Dr. Steve Best: In Response to "A Response to 'Vegan Purists' and 'Vegan Police' Who Criticize Vegans with Non-Vegan Cats"

September 5, 2011

 Given the controversy and furor this has caused among the True Believers, allow me to provide an interpretive tip: This piece is not about feline predators, it is about human hypocrites, the impossibility of being pure, contradiction-free, non-violent, and even "vegan." Its about being honest. it's against factionalism and vegan police whose focus in on flaws in lifestyle rather than contradictions in social structures that are producing increasingly deep and irreversible social and natural breakdown and catastrophe. It's about dialectical embeddedness, existentialist paradox, and the "ethics of ambiguity" (De Beauvoir). Increasingly, veganism degenerates into a fascist, sanctimonious, elitist, consumerist, individualist, apolitical religion, fundamentalism, and form of Panglossian optimism, such that everyday a dozen Facebook warriors gleefully bring us the good tidings that "we are winning!" No, we are losing, losing and badly. We are living in mass denial, oblivious of scientific warnings to humanity, living in a fool's paradise amidst this unique moment in history characterized by social collapse, the dramatic spike in meat consumption in China and India (the two most populous nations in the world vs. the less than one % of "vegans" in the US), climate change, mass extinction, and biological meltdown. It's not about cats ..

Many excellent comments and responses here: http://drstevebest.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/in-response-to-a-response-to-vegan-purists-and-vegan-police-who-criticize-vegans-with-non-vegan-cats/