I am a Marxist and a materialist. Ideas and beliefs don’t arise ex nihilo. They emerge to fit the material reality in which they exist. What are the material realities that lead to carnism? I would argue that there are only two that matter:
- “I benefit from objectifying these animals.”
- “These animals are too weak to stop me from objectifying them.”
Boil away the justifications, strip away the decorum, and this is what you get. But what if that person enters a situation where they benefit from objectifying me? What if I’m too weak to stop them? What barrier prevents them from doing so? My intelligence? My capacity for suffering? Their empathy and goodwill? None of that saves cattle, or pigs, or chickens. Why would it save me? I’m not foolish enough to think I’m special.
And look, survival situations are one thing. If you kill and eat an animal because the alternative is starvation, you have decided that the animal’s life is worth less than your life. If someone decided that my life was worth less than their life, and a situation came up where they had to act on that decision, I wouldn’t begrudge it. I wouldn’t like it, I’d fight it, but I wouldn’t begrudge it. The thought of someone deciding my life is worth less than their pleasure, though? Turns my blood to fucking ice.
But actually, they aren’t okay.
The people who actually do this grisly work for a living face the same kinds of traumatic stress symptoms as any soldier or torturer would. They do have empathy for non-human animals and it eats them alive. They have to fight themselves constantly to overcome the barriers that prevent us from hurting and killing and mutilating others. That’s why the people coerced to work in this industry consistently face higher rates of depression, self-harm, addiction/overdose, every violent crime you can think of, and suicide.
The vast majority of carnists have never killed anything bigger than a removedroach. They get neat little packages of decontextualized red goop on the store shelves and don’t have to spend even a second thinking about the suffering that went into making it.