In this episode, Dr. Will Tuttle (vegan), author of “The World Peace Diet,” discusses how increasing compassion toward animal-people can change society.
(Dr. Tuttle, would you like to weigh on the evolution aspect of this spirituality crisis?)
Dr. Will Tuttle: Yes. What I’ve discovered in my research into this for a long time is that all of us have been born into a culture that has an underlying hidden core that is taboo for us to discuss. And it is taboo for us to discuss it as a culture because we, at a deep level, feel a lot of remorse and grief over the massive amount of routine brutality that we mete out towards animals for food, routinely every day in this culture for food, and also for entertainment and for research. And so, it’s taboo to talk about this. And I think that’s one of the main reasons this conference is so valuable, is that we’re actually talking about what is taboo. And there’s always this sense in talking about a taboo subject, that there’s sort of this quality of “Oh, no, don’t talk about it.” But there’s also an aspect of “Oh wow, this is powerful to talk about.”
And it’s the very hidden shadow at the core of our culture, I believe. And what this core is, fundamentally, is the mentality of reductionism. That we’re taught from the time basically we leave our mother’s womb and come into this world, and we begin to start eating the foods that we’re forced to eat in this culture. After we lose our mother’s breast, we’re given the flesh and secretion of the animals that have been brutalized. And so we’re taught from an early age to reduce beings to things, to mere commodities. So it’s a mentality of commodification of life, it’s a mentality of reductionism. It’s also a mentality of exclusion, because we learn early on to exclude certain beings from the sphere of our compassion. And when we do that, we’re automatically able to commit violence towards them because we say something like, “Well, they were just put here for us to use,” or “They don’t have a soul.”
And every institution in our culture cooperates in basically ritually injecting this mentality into each and every one of us from the time we were born. The institution of our family, the institution of religion, the institution of education, the institution of the media, government, law, every institution in any culture all work together to basically let that culture reproduce itself, whatever that culture is. Whether it’s destructive and violent or whether it’s very wise and benevolent, the institutions in that culture naturally work that way.
And so what I realize is that we’ve all been basically forced into participating in daily rituals of violence that are based on reductionism, commodification, exploitation, exclusion. And fundamentally, I think even deeper than that, of disconnectedness, that we learn early on to disconnect the reality that’s on our plate every breakfast, lunch and dinner from the reality that it actually took to get it onto our plate. So, we learn early on through practice of the art of disconnecting, and we become masters by the time we’re 10 or 12 or 15 years old of the art of disconnecting. And so we can be devastating the rainforest, cutting them all down, destroying them, and we just disconnect and say, “Oh, not really happening.”
And the oceans are being destroyed, and we disconnect from that. And our kids are committing suicide out of despair, and we disconnect from that. And so, I think that the core of this whole fundamental cultural taboo that we’re talking about here today is a mentality that our culture yearns at its very soul and core to transcend, to evolve out of. I think that we know, at a deeper level, that our purpose on this planet is to grow and to awaken and to be living blessings in the world, that we’re here literally to bless the world and to discover our own unique way of being that blessing.
And so, this I think is really the challenge that we’re faced as a culture. And why the greatest thing anyone can do is to become a vegan – because being a vegan is simply taking responsibility for the ripples that radiate from my life into the world, and it’s a mentality of radical inclusion. It’s saying, “I’m going to include all living beings within the sphere of my compassion.” And so, it’s a fundamentally and extremely healing and life-affirming attitude. But it’s more than an attitude, it’s actually living it. You can’t be a vegan in theory only; it’s practical. And that’s why I love it so much – it’s something we actually live and do.
And I think on the outside, most people think of veganism as like you’re saying “No” all the time. You say, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t eat this. I don’t eat ice cream. I don’t eat eggs. I don’t eat cheese. And no, no, no.” And people go, “Oh, man, you’re really negative. You just say no to this, and no to that. You won’t go to the zoo, you won’t…” But actually, I think it’s really important to remember that that attitude that seems negative of saying “no” actually rides on a huge “Yes” – a “Yes” to kindness and compassion and sustainability and freedom and peace and blessing and justice to all living beings. And it’s out of that concern that we’re basically following a life where we show kindness and compassion to other living beings by refusing to pay our brothers and sisters to do the heartless and brutalizing and demeaning work of killing them.
And Martin Luther King Said, “Violence anywhere hurts everyone everywhere. We are all connected.” And so I think it’s important to remember that, if I take out my wallet and I start paying someone to confine a cow or a chicken or to brutalize these animals for food in some way, that I’m actually the one that’s responsible for that. I’m paying them to do work that I would never want to do myself. And so underlying this, I think, is really an incredibly positive message that we can transform our culture.
In the “World Peace Diet,” one of the things that early on in the book I talk about is that the last revolution that this culture ever experienced was between eight and ten thousand years ago. And I called it the “herding revolution” where we basically actually started in the country that is now Iraq, started to own animals.
The first time people started owning animals and seeing them merely as property, that was the fundamental reduction, and with that came everything else. We started owning human beings, slavery happened. We started having this rich, elite that emerged, and they owned the capital. “Capital” means “head,” as in head of livestock. So the first capitalism was ten thousand years ago, with this wealthy elite that emerged, that owned the capital. They wanted more land. They wanted more capital. The fastest way to get rich quick back then was to steal, was actually to go to war and fight against other capitalists to steal their livestock or to win their livestock by defeating them in battle. The very first word for “war” in this planet that we know of is the old Sanskrit word “gavya,” which means simply the desire for more cattle. That was the first word for “war.”
And the people who lost, basically their livestock became the property of the ones who won, and the men became slaves, the women became concubines. And it was really a brutal time, and it brought out the worst in people. The men had to become hard and tough and brutal and disconnected from their feelings. Women became reduced to mere property that were bought and sold like chattel property. If you look at the very first writings that we have, the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, the old Sumerian writings, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Old Testament writings, the first ones, you see by the time the historic period emerged three thousand years ago, the whole thing is established. There is slavery, and women are property. And nature, wildlife has also been reduced to being a status of mere pests. They maybe will interfere with our livestock, so we want to get rid of them.
And whoever owned the most capital, the most sheep and goats and cows, they were the ones who controlled society. They controlled all the institutions. They controlled religion and education. And is it any different today? I mean, why is it that it is still today that making war is the most profitable thing for the wealthy elite? Because we’re still eating the same food. At the end of the day, we go home and we eat the flesh of animals that have been brutalized, and we eat the secretions of the same animals that have been brutalized. And so we keep the same institutions in place. And that’s the reason we’ve had so much trouble making any significant progress in this world and in all these efforts for justice and sustainability, because we’re still eating the same food.
We’re still fundamentally reinforcing within ourselves the idea that “might makes right.” The idea that we can exclude other living beings from the sphere of our compassion, and the idea that war is a good way to make money. And this is underlying this culture. This is the living fury at the core of our culture that no one can look at. It’s taboo to talk about this. So once we start to see it, then we get the understanding of the big picture of our culture, then we realize why veganism is so essential, why it’s the most powerful thing anyone can do to bless our world, and why there’s nothing more benevolent and more sacred and noble, I think, that anyone can do than to take on the task of spreading this message of veganism. Because at the very core of veganism, the other thing is the domination of the feminine. The animals that are most brutalized in this whole system are female animals. On dairy farms, on factory farms for pigs, chickens, cows, fish, all of this stuff, basically it’s the female animals and the female reproductive cycles that are mercilessly dominated.
And so, we would never be able to do this to these females if we hadn’t disconnected from our own innate wisdom and sensitivity that naturally knows that the most sacred parts of our lives, the most sacred things in nature are mothers giving birth to babies, caring for those babies, nursing those babies, nesting. This is something we should have a sense of honor and respect for.
And yet, dairy farms and all these places, they are basically rape and kill operations where the females are confined, their babies are stolen, they’re raped again, we take away their products. And so, not only does it harm them, but it harms us.
The ancient spiritual teachings of all the traditions emphasize – when you harm someone else, you harm yourself more than you harm them. That whatever we would want most for ourselves, we should give to others. So, if I want freedom and peace and joy and love for myself, I’m called to give that to others. If I give to others misery, enslavement and domination, then we end up being dominated. That’s why we find more and more in our culture, we are becoming enslaved. It’s because we are enslaving others. If we want to be free, we have to free others. And this is the teaching of liberation that I think we all know at the core of our being.
I remember growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, and I just ate the food, massive amounts of meat, dairy, and eggs. I remember when I was about eight years old, I said to my mother, “So, is this what everybody eats?” And she said, “Yeah, this is what everybody eats,” and then she said, “Well, there are vegetarians…” And she said it like, “But don’t worry, you’ll never meet one! They live on another planet. They are far away, don’t worry!” I remember I grew up, and when I was about 12 or 13 years old, I went to this dairy farm. I was on my way to summer camp in Vermont, and it was affiliated with the dairy farm that was organic. And this was in the mid 60’s, I guess, or something.
It was so interesting, because this is the kind of place you think that nothing but good can come from, a Vermont organic dairy farm. And I remember we went down, and we were all taught to catch our own chicken and to put the chicken down on this board on the ground, and then to put her head between the two nails. And then in your other hand, you had your axe, and you just cut her head off. And she would run around sprouting blood, and then when she expired, we would take her body and put it through the hot water. And we would eat the chicken.
And I remember, as a kid of maybe 12 or 13, I had no problem with that. I had been well indoctrinated. I had gone through 12 or 13 years of intense indoctrination, three times a day. And I knew, as a matter of fact, that a chicken is just chicken; it has no soul and it was put here by God for us to use. And if I did not eat this chicken or this meat, I would die within 24 hours of a protein deficiency. I would be dead! So you just have to do it; it’s set up like that. And I remember a little later, we did the same thing to a cow. A cow wasn’t producing enough milk, and we were brought down to this organic dairy. And we shot the cow in the head three times with the rifle. And she fell to the ground, and he cut her head off. And the blood was everywhere, and he wiped his brow very calmly and said, “You have to do that, you have to cut those arteries while the heart was still beating; otherwise, the flesh would be disgusting, and we humans would never want to eat it, because we don’t like soggy flesh.”
And so, underlying and behind the curtain of our culture, there is a massive amount of killing – 75 million animals a day just in the United States alone are being slaughtered for food. These numbers are mind-boggling, and that’s the background of this culture. And unless we begin to look behind the curtain of our denial and come to terms with this violence, not only to the human beings who have to do this kind of brutality on a massive scale and what it does to them. If you just read books about what slaughterhouse workers and factory farm workers go through: the violence, the spousal abuse, the drug addiction, the alcohol addiction, the misery in their lives. About a billion people are chronically malnourished and hungry, and another billion people are chronically obese and overweight because they are eating, gorging on grain-fed animals.
And the massive devastation to the environment and the disconnectedness underlying that that’s been injected into us by our culture and by our religion, by every institution, because we don’t want to look at this because it goes against our fundamental nature. So, the underlying idea is to awaken to our natural compassion, and I think this is the great calling that we all have. This is the underlying benevolent transformation, benevolent revolution, benevolent evolution that our culture yearns for and longs for, and we can see right now literally it’s on our plate!
And I just want to invite all of us in this room and everyone who is listening to this or watching this at any time, to go into our communities and spread this message. I was just at a retreat on my book, “The World Peace Diet” Forty people went out, and they are now teaching the ideas in “The World Peace Diet” in their communities. We can do that with all modes and forms of vegan education. It’s a grassroots movement. It’s not going to be coming, probably for a while, to the mass media, but it can – it will when we get strong enough. So keep spreading this wonderful message and thank you very much. Bless you, that’s wonderful. Thank you. (Thank you. Thank you, thank you.)
Photo Caption: “All Seasons Remind One of the Ephemeral Nature of Illusionary Existence, but Also Remind One of the REAL LIFE Behind It”
