Last weekend I went to see my family, catch up on news, drink too much... the usual. Meet new friends. Nice people, a couple with three kids, she is vegetarian, her husband is getting there, kids know where meat comes from and they don't want to eat it. But what was the best about it was not that vegetarians were majority at that moment in the house, but how casual it was. No tree-hugging hippies. No revolutionary visionaires. There was no need to discuss animal cruelty. We shared some stories about grandparents getting used to the idea of raising children without meat (not without fight sometimes), but otherwise... we were all adults, with normal day jobs, we talked about many things, lazy Sunday afternoon. No revolutionary ideas though.
It was great.
More often than not the discussions I am involved in are about big things. Changing the world. Etc. What changes the world though is the silent revolution of people learning enough, and changing their ways enough in small steps. Don't get me wrong, I admire what ALF is doing, and all the brave people who fight for animals - they are doing great job, no doubt, but it's just a start. What is really needed to end industrial farming is just one, small, subtle thing... Next time you are hungry, eat something that has no bone sticking out of it.
Fighting for animals makes noise, makes the difference, makes some people think. However, it is similar to fighting other Behemoths - in open fight they are very difficult enemies - enormous financial and legal resources on their disposal make them invulnerable on almost all sides. Apart from one.
I wrote about many similarities between economic systems, but one key difference between communism and capitalism is that the latter is based on soft coercion. In communism you are told what to do (or else...) In capitalism you have to spend quite a lot of money on coercive advertising to make people buy your product (whether the product is a can of sugary drink or your next president), but you are, essentially, free to choose otherwise anyway. You are free to not buy what you don't want. This is the one soft spot of the system. Of The System. And it goes well beyond just meat. You can harm the animal cruelty industry by giving up meat (which is not good your you anyway), but there is one more detail to be aware of: each dollar you don't spend is one dollar that does not generate various taxes when it moves through the system. Each dollar you spend gets divided and fed into two pipes - one goes to someone's pocket (owner of the business), and the other feeds the Behemoth of the State. Avoiding personal income tax is one thing, but the Behemoth has tiny power lines connected to each cable in the system, and drains a little bit of value (or its abstract representation, money) from each cable. Imagine a network connecting all participants of capitalist system, any economic system, with money/resources moving between nodes, and then, flying above it, an ubernetwork parasiting on the real network, getting a tiny percent from each transaction made on it. And then that money is used for many things, positive (hospitals) and very negative (bombs, armies, corporate welfare). And in some cases both networks, business and state, merge, and show some similarity to old times of feudalism, where money and power were officially one. They are becoming one again. In theory the two networks should be complementing each other, to keep balance between wellbeing of population and freedom of market, but when they merge, they make the Behemoth. And besides, when you think about the two networks, neither is there for you. They both need you to run them, fuel them, make them stronger, but it is by making you weaker, powerless, dominated.
This isn't the conclusion I wanted to make when I started writing this post, I wanted to make the point that stop buying stuff you don't need is the most revolutionary thing we can do (which deserves explanation of course), but there is something else to think about here. The two networks analogy talks about money and power networks, and that neither treats people as, well, people.
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