of someone putting forth a bad argument that we the listener would also be frustrated to have to answer, Eisel can jump in to save the day and answer with an apparent sense of superiority:

[Video Clip – Answering “White Privilege” (VS. Joey Carbstrong!)] [4]

My answer to that is two-fold, one, when you think of culture, do you of it as a weakness or a strength? I’m dead serious, really think about it, is your culture holding you back? Is it dead weight? Is it a burden you’re going to place on the shoulders of the next generation?

Cool, so for Eisel that’s video over, that’s the advice to remember to take away with you. But how would this actually go over, if you were in a room with a well read, articulate person offering reasonable concerns about the impact of veganism on indigenous people. Well we can imagine the meat eater asking “What about indigenous people on the bones of their asses, hunting as a cheap way of acquiring food and having a culture of sharing with elders in their community who can’t do it themselves, do you see nothing about that worth preserving? And now Eisel’s answer;

[Video Clip – Answering “White Privilege” (VS. Joey Carbstrong!)] [4]

When you think of culture, do you of it as a weakness or a strength?

Clearly this is inadequate, and everything about taking those actions in that circumstance and that culture is commendable. Did it sound like that argument could be put into practice just as easily on a more nuanced critique of veganism and it be just as easily refuted, as Eisel would have you believe?:

[Video Clip – Veganism vs. Anti-Capitalism (vs. The Vegan Anarchist] [5]

Every so often, London School of Economics has people with PhDs, who are on the far-left, making these same sorts of arguments, and they’re just as easily refuted.

So, the correct answer for me there is to say, of course I wouldn’t condemn them for killing animals in that hyper specific circumstance, and I would campaign for free & better education, community gardening projects, etc. To improve their lot in life. But, if you’re living in the city and your only access to hunting grounds is driving an hour out your way, then a healthier and more ethical use of your money would simply be picking up tofu from the supermarket instead of meat.

As a side note, this is also where I view my definition of veganism as an animal products boycott behaviour as having advantages over other ones like the vegan society which defines veganism as a philosophy:

Firstly, because when simply explained as a behaviour, it’s less easily misunderstood as a belief-ism one needs to buy into which could negatively change everything about how one currently views the word. And rather can be related to as a tool for achieving goals one has through ones own philosophy and culture already. Like the Mi’kmaq legend of how a demi-god used magic to obtain unlimited amounts of beaver meat from a single bone, reflecting a wish for abundance disconnected from the need to hunt.

Secondly, The strong commitment is clear through it being a boycott protest, which we can really easy conceptually tie to other boycotts, where someone boycotting South African products during apartheid wouldn’t feel comfortable flying over their and joining the police force themselves. More so than in other definitions where you’re just saying you’re abstaining from using the end animal products.

And finally, I am actually fine with my definition being softer on for example subsistence hunters. I’ve got a video on my channel of Penan tribes people in Indonesia explaining how it would be repulsive to them to keep animals in captivity to farm, and I think this is great animal rights advocacy, so again a positive distinction.

2b. Faulty comparisons

So, a faulty comparison is when you compare one thing to another that is really not related, in order to make one thing look more or less desirable than it really is.

For example, the comparison; broccoli has significantly less fat than the leading candy bar!

While both broccoli and candy bars can be considered snacks, comparing the two in terms of fat content and ignoring the significant difference in taste, leads to the faulty comparison.

Now in Eisel’s case, here’s an example from his video called Against Anarchism:

[Video Clip – Against Anarchism (In Principle and in Practice, esp. “Left Anarchism”)] [4]

So someone could challenge me, I’m steal-manning Theo’s position here to say well look even if you don’t subscribe to this long term more utopian idea of where this is going to, and even if you don’t agree with this in principle, in this sense, can’t you see some short-term benefit in anarchism here and now, in the same way that I can see a benefit in charity. . .

And if I argued back pointing out the relative historical triviality of libertarianism, look this isn’t really a major influential political philosophy, but if on a scale of one to ten, if we rate libertarianism like a three out of ten, then left-wing anarchism is a zero, it has no significance at all.

Now, the obvious mistake he made here is the pragmatic goals of right or left-wing anarchists would simply be to win people over to transitionery policy steps through left or right-wing libertarianism. So the logical comparison to make would be comparing support between right wing anarchism and left wing anarchism, or right wing libertarianism against left wing libertarianism. Not comparing the more public friendly image of right wing libertarians against the more radical side from the left wing anarchists.

Next, an example from his video on China’s policies in Xinjiang towards the Uiyghur Muslims:

(Video Clip – China is Right About Xinjiang. By Eisel) [5]

Is it fair to say that this is cultural genocide? My answer to that question is yes, this is cultural genocide, but we should say in the same breath without any hypocrisy that what the government of the United States of America attempted to do in Afghanistan also was cultural genocide.

So even if we examine the cultural project that the United States embarked on and compare it to the cultural project that the government of China is embarked on, we have to say the body count for what China is doing and how it is doing it is much much lower, the negative impacts are much more limited.

Now, in reality the cultural heritage that was attempted to be destroyed in Afghanistan, if we can even call it genocide really was only aimed at disarming the movement of rural Pashtun’s who chose to take up arms only 10 years earlier, naive though that aim was. Rules of engagement listed mosques as protected buildings and a conservative Islamic government was put in place.

China on the other hand is locking up millions, bulldozing it’s towns and mosques, subsidizing settlers to move in on mass and take coordinator positions. All in an effort to brainwash the people into thinking of themselves as more like Han Chinese who should praise the state for their glorious history. So the level of cultural destruction is played up in the Afghan case to appear more equal and suffering as a result is played down in the Chinese case to appear better.

And finally a video he did on civil disobedience:

(Video Clip – Civil Disobedience is the Opposite of Democracy. By Eisel) [6]

Do you think Israel should be ruled by the sober judgment of a hundred percent of the population participating in a democracy where they have to stand up and make rational arguments where they believe in and consider the law of the Constitution and people get to vote and all this stuff [In short…] do you think it should be a procedural rational democracy involving everyone OR do you think that a small minority of religious fanatics should just be able to go and engage in civil disobedience?

. . . Civil disobedience is; rule of your society by the most militant minority.

So, this is both a bad comparison and a faulty dilemma, there are obvious degrees of punishment a government can bring down on people breaking the law, any direction the society goes in for either not controlling or bowing to protesters demands is still the moral culpability of the government and those who participated in the party political process. There is an obvious legal and moral difference between victimless civil disobedience aimed at all people being treated equally in society like collecting salt from the sea or staying seated on the bus, to that of stealing another country’s resources against international law.

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2c. Jumping to conclusions

So, in the video I’m responding to he claims Singer has said he himself eats meat:

[Sanity vs. Insanity: Veganism vs. Animal Liberation] [7]

Peter Singer very casually talks about eating meat in his own life when he’s in a particular situation at a restaurant other people order meat and he’ll eat meat too for no reason

But try as I might googling, I can’t find any quote anywhere to back up his claim, so more than likely this is just part of a long running pattern of Eisel jumping to conclusions that fit his narrative.

The reality is not much better, but the fact is Singer acts vegan when at home and vegetarian when travelling and there are no vegan options in the restaurant he wants to visit.

When I’m shopping for myself, it will be vegan. But when I’m travelling and it’s hard to get vegan food in some places or whatever, I’ll be vegetarian. I won’t eat eggs if they’re not free-range, but if they’re free-range, I will. I won’t order a dish that is full of cheese, but I won’t worry about, say, whether an Indian vegetable curry was cooked with ghee.

Singer’s book ‘Animal Liberation’ promoted a preference consequentialist view which makes veganism an obligation, it was only later he started to slide towards hedonistic utilitarianism.

I also found a particularly hilarious example of Eisel not watching the video he’s responding to to the end and making a response video critiquing the guy for burning a poster of Mao Zedong, which he in fact doesn’t do and Serpentza gives the same reasons for not doing it that Eisel is supposedly critiquing him for doing.

So, Serpentza makes a video saying how he couldn’t understand at first why Chinese people don’t reject putting up posters of Mao Zedong in the same way German people reject putting up posters of Hitler today, but he learnt to sympathise with the fact it’s part of the culture to see him simply as a symbol who kept the country strong and independent.

Eisel’s response; ‘why would you burn a poster of Mao Zedong, you don’t have any sympathy for the Chinese people or their culture, you ignorant, unresearched, lazy fuck.’ Hahaha

(Chairman Mao – Why do people worship this MURDERER? By Serpentza) [8]

04:40 – [The communist party are] very good at engineering what people think from a very young age through education and through various different social programs. People still believe that if it wasn’t for him, China wouldn’t be the way it is, people still believe that he’s a great man who maybe made a few small mistakes and if you want to call a few small mistakes murdering millions of people, so be it.

11:10 – So at the end of the day, am I going to burn this portrait of Mao Zedong? No I’m not going to burn it and you all know why because I respect my Chinese friends, I respect my Chinese family and I respect Chinese people and their opinions, at least to a certain degree. And while I do not agree with everything that this man stands for – and why honestly if I could have met him in real life, just like most people say about you know taking out Hitler, if they met him in real life that’s something I would have done – at the end of the day though because I do respect my Chinese friends, family and Chinese people, I will not burn this because it’s distasteful, because it shows a massive lack of respect towards the Chinese people.

(Against Serpentza, re: Chairman Mao’s Portrait on the Wall. By Eisel) [9]

03:25 – So he had a video recently in which he featured himself burning a portrait of Mao Zedong. I guess I’ll give the link below this video and currently that video has over 200,000 views, so I certainly can’t hope to challenge that by reaching an audience of equal size and you know he’s reaching that audience because he’s telling people something they already want to hear. . .

04:55 – I am not in a position to say to people who put his poster on the wall this is all that Mao Zedong represents this is the only thing it represents and this is what it must mean to you. . .

I think it comes down to a trend of Eisel’s to jump to conclusions about a persons position so that he can believe he has superior positions to the person and mock them. It’s part of a conspiracy mindset. Like believing with confidence the assassination of both Kennedy brothers was done by the CIA and that people like Abby Martin are government agents for Russia.

I’ll link to another funny example where he did this to me in the description box down below.

But yeah, that’s the end of the video, all the best, peace.

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References

1. Beyond Compassion and Humanity; Justice for Non-human Animals by Martha Nussbaum – https://activistjourneys.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/beyond-compassion-and-humanity-justice-for-non-human-animals-martha-c-nussbaum/

2. The Capability Approach – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/

3. Veganism vs. Anti-Capitalism (vs. The Vegan Anarchist) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFqvoTLd5_k

4. Against Anarchism (In Principle and in Practice, esp. “Left Anarchism” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaTvML9ATaY

5. China is Right About Xinjiang – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqgPw5Z-Guw

6. Civil Disobedience is the Opposite of Democracy. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs9HO4BjwrY

7. Sanity vs. Insanity: Veganism vs. Animal Liberation – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXghrCRoz5s

8. Chairman Mao – Why do people worship this MURDERER? By Serpentza – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_ZCf1dZv6g

9. Against Serpentza, re: Chairman Mao’s Portrait on the Wall – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_AFVx0SOZk

10. Eisel’s use of faulty comparisons to oversimplify problems. – https://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?p=48462

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Debate On The Definition of Veganism

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Debate Proposition: We should define veganism as “an animal products boycott” which is primarily against animal agriculture, and not “veganism is a way of life that seeks to place the value of animal life, health and liberty above the value of substitutable classes of goods, services and uses derived from animals.”

At the 32:30 mins mark in the video, I gave a rebuttal to Shadow’s definition, on why I think myself and other vegans don’t and shouldn’t have to fit under his definition, but either he didn’t understand it and/or I didn’t explain myself clearly enough.

He views anyone who would ‘substitute meat in their shopping trolley for vegetables’ as what qualifies them as a vegan (fitting under his definition), but I disagree that it has to be because you’re strictly valuing a hypothetical animal that got a chance to live, higher than the one that died to make the animal product which you’re substituting for vegetable products.

I desire to grant guardianship laws to animals to collectively be able to seek refuge in a specific area of wildlife habitat because I can recognize they desire to express their capabilities, having land they can call their territory helps them fulfil this need, and I can recognize if I was born into the world as an animal or severely disabled human I would want access to resources to fulfil my needs.

Another way of saying this could be I place the value of getting to see wildlife in dense wildlife habitat above the value of strip malls, business parks and open cast coal mines.

I don’t think I ought place the value of animal life, health and liberty above the value of substitutable classes of goods, services and uses derived from animals.

So two exceptions to the rule could be:

1. I don’t think I’m viewing the value for the animal to live in the wild as being higher than the value a sheep would find on a semi-wild farm protected from predators and then turned into a substitutable class of meat towards the end of it’s life. (Even thought I think a fully wild habitat would offer more life for more animals and not slaughtering would offer a more virtuous life for the human).
2. And I even think that I value the class of goods of carrots above the substitutable class of goods of apples which puts the value of animals life lower in some circumstances, like turning over soil to let seagulls feast on the worms.

My argument is simply that we ought engineer a set of circumstances in which a much higher number of animals are getting to express their capabilities in wildlife habitat. But I don’t think that necessarily has to be hashed out to ‘doing it for the animals’ or ‘because I’m viewing their life in the wild as universally of higher value to ways you could individually treat them as means to an end substitutable classes of goods or services.’ Because I wouldn’t necessarily.

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Shadow Starshine’s response to the exceptions to the rule (after the debate had ended) was:

Right, let me respond to the second point first. It’s where I’ve admitted that my definition has the highest weakness is that what a “class” is, is vague. I obviously don’t mean specific fruits and meats and whatever to constitute legitimate classes, and I want “food” to be a class of product. or “medicine”, things of that level. I agree that one can sort of twist the wording of class to mean things like you’re implying which is beyond my intention.

The first point is interesting, I may or may not agree with it. I’ll think on it.

How to simply explain what veganism is and argue for it

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Script for a two part video series, plus formal syllogisms.

Part One

Part 2

Coming soon!

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Table of Contents

• 1. The Vegan Definition – 1a. Intro
  • 1b. How to explain what veganism is
  • 1c. Why not other definitions?
  • 1d. What specifically is wrong with other definitions?
  • 1e. Good definitions
  • 1f. Outro
• 2. Arguments for Veganism – 2a. Intro
  • 2b. General Purpose – Name The Trait
  • 2c. Consequentialist – Marginal cases
  • 2d. Virtue Ethics – Respect for Animal Capabilities
  • 2e. Deontology – The Golden Rule
  • 2f. Nihilist Ethics – Property Rights for Animals
  • 2g. Outro
• 3. Formal Syllogisms – 3a. General Purpose – Name The Trait
  • 3b. Consequentialist – Marginal Cases
  • 3c. Virtue Ethics – Respect for Animal Capabilities
  • 3d. Deontology – The Golden Rule
  • 3e. Nihilist Ethics – Property Rights for Animals
• 4. References

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1. The Vegan Definition

1a. Intro

Hello, okay this is going to be the first of two videos, where in this first video I introduce my preferred definition of veganism, explain why I think it’s the best one for advocacy, then in the second video run you through 5 a-mazing arguments for veganism and how best to argue for it. This is mainly for vegans to become better skilled at advocating, but any feedback is more than welcome.

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1b. How to explain what veganism is

I define veganism as simply “an animal products boycott.”

I make the point of saying it’s one campaign tactic among many, aimed primarily at achieving the end of animal agriculture.

And that personally I see the principle behind the action as being grounded in the animal rights movement, seeking collective legal rights for animals to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren’t subject to human cruelty. In a similar way to how the act of boycotting South African products or the act of boycotting the Montgomery bus company was grounded in a larger civil rights movement.

Other boycotts didn’t have a specific name for the identity one took on when boycotting, the principle for why they boycotted was contained in what it meant to be part of a larger movement e.g. being a civil rights advocate. So I would just encourage people to think of themselves as animal rights advocates first, fighting for the legal protection of animals. Though you could also call yourself an animal liberation advocate fighting to free non-human animals to be able to express their capabilities in managed wildlife habitat or a sanctuary.

As for why someone would arrive at the ethical conclusion to boycott, it could be a million ways, but the three main ethical schools of thought you can draw from are consequentialism, virtue ethics and deontology. I would just be prepared to tailor your arguments to the person you’re standing in front of, as we’ll discuss in the second video. It’s not important for you to know the school you’re arguing from, but I’ll give you them anyway as an introduction to each ethical argument for an animal products boycott.

So, five ways to explain the principle that got you into veganism and what branch of philosophy it may be related to:

Hedonistic Utilitarianism: The principle of not breeding sentient life into the world where you know you will cause more suffering on a global calculus than happiness. Examples: climate change, stress and pain in slaughterhouse than longer happy life in wild with low rates of predation, stress to slaughterhouse workers who are more likely to abuse their family).

Preference Consequentialism: The principle of not breeding sentient life into the world to kill when you know they will have interests to go on living longer than would be profitable. Examples: They have habits for things they’d like to do each day and they show you by their desire not to be loaded onto scary trucks and to a slaughterhouse with screams and smells of death.

Virtue Ethics: The principle of not breeding a sentient life into captivity when you know you could leave room for other animals to enjoy happy flourishing being able to express all their capabilities in wild habitat. Not wanting to parasitically take away life with meaning for low-order pleasure in our hierarchy of needs which we can find elsewhere.

Deontology: The principle of everyone should only act in such a way that it would still be acceptable to them if it were to become universal law. So not breeding sentient life into existence, only to keep them confined, tear families apart and kill them later, as you wouldn’t want it to happen to you.

Nihlist Ethics: The principle that you should be wary of in-authentically acting in a way you don’t believe due to outside social pressures, like that acting un-caringly is necessary to what it means to be a man. So testing out values you were brought up with against new ones as you go and coming to the conclusion that you prefer a society where most have the value of seeing animals flourishing in nature and not in captivity/pain.

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1c. Why not use other definitions?

The reason I would encourage people to use the definition “an animal products boycott” and not other definitions is it gets at the root motivation people have for being vegan without being divisive about which ethical system is best.

In 1944 those members of the vegetarian society who were avoiding all use of animal products, created their own vegan society and came up with the word vegan. They did this after a series of debates in which they voiced their concern that we should also be advocating the boycott of the dairy and egg industries.

Now I acknowledge that one problem with defining veganism as an “animal products boycott” is people saying “well would you be okay with hunting wild animals yourself then?” But to that I would answer “implicit in the word boycott is an ethical judgement on the activity that creates the product.”

So, for 99% of people protesting animal farming, it’s going to be hypocritical to go hunting, because you’re desiring to prevent the incentives for the killing from ever happening so you couldn’t then go out and do it yourself. It’s a positive that we get to really easy conceptually tie this to other boycotts where someone boycotting South African products during apartheid wouldn’t feel comfortable with flying over their and joining the police force themselves, more so than in other definitions where you’re just saying you’re abstaining from using the end animal products.

But I am actually fine with my definition being softer on for example subsistence hunters. I’ve got a video on my channel of Penan tribes people in Indonesia explaining how it would be repulsive to them to keep animals in captivity to farm, and I think this is great animal rights advocacy, so again a positive distinction.

So the idea that some tiny 0.001% of people who might boycott animal products, may also feel fine with going out hunting themselves would just be one of a number of fringe groups you already have under many definitions, like neo-nazis desiring to boycott animal products and wanting to commit harms against humans. Which we simply have to denounce or distance ourselves from in our animal rights advocacy anyway.

Another concern people may have is that boycotting sounds like you’re primarily negatively opposed to a thing and trying to reduce your reliance on that thing. But I would argue you have that with every definition and that by creating a distance between the behaviour (veganism) and the principle (animal rights) you allow people to see the action as part of a big tent animal rights movement, where you’re hoping through boycotting, lobbying, starting vegan cafes, food not bombs stalls and foraging groups to create the breathing room necessary for legislation and rewilding where you can get to enjoy a more compassionate local community and see more animals flourishing in wildlife habitat.

To draw attention away from veganism as a political act is to make veganism look simply like an identity one takes on to look cool or be part of a subculture. Whereas people can relate boycott’s to other real world events as great positive coming together moments under a liberation politics. For example car-sharing during the Montgomery bus boycott, students leading the call to stop subsidising Israel and before that South Africa, the widespread boycotting of a reactionary tabloid newspaper in the UK that ran stories saying mass suffocation at a football stadium due to overcrowding and fences were the fans fault. So boycotting to show your real felt ties to the land you stand on. The first boycott was people simply withdrawing their labour from an imperialist landlord in Ireland in a desire to build something greater once he’d left, so I think it is very flexible to positive intention [1]

Now, does this definition leave room for any exceptions to the rule? Well yes in a way, but I would say a positive one, in that it allows for waste animal products to be used if no profit finds its way back to the person who caused the harm. If you can get a supermarket to redirect its 1000 loaves of bread containing whey from going in the dumpster to a food bank, that can only be a benefit to the world.

Also, it doesn’t attempt to include animal entertainment boycotts in what it means to be vegan, and simply leaves that to be included in what it means to be an animal rights advocate. Although it’s so similar one could raise an eyebrow about why someone would boycott animal agriculture and not animal cruelty as entertainment. People already view veganism as simply abstaining from the use of animal products, so we just do have to contend with why awful people like some eco-fascists desire to be vegans and denounce them. To try and pretend that someone boycotting animal products can’t also be an awful person in other ways is wilfully ignorant. In the same way, claiming that ex-vegans could never have been vegan for not having understood the ethical arguments is fallacious and off-putting.

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1d. What specifically is wrong with other definitions?

Why not define veganism as reducing suffering which is the consequentialist reason for being vegan? Because ‘reducing suffering’ is too big, too abstract, too idealistic, beyond the capacity of one person to ever achieve, laudable but doomed to failure. Whereas ‘boycotting animal products’ is not. ‘Reducing suffering’ creates the impression of the martyr, the need to live a ridiculously puritan lifestyle, like Jain monks sweeping the floor everywhere they walk. And excludes all other ethical systems.

Why not define veganism as the rule that ‘man should not exploit animal’ which is the deontological reason for being vegan? Because it immediately brings to mind the plenty of ways we can pragmatically rescue animals and improve their circumstances while still less obviously exploitative-ly keeping them captive, e.g. rescuing dogs, chickens or horses. And excludes all other ethical systems.

The debates that lead up to the creation of the vegan society were about the dairy industry. They were raised equally from a concern about well-being and about rights:

Dr. Anna Bonus Kingsford, a member of the Vegetarian Society in 1944 argued for a total boycott of animal products, saying “[the dairy industry] must involve some slaughter I think and some suffering to the cows and calves.”

Why not define veganism as a hodge-podge of the two main ethical systems, consequentialism and deontology, as the modern vegan society tries to do? Because it’s far too convoluted and open to misinterpretation. You get into debates about what does “as far as is possible and practicable” mean, when you could just say veganism is a boycott. If you aren’t capable of participating for being eating disordered for example, that’s ok, you can be ethically on par with or more ethical than a vegan in your own way, but you just aren’t able to participate in the boycott.

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1e. Good Definitions

So, In summary, I’ll go over what I think are the best definitions:

What is veganism?

1. An animal products boycott.

(This is a minimal behavioural commitment, with very little confusion about what it entails. The idea that it’s a protest allows for other priorities to override the idea like the need to take vaccines with egg product, but either way it’s still a strong commitment to a commercial boycott. It’s both the reason the vegan society was created and simply the colloquial understanding of a vegan as ‘a person who does not eat or use animal products’, but leaves room for freeganism.)

And/or…

2. A way of living which seeks to exclude all use of animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.

(This includes other boycott behaviours like avoiding animals in entertainment, but is vague about whether it entails a weaker or stronger commitment to the act of boycotting itself. Potentially we could move to solely this one definition when we can afford to give more or less equal focus to campaigning against other industries).

What is Animal Rights?

The philosophy which says animals should be granted collective legal rights to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren’t subject to human cruelty. With the few exceptions where the law is overridden by right to self-defence or special dispensation from the government for example to practice some scientific testing to cure diseases, as well as breed and keep guide dogs for the blind.

(If a fox kills a rabbit because it’s the only way it can stay strong and pass on it’s genes, it’s part of a wonderfully delicate ecosystem. I have the choice to pick an apple off a tree and enjoy watching the rabbit. So, not wanting to parasitically take away life with instinctual desires to express their high order capabilities for low-order pleasure in our hierarchy of needs which we can find elsewhere.)

What is the Animal Rights Movement?

(Same again, just swapping philosophy for social movement, so…)

A social movement which seeks to gain collective legal rights for animals to have a refuge in dense wildlife habitat where they aren’t subject to human cruelty, etc. Etc.

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1f. Outro

Let me know what you think in a comment down below, all the best, peace.

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2. Arguments for Veganism

2a. Intro

Hello, okay this is going to be a long video, so time-codes in the description if you just want to flick around. This is the second video in a two part series, where in the first video I introduced my preferred definition of veganism, why I think it’s the best one. And now in this video I I will run you through 5 a-mazing arguments for veganism. This is mainly for vegans to become better skilled at advocating, but any feedback is more than welcome.

So, what are the best arguments for advocating veganism?

Well that really depends on your audience, but I’ll run through a few and give my thoughts on the pros and cons of each.

First off let’s start with an argument that is designed to work on any ethical system, called name the trait.

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2a. General Purpose – Name The Trait

Basically it asks what would be the ethical implications for humans if we used the same justifications that meat eaters use for how we treat animals.

1. Would you prefer not to kill a human for food if you could easily access and eat plant food?
2. Would you prefer not to kill a non-human animal for food if you could easily access and eat plant food?
3. If you answered that you’re not ok with killing humans for food and you are ok with killing non-human animals for food, what trait is true of the animal that would let you feel justified in killing animals. And, if that became true of humans, would you then feel justified in killing humans if you could easily eat and had access to plant food in either scenario?

So lack of intelligence, no social contract, etc.

So one positive feature of this argument is it directly makes real for people the severity of their actions.

The negatives are it doesn’t directly deal with any of the pragmatics of day to day living. It’s this abstract hypothetical in which if the other persons position is shown to be absurd, nothing they said was of any value. You may win your point but still alienate the person. People like to have the feeling that they have imparted some knowledge about the world in a two way conversation, not that they are just being shown up for their mistakes.

One way to alleviate this problem could be to ask beforehand, how confident are you on a scale of 1 to 10 that eating animal products is ethically justifiable in your current situation in life? Engage them in the idea that we all have assumptions we were raised with which we have to work hard to see through sometimes, as a precursor to asking your questions. Having had the conversation, ask if their confidence was increased or decreased.

But even this tact again runs the issue of people just saying a high number and then feeling obligated to argue strongly to justify their conviction. Or even coming away with a lower number, but now believing it’s even more of a complex topic than they previously thought – so feeling vindicated in continuing to consume animal products because “there are no easy answers”, even though the agnostic position should be to ‘do no harm’.

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2b. Consequentialist – Marginal cases

Very similar to name the trait.

When meat eaters try to justify the killing of non-human animals they often reach for the idea that humans have some superior ability which entitles them to control the lives of those without that ability. How this intuition plays out in society has led to disabled people working below minimum wage or the putting off of using tax payers’ money towards accessible public amenities like bus stops with the right pavement height for wheelchair users.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

The argument from marginal cases takes the form of a proof by contradiction. It attempts to show that you cannot coherently believe both that all humans have moral status, and that all non-humans lack moral status.

Consider a cow. We ask why it is acceptable to kill this cow for food – we might claim, for example, that the cow has no concept of self and therefore it cannot be wrong to kill it. However, many young children may also lack this same concept of “self”. So if we accept the self-concept criterion, then we must also accept that killing children is acceptable in addition to killing cows, which is considered a reductio ad absurdum. So the concept of self cannot be our criterion.

Then we can say for any criterion or set of criteria (either capacities, e.g. language, consciousness, the ability to have moral responsibilities towards others; or relations, e.g. sympathy or power relations), there exists some “marginal” human who is mentally handicapped in some way that would also meet the criteria for having no moral status.

Positives are it works well on consequentialists.

Negatives are: because of its focus on how similar humans are to animals it could unintentionally leave you with a warped picture of only the cost and complexities of helping disabled people to engage in as many of the aspects of society that they are capable of and would like to. So coming to the end of a discussion solely focused on connecting two negative facts about some disabled people and non-human animals.

Therefore it’s important that there should be time spent acknowledging both the unique perspectives of neuro-divergent people who have improved our society dramatically like Albert Einstein. As well as the unique capabilities of non-human animals to pursue what they have reasons to value, that is a great source of wonder to us, which inspires the arts and which we can study through behavioural science.

Which leads us well onto…

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2c. Virtue Ethics – Respect for Animal Capabilities

If the wonder that we experience in viewing wild animals is not ‘how similar to us they are’, but their ‘real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value’ and one sufficient reason we grant this freedom at least to a basic extent to humans is they have a desire to achieve what they find valuable then; the fact non-human animals experience this desire too means we ought extend these freedoms to animals.

So, a holistic world-view of not wanting to reduce both the quality and quantity of positive experiences humans can have with animals, as well as animals with other animals for low-order pleasures such as taste/texture.

From the philosophical vegan wiki:

Veganism is at its core about peace and compassion. By not buying animal products, you may even feel more at peace and start to get other ideas about how to become a more compassionate person in other areas of your life. Feeding your virtue in one way can help you become a happier person, while doing harm to animals can lead to cruelty or caprice in other ways e.g. the link between slaughterhouse workers and rates of domestic violence.

Of course be prepared to acknowledge that there are fringe cases of people going vegan as a method to feed a concept of superiority and use it as a tool to bash others over the head with.

Positives are it’s hard to argue against without making yourself look bad aha.

Negative are: we’re used to treating virtue as an extra something special we’re not required to do, but makes you an even better person if you do voluntarily. So the idea that we ought do something just because we find wonder in it doesn’t appear to hold a lot of weight on it’s own. Therefore probably best used in tandem with an argument like name the trait. Still the argument offers an avenue to talk about what goals and ambitions people have and how breaking with addictions to unhealthy foods could make them happier because of the compassion they would also be showing animals and the better world with more wildlife in it that they could help to bring about.

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2d. Deontology – The Golden Rule

The golden rule isn’t strictly deontological and can be used on anyone, but it is also very close to how deontologists you may encounter view philosophy, like Kant’s categorical imperative for example: The principle that everyone should only act in such a way that it would still be acceptable to them if it were to become universal law. So when applied to animals; not breeding sentient life into existence, only to keep them confined, tear families apart and kill them later, as you wouldn’t want it to happen to you.

From the philosohical vegan wiki:

• Ask people if they accept the golden rule
• Ask if they were in an animals’ hooves if they would like being born into this world as property, only to be killed at a young age for another’s taste pleasure.
• The response should typically be “no”, but…

There are three common objections:

1. The objection that we could eat nothing, because “If I were a plant I wouldn’t want to be eaten either”

This is easily answered, but may lead into more discussion: If you were a plant you would not care about being eaten, because plants are not sentient and have no brain or ability to think. The only likely response is plant-sentience, which is an argument rife with pseudoscience and misunderstanding of physiology and the nature of sentience and intelligence, as well as often supernatural claims.

2. The arbitrary objection that the golden rule only applies to humans.

Which begs the question of “why?”, and “why not only to your own family and not to strangers?” Or “why not only to your own ‘race’?”

3. The rejection of application of the golden rule to those who in theory would not or could not apply it back to you.

This is a misunderstanding of the golden rule, which operates independently of how others might treat you.

Positives are it’s simplicity.

Negatives are by comparing ‘how similar to us they are’ in their desire to avoid simple things like pain, it again, like the first two arguments, unintentionally draws people’s attention away from animals desire to ‘do and be what they have reason to value’. E.g. conjures up imaginings of having to share a busy high street with masses of sheep and cows because they want to enjoy the same right to free movement as you. However, you can easily argue that as humans there are some ways that we can intelligently gather that fences separating human habitat from animals would be a plus because it’s in cows own interest not to get lost inside a concrete jungle.

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2f. Nihilist Ethics – Property Rights for Animals

If you desire the ability to live a full life on your property because it satisfies a desire you have to meet your basic needs and you’re in favour of guardianship laws to protect this ability for severely mentally disabled people in court because they can’t defend themselves then; you should really desire non-human animals who also have these needs have a legal right to their wild habitat as property and should enjoy guardianship laws which protects their legal rights in court through appointment of a guardian to represent the case of one or a group of animals unless another reason is specified on pain of living in bad faith.

This centres the discussion on how you may be excluding other groups because it’s the social norm. If there’s one norm that unites nihilists in their rejection of universalist ethics, it’s that of the desire to live authentically, so not acting in a way you don’t believe due to outside social pressures, like that acting without compassion is necessary to what it means to be a man.

Everyone has some values they were brought up with that inform their meta-ethical system. It’s up to us to test out those values as we go along against new ones we discover and decide what kind of world we want to live in. We are meaning-seeking creatures innately, we can if we chose seek the happy flourishing of ourselves and others in the process, instead of living a life predicated on taking from others happy flourishing unnecessarily.

Getting to a stage in human civilization where we are able to derive meaning from compassionately caring for the basic needs of every person could be a great thing, just like we could find meaning in getting to see more land freed up for wildlife, where animals are able to express all their capabilities.

Positives are it gets you to appreciate what core basic necessities you take for granted as a means of encouraging the other person to show compassion for animals.

Negatives are it is primarily made to work on nihilists highly concerned with authenticity. Again could be used in tandem with name the trait, to first show a basic commonality for how we all come into this world with certain needs and then ask what trait justifies excluding one group from moral consideration over another.

Secondly people may question the logistics of granting rights to animals today which leads to a procedural tangent about how to incrementally introduce the law in parts. Complications like, the time to grant habitat rights in planning disputes. Then when to introduce rights for some of the few farm animals left to live a full life seeking refuge in semi-wild habitat, pigs being al. Or where and when pigs are allowed to go feral, with the proviso that we can re-introduce predator species to keep the population in check. But misunderstandings like these are crucial intuitive blocks as to why the general population may find it difficult to accept an argument without a clear understanding of the pragmatics of how vegans envision progressing to this more ideal society. So, even if tiresome for the vegan who’s gone over it a million times, it’s always useful to being open to going over it again.

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2g. Outro

But yeah, that’s the end of the video, remember to tailor the argument you use to the person you’re talking to. I’ll put a link to the full script in the description, so you can read back the arguments, plus formal syllogisms if you’re curious. Let me know what you think in a comment down below, all the best, peace.

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3. Formal Syllogisms

3a. General Purpose – Name The Trait

P1) Humans have moral value.

P2) If your view affirms a given human is trait-equalizable to a given nonhuman animal while retaining moral value, then your view can only deny the given nonhuman animal has moral value on pain of P∧~P.

P3) Your view affirms a given human is trait-equalizable to a given nonhuman animal while retaining moral value.

C1) Therefore, your view can only deny the given nonhuman animal has moral value on pain of P∧~P

P4) Animals have moral value.

P5) If a being has moral value, we ought not support the use of that being for animal products.

C2) Therefore we ought not support the use of animal products

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3b. Consequentialist – Marginal cases

P1) Some humans (infants, young children, profoundly intellectually disabled) are intellectually comparable to non-human animals.

P2) If the well-being of non-human animals (e.g. their avoiding a given amount of suffering, their benefiting from a given quality of life) is morally less important than ours (in virtue of these lesser intellectual abilities), then the well-being of these humans is equally less important (in virtue of their lesser intellectual abilities).

P3) But the well-being of these humans isn’t morally less important than ours.

C1) Therefore, The well-being of non-human animals is not morally less important than ours.

This entails (if you like in conjunction with P4. Our well-being is morally important) the Principle of Equal Consideration: human and non-human animal well-being is of equal intrinsic moral importance (i..e moral importance in itself and apart from its further effects) – e.g. all else held equal, the fact that an act would inflict a given amount of harm (e.g. a given amount of suffering) on a human or a non-human animal is an equally strong moral reason against it.

Defense of P3: It is deeply implausible that intellectual ability affects the intrinsic importance of one’s well-being once we distinguish (i) its role in making one a moral agent who owes duties vs. a moral patient who is owed duties, (ii) its role in affecting the instrumental importance of one’s well-being for others, and (iii) its role in determining how beneficial or harmful certain things are for you (including how much typical human adults benefit from living vs. how much non-human animals and profoundly intellectually disabled humans benefit from living).

Defense of P2: The only relevant thing that distinguishes non-human animals from intellectually comparable humans is bare biological species membership, but it’s deeply implausible that bare biological species membership is relevant to the intrinsic moral importance of someone’s well-being once one we focus on what it really is: something like potential to interbreed to produce fertile offspring, psychology-independent morphology, phenotype-independent genotype, history of phylogenetic descent. It’s no more plausible that these matter to the intrinsic moral importance of someone’s well-being than someone’s ethnicity / continent of ancestry and consequent facial features, hair texture, and skin colour (race), or her chromosomes and relative gamete size (sex).

The weakening: Even if somehow intellectual ability or biological species memebership per se mattered to the moral importance of someone’s well-being they couldn’t matter very much. Since they seem utterly devoid of moral importance; surely it is safe to at least conclude:

C2) Principle of Minimal Consideration: We should / are morally required to avoid inflicting enormous harm on non-human animals for what is at most relatively trivial benefits for ourselves.

Empirical considerations about factory farming, human health, environmental effects, and, if you like, further philosophical considerations about what makes death a harm, the potential relevance of the fact that future farmed animals won’t exist unless we buy animal products, and the probabilities that one’s purchasing decisions will make a difference of various kinds and to what extent this matters, we get:

P5) To avoid inflicting enormous harm on non-human animals for what is at most relatively trivial benefits for ourselves, we must be vegan.

Finally, C2 and P5 entail:

C3) We should / are morally required to be vegan.

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3c. Virtue Ethics – Respect for Animal Capabilities

P1) If the wonder that we experience in viewing wild animals is not ‘how similar to us they are’, but their ‘real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value’ and one sufficient reason we grant this freedom at least to a basic extent to humans is they have a desire to achieve what they find valuable THEN the fact non-human animals experience this desire too means we ought extend these freedoms to animals.

P2) The wonder that we experience in viewing wild animals is not ‘how similar to us they are’, but their ‘real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value’ and one sufficient reason we grant this freedom at least to a basic extent to humans is they have a desire to achieve what they find valuable.

C) Therefore the wonder that we experience in viewing wild animals is not ‘how similar to us they are’, but their ‘real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value’ and one sufficient reason we grant this freedom at least to a basic extent to humans is they have a desire to achieve what they find valuable AND the fact non-human animals experience this desire too means we ought extend these freedoms to animals.

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3d. Deontology – The Golden Rule

P1) If I would like to be treated well then I should treat others well

P2) I would like to be treated well

C1) Therefore I should treat others well

P3) I would not like to be treated badly then I should not treat others badly

P4) I would not like to be treated badly

C2) Therefore I should not treat others badly

C3) Therefore I should treat others well and not treat others badly

P5) Non human animals count as “others”

P6) Veganism is entailed by treating others well and not treating others badly

C3) Therefore I should be veganism

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3e. Nihilist Ethics – Property Rights for Animals

P1) If I desire the ability to live a full life on my property because it satisfies a desire I have to meet my basic needs and I’m in favour of guardianship laws to protect this ability for severely mentally disabled people in court because they can’t defend themselves THEN I should desire non-human animals who also have these needs have a legal right to their wild habitat as property and should enjoy guardianship laws which protects their legal rights in court through appointment of a guardian to represent the case of one or a group of animals unless another reason is specified on pain of living in bad faith.

P2) I desire the ability to live a full life on my property because it satisfies a desire I have to meet my basic needs and I’m in favour of guardianship laws to protect this ability for severely mentally disabled people in court because they can’t defend themselves.

C) Therefore I desire the ability to live a full life on my property because it satisfies a desire I have to meet my basic needs and I’m in favour of guardianship laws to protect this ability for severely mentally disabled people in court because they can’t defend themselves AND I should desire non-human animals who also have these needs have a legal right to their wild habitat as property and should enjoy guardianship laws which protects their legal rights in court through appointment of a guardian to represent the case of one or a group of animals unless another reason is specified on pain of living in bad faith.

Defence of P1: The different identity relations between humans and animals would be the other specified reason, if you desire to do something simply because of reason x, and reason x applies to this other group, then unless another reason is specified you’re likely simply excluding the other group because it’s the social norm. So you haven’t thought it through, hence living in bad faith. You can still easily get out of it by saying you don’t care about speciesism, but that would be adding another reason.

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References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

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The bizarre case of vegan Neo-Nazis & deprogramming vegans who glorify violence

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Part 1 – Identifying a problem

 

Vegan Neo-Nazis

So I’d like to tell you the story about a pair of ex-anarchists, ex-Animal Liberation Front convicts, Walter Bond and Camille Marino who have launched the website ‘Vegan Final Solution’, a Neo-Nazi platform trying to recruit from the vegan & animal liberation milieu. Here are some of the ideas they promote: [1]

WE ADVOCATE a third position beyond left and right-wing ideology; a third position that encompasses the best of both, and discards the rest.

WE ADVOCATE a hierarchy where those that exercise self-discipline and self-sacrifice for the good of animals and the earth are deemed more deserving of life than the gluttonous, selfish drones that shovel dead animals into their grotesque faces, simply to satiate their lust for rotting meat. With hierarchy, we separate the wheat from the chaff.

WE ADVOCATE a total lack of concern for egalitarian issues. The whole laundry bag of activist, and so called “total liberation” issues, not only seeks to put the focus right back on worthless people, but also undermines the animals’ safety by making society more cohesive and functional.

So classic fascist ideology, plus a bunch of dog whistles to Classical Nazi code-speak: Final Solution, Third Position & Life unworthy of life.

Also letters he would send from prison had nazi propaganda on the back, so that’s always fun. [Video]

 

Now the case study of groups who supported or continue to support them

Walter Bond was supported by the group ‘Unnoffensive Animal’ in a hopeful disregard for his fascist leanings, they were convinced by his support group that his early fascist writings were just a short lived cause of traumatic prison conditions. They encouraged vegans to send letters of support and buy his book. Allowing their respect for his actions to get in the way of transparency and accountability. [2]

He was and still is being promoted by the North America Animal Liberation Press Office, SupportWalter.org & Forward to Eden. [3][4][5]

And finally listed on the website for people they view as ‘friends & allies’ are Gary Yourofsky (ADAPTT) & Black Rose Belarus. [1]

 

So what commonalities can we find among all these groups?

Well for one, a strong commitment to vandalism as a campaign tactic and potential tolerance for violence which goes further than that.

Now disclaimer; I’m not saying all graffitiing is wrong or all revolutions are bad. I’m not even saying there’s a risk of thousands of die hard vegan anarchists becoming Neo-Nazis.

I am saying there’s a risk of politically ignorant people who glorify violence (like Gary Yourofsky’s apolitical misanthropy) finding common cause with eco-fascists and not seeing the harm they’re doing promoting this shit.

I think the few revolutionary groups who are promoting this Nazi website should be a wake up call. And so an issue we should work to untangle for how people get duped into first glorifying ‘propaganda by the deed,’ bodily harm and violence, for the animals today – where it would be completely unethical and counter-productive – then find common cause with Nazis.

So I think we need to do a better job of explaining where some direct action goes overboard and becomes both unethical and ineffective. As well as checking in on our friends who look to be going down a bad path and provide them with the support they need.

 

Part 2 – Solutions

 

Step 1: Putting social pressure to bear on groups, organisations and content creators

 

We need to discourage the excuses that could easily lead to this happening again.

People’s appreciation for Gary’s speech turning them and others vegan also got in the way of people condemning him for his support for violence, his wishing rape on people as punishment & calling Palestinians psychopaths and their rights supporters insane. [6]

As well, Anonymous for the Voiceless made a post about the man who took a bunch of people hostage at gunpoint until the President made an online post promoting the movie Earthlings… ‘Just asking the question’ as to whether it was a success or failure for the animals, without clearly condemning his actions. [7]

It’s really worrying that 100s of vegans on Facebook would comment in favour of the Ukraine hostage taker and have their profile public showing police everything about their life. It shows both the level of unethical-ness and the naivety that could likely easily be swayed into promoting an edgy neo-nazi who hides the real outcomes of their politics only slightly.

Finally it’s important to make people aware of when the person they’re following has far-right leanings, so they aren’t sucked down the rabbit hole of bad justifications without realising where the end conclusion is leading. I’ll put a link in the endnotes to an article for further reading on racists in the vegan movement. [8]

 

Step 2: Deprogramming individuals who glorify violence

 

How does someone begin to take on beliefs which glorify violence?

Some examples we could think of could be obsessively watching animal cruelty videos, being insulted by friends & family over your vegan diet and not being able to avoid seeing people eat meat.

We could simply do a better job of checking in on newly vegan friends and promoting online spaces for them to find people to talk to.

Remind them they were blindly ignorant once too, so we need to have compassion for the perpetrator too.

 

How does someone potentially work up to taking unethical violent acts?

Blocking foxes from getting mauled to death, so gaining the confidence to get into stand-offs with fox hunters. Similarly with blocking fascists marching through immigrant neighbourhoods.

Disclaimer; I’m very much pro hunt sabbing and protesting fascists, I’m pro people getting active and feeling invested by protecting each other and foxes.

But, I also know people who get obsessed and all I’m saying is don’t be afraid to bring up with your friend that they may need to take a break or could be turning people away with their not comprehensible rants on Facebook. Get talking to them about other campaign tactics they can engage with for a time. [9]

Remind them the best advocacy tool we have is just shining a light on their cruelty and defending the victims. The few fox hunters we can annoy into not wanting to go on the hunt again pales in comparison as a goal to the amount of people we can get to question their meat eating by just showcasing their cruelty and showing how a fox or multiple foxes lives were life was saved.

 

Part 3 – What are the philosophical justifications for violence

 

1. Self-defence by proxy.

Reasonable grounds that when confronting systemic violence, you are preventing the total number or rate at which animal lives experiencing unjust cruelty stay the same or goes up. Not true of today.

Reasonable grounds that there was no way of avoiding injury to the perpetrator or any potential injury would be less than the well-being gained for the lives saved. Not true of today.

You could grant that in a hypothetical future if we were to get to a place where 99% of the world were vegan and less animal products being produced causes a drop in demand, yet we still hadn’t made meat eating illegal, then; you could risk injury to the perpetrator by citizens arresting them, while you free the animals where there was no other option than risking potential injury because the value for the sentient animals being free to live in a sanctuary is greater.

 

2. Desire for a war of self-determination

Animals can’t conceptualize a tactical war to achieve rights, so they can’t desire it. We aren’t even able to alleviate their suffering like we could human prisoners with the optimistic notion that direct actions done in other places now, may one day lead to an end to their suffering.

You could grant in the socialist case if 99% of society had been fully socialised and a previous factory owner had locked themself in and was refusing to move for wanting to employ only who they like and keep the profits to themself, some force in picking them up and moving them would be acceptable. Obviously revolutions are a lot more complicated than this hypothetical and I do commend cases like the Kurdish uprising in Northern Syria which took power from a regime who had rolled tanks on demonstrators and outlawed teaching of their native language.

But, even in the human case there are key foundations you need to work from, like the probability you won’t just give an excuse for the oppressor committing even worse horrors as was the case with the Rohingya militants who ambushed a police checkpoint, resulting in army & citizen campaign to burn down many villages, plus murder and rape those that couldn’t get away.

As well as a responsibility to put down arms after winning political freedoms and a majority are in favour of diplomacy through electoral politics, like in Northern Ireland today.

Much of the problem I think is animal rights activists confusing these two arguments. But what do you think? What other ways can you think of for talking someone down from their beliefs glorifying violence?

 

Part 4 – Closing Arguments

 

Time on earth is the greatest gift we have

Even if it could be argued that a war of terror, killing those involved in animal agriculture was the easiest route to reducing the number of animals bred into living horrible lives… I would still say it’s ethically wrong to be the person who takes another’s life just because it’s the easiest way. You could have worked to become president and outlawed it with one signature, you could have inspired a 1000 liberators to break every cage.

It’s an act of self-harm to treat life with such disregard when you could have been that same deluded person shrouded in the justificatory trappings of society treating your behaviour normally.

What I see is vegans in mourning for the animals, angry and wanting to find an outlet for that anger. After the vegan activist Regan Russell was killed, many ALF actions happened in response, and if taking the risk to slash slaughterhouse trucks’ tires in the dead of night is how you develop stronger bonds with a group of people and gain the confidence to do amazing things like travel the world and learn from other liberation struggles, then I’m all for it…

But, I don’t think the way we win today is treating a cold bureaucratic system with equally cold disregard in whose life we had the resources to be able to intimidate this week. Time on earth is the greatest gift people have, to make mistakes and learn from them, so I could never condone risking injury to people when fighting such a monolith as the animal agriculture industry today.

Let me know your thoughts in a comment down below, all the best, peace.

 

Endnotes

1. https://veganfinalsolution.com/
   
2. https://www.facebook.com/liberateordie/photos/a.261410787880915/579192992769358
   
3. https://animalliberationpressoffice.org/NAALPO/2020/07/28/vegan-final-solution-com
   
4. http://supportwalter.org/SW/index.php/2020/07/25/new-website-created-by-camille-marino-and-walter-bond-officially-launched-today
   
5. https://www.facebook.com/forwardtoeden/posts/3118564944864698
   
6. http://veganfeministnetwork.com/hero_worship/
   
7. https://www.facebook.com/anonymousforthevoiceless/posts/3264530266902514
   
8. https://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Racism_in_Veganism
   
9. https://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Common_Allies

How To Advocate To Pro-Vegan Leftists (Mock Vaush Debate)

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Full Transcript

 

[This is the intro to a debate that happened between 2 YouTubers on the topic of veganims and animal rights.

At the 1:10 mins mark Vaush presents an argument, then I jump in to mock debate how I think the conversation could have more ideally gone.]

Vaush: Howdy

AY: So, you currently are not a vegan?

Vaush: That is correct

AY: Now if we replaced all the animals in the factory farms with humans you wouldn’t say it’s morally wrong…

Vaush: We can skip a few steps, I include animals in my ethical system, I agree that meat eating is morally unjustifiable. I’m not… “believes meat eating is fine,” I’m… “knows veganism is correct and is too much of a moral hypocrite to go forward with it.”

AY: Oh ok, well honestly I don’t know how much I have to say to you then, I’m not like a psychologist who can work your brain.

Vaush: Yeah, no, what we do is unironically monstrous with the factory farming.

My argument here, and this is one of defending hypocrisy, so I recognise my bias in this respect, but the argument I would have here is comparable to the argument I would make for not for example telling people to not buy t-shirts that were made in China. It’s that we live in a system of such unfathomably inhuman production and it’s so convenient to adhere to the ethical modes of production in which we live, that I don’t know if I can condemn a person ethically on an individual level for participating in systems that are so much larger than them. You know?

Script: Okay I can answer that, so it’s important to acknowledge where someone is either unaware of or incapable of following a vegan lifestyle, that they are not individually responsible for the act of eating meat, even though the act itself is still unethical.

But we should be wary of extending that lack of individual responsibility away from extreme situations like being stranded on a desert island, to today where a lot of industry happens to be unethical.

Because even if we grant there’s a better system we can move to such that all consumption under capitalism currently is unethical, there exists a scale of immorality such that we hope once people become aware of particularly bad industries, they will get on board with living a low-impact vegan lifestyle.

So there’s two things:

1. There’s the potential harm in playing down the effectiveness of the vegan boycott, because a really important positive attribute to acknowledge about this lifestyle is it’s a broad food category that in its wholefood form is easy to distinguish on the shelf. Therefore experimenting with the diet doesn’t need to feel like a burden to take on board in the same way researching and seeking out conflict-free minerals in everything you buy can be for example.
2. The potential harm in exaggerating exceptions to the rule of individual responsibility.

But yeah you accept buying animal products is unethical, it’s just a case of some of the individual responsibility gets shared more evenly with the collective society for say voting parties which maintain the status quo, which in turn alienates/socially conditions you into not having full agency.

Vaush: Yes, I agree that meat eating is morally unjustifiable. I’m not… “believes meat eating is fine,” I’m… “knows veganism is correct and is too much of a moral hypocrite to go forward with it.”

Script: Cool, so yeah, you just have a critique of where activists put their energy?

Vaush: Yes, I just think advocacy is more effective when it’s being done outside of the demand by consumers, I don’t think there’s any likelihood or any possibility of getting the vast majority of people off of their meat diets.

Script: Well I would say existing as a vegan in the world is this really positive step to showing your seriousness and dedication you’re willing to put in, so then being better able to find each other and get organized, for example people’s willingness to start a food not bombs stall or guerrilla garden.

Secondly It’s not the case that we need to win over everyone to veganism in order to make massive change, if a large enough minority can create breathing room for legislation and food co-ops on the way to a vegan world, I do think it’s both an obligation to attempt it and to make the transition easier saving humans and wildlife. As well as driving less, buying second hand, etc.

Thirdly, boycotts have the effect of bringing communities together under a liberation politics. For example car-sharing during the Montgomery bus boycott, students leading the call to stop subsidising Israel and before that South Africa, the widespread boycotting of a reactionary tabloid newspaper in the UK that ran stories saying mass suffocation at a football stadium due to overcrowding and fences were the fans fault. So boycotting to show your real felt ties to the land you stand on as necessary optics for seriousness on the left.

And finally I’d just say there’s a way you could take this concern for shifting the blame onto individuals too far the other way, in that I think we’d agree if someone was obscenely rich and spent all their money on luxury items, never donating to campaigns or charities that we would need to bring about a better society you would think badly of this person because they would be displaying the same indifferent behaviour you’d expect of someone who say participated in systemic racism, for example excluding your generationally low-income black friend with no car from playing on your sports team by never seeing it as your responsibility to offer to drive to pick them up so they can join in.

Vaush: Yes. Look forward to discussing this more.

Script: Great, also if you could look into some animal rights news stories to cover on your stream, I do think there’s a lot of damning political stories which would do the job of bringing people further left as well as hopefully towards veganism. I’ll leave links to some in the description you can take a look at.

Alright, take care.

Vaush: Yes. Have a good one.

 

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Description

• Trump Approves $16 Billion Coronavirus Bailout for Meat and Dairy
• Abattoir workers are the forgotten frontline victims at the heart of this crisis – and now they’re spreading coronavirus
• A group of indigenous Tahltan people blockading a road to try to reverse over-hunting on their territory