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.
I’m going to first qualify all of this by saying I’ve eaten an all vegan diet for long stretchs before and I believe veganism the morally correct position. Due to COVID and allergic reactions I didn’t understand I’ve also had times where I’ve eaten a 100% carnivorous all meat diet. I swear to God eating the all meat diet after eating vegan was like microdosing a drug that heightened my predators instincts. Maybe it was because I was so sick at the time but I truly felt like eating all meat reduced my empathy and control over antisocial impulses.
I think your existential distrust is well placed. Something goes wrong in the brain when you feed it so much meat, just my opinion and observations