Hiding from Reality | Symptomatic Approach : It's Origin and Ineffectiveness

Self-survival instinct is at the very core of all the drama of life here on earth.
It is the most fundamental drive in the animal kingdom, common to all living beings but individual to each one, which means that each animal is responsible for his or her own survival.
And when each and every animal is individually driven most strongly by his/her self-survival instinct, it is logical to say that only the fittest survive, because there is a competition and a struggle against one another for survival.

There are two sides to this struggle for survival - on one side animals of any species have to struggle and fight with other members of the same species for life resources, and on the other they have to struggle to keep safe from the predators.

Also to me it seems that any animal that can live freely and independently without risking his/her life will prefer to live freely.
So we see that animals like the cheetah or the eagle who are at the top of their respective food chains and have very few or no predators to fear of, can and do live and hunt independently.
Whereas a lot of other species of animals like deers, monkeys, buffaloes, elephants who are not strong enough individually to survive alone in the wild usually stick around in groups or herds.
But it is important to understand that these animals don't stick around in groups because they want to look out for one another or for the common good of the group.
Rather the fundamental reason behind relatively weak animals staying in groups is that it improves each one's individual chances of survival.

A good example to illustrate this point would be to consider a herd of deer grazing together in a field. Now if a cheetah or a pack of lions were to attack this herd, every deer would run for his/her own life away from the group rather than facing the danger together as a group.
Hence it's clear that these animals stick together in a group as long as it keeps them safe or at least makes them feel safe individually, but the moment this feeling of safety is threatened they leave the safety of the group and run away.
Same is true in case of human beings as well. Say a few people are in a movie theater, and the theater catches fire. Now what do people do? Do they stick around together and try to get the whole group out safely?
No they don't! Everyone runs for their own lives. Forget about sticking around together to save each other, in a hurry to save themselves people don't even care if they kill a few other people in stampede.

So we see that all animals come together in groups because it gives them an improved sense of individual safety, but the moment that feeling of safety is challenged, each one is on his/her own again.

We humans are animals too, animals who are capable of intelligent thought and logic and all that, but looking at what we have done with ourselves and our world, we clearly haven't let our intelligence make us very different from the rest of the animals.

Human ancestors lived in groups as well, alongside all other animals, fighting for survival in the wild.
And they started living in groups for the very same reason as all other animals did- because they were too weak to survive alone in the wild, and living in groups increased their individual chances of survival.
So we see that even the earliest human society began as nothing but a group of animals who stuck around together for their own individual safety.
And when individuals in a group are only concerned about their own well being, there is bound to be a competition for resources and power.

Just like all other groups of animals, the earliest of human groups had leaders too.
Usually the strongest one would more or less self-appoint himself as the leader, just like even in today's world.
So our ancestors lived in the jungle in families under leaders in exchange for a feeling of safety from other animals.

Slowly we came out of the jungle, and started living in relative safety of tribes and villages, under new leaders. Now we didn't have to worry too much about the wild predators. But as individuals we were still insecure about our lives and being too weak to survive alone still wanted to live together in groups.
But as I said the only reason animals/people stick together in a group or a society is due to fear of something.
In the jungles we stuck together because we had fear primarily of predators. Once out of the jungle we needed something else to be afraid of in order to stick together in tribes.
And we found this fear in form of tribes or groups of other people.

This individual insecurity/fear that people have for their own lives has been exploited by our leaders for a very long time. We as animals are always afraid for our lives, and our leaders give us something to be afraid of to keep us together under their leadership.
The leaders understand that to keep people together, they have to be kept in a constant fear of something or the other.
There has to be an enemy image for the society to stick together.
But the leaders alone are not to be blamed, they have merely played on our insecurities.
The people are the ones who want something to be scared of so they can stick together as a society, leaders just happen to want the same, so every now and then they create a new enemy for the society to face.
The current favorite of our leaders seems to be terrorism.
So we see that in a selfish paradigm where each one is merely bothered about his/her individual survival, it is impossible for anyone to live without fear. Because each one sees other people as a potential threat to his/her survival.

Now when as individuals, we feel threatened by other individuals for survival, it's obvious that this insecurity reflects at society level as well. Because if individuals living in different societies feel threatened by each other, then the societies too are going to feel threatened by other societies. A society is nothing but a collection of individuals anyway.
So we fight individually for survival with one another, and we also fight as societies with other societies for the same reason.

Our ancestors fought with one another for survival in the jungle, and we are still fighting with one another for the very same reason - individual survival.
Only thing that has changed is that those fights and skirmishes between early tribes of humans, over the years turned into bloody battles between kingdoms, and today they have turned into wars between countries.
Now we think we have evolved and are better than those lesser evolved animals because we have climbed off the trees, and come out of caves and built ourselves clean cities, and handsome clothes, and expensive cars.
But we haven't really evolved, with all this external glamor we are only trying to cover up the true animal nature that is still the driving force behind our lives.
If we have evolved anything, it is the ways in which we can compete with one another for survival.
While other animals compete with one another for survival based primarily on their physical strengths, we humans have invented a whole array of concepts to compete with one another for survival.
Religions, Castes, social classes, fashion, nationalities are all concepts that show how desperate we are to give ourselves and each other as different identities as possible, so that when we look at one another we only see how different we are from one another and hence a threat to each others individual survival.
As neighbours we fight, as different religious groups we fight, as different castes we fight, as different countries we fight. So we are constantly fighting with one another for our lives.

But now one may ask - what exactly is the problem here? Human beings are animals and they live like animals! So what's wrong with that?

The problem is the fact that we humans can think intelligently, unlike all other species of animals.
So when a powerful lion snatches away food from a weaker lion, and the weaker one goes hungry, the stronger one doesn't think about the plight of the weaker lion, because he can not. He is purely driven by his self-survival instinct and does not have the capacity to think about the consequences of his actions.
But because we humans can think, when relatively powerful human beings compete and snatch away food from weaker human beings, it makes some of us question our actions . And hence the whole debate.
Besides I think when a lion has eaten his stomach full he might leave the rest lying around for other lions to eat.
But we humans want everything for ourselves, even if we are done eating, we had rather hide the remaining food till it rots than give it to other people.

In spite of our ability to think and understand logically and even after thousands of years of technological advancements, the problems facing the human society haven't changed at all.
Thinkers like Plato from ancient civilizations spoke about the same social and moral issues that we face today. Which means that there is a realm in human existence which has remained unchanged over all these years.
This is the psychological realm, or realm of the consciousness.

But why have we failed to eradicate these issues for thousands of years?

To me this seems to be due to lack of our sincerity towards addressing these problems.
But why have we shown lack of sincerity towards these serious social issues?

When people get cancer, do they go to the doctor and ask him to just remove enough cancer cells to eliminate physical symptoms to allow them to go about their daily life or do they ask him to remove the god damned thing from the root itself as soon as possible?

They obviously ask him to remove it from the root as soon as possible, so we see that there is sincerity when an individual's life is at stake. But even though society has been suffering from these ailments for thousands of years, we have failed to face the root causes and get rid of them.

And our failure to show same sincerity towards these social cancers shows that just like all other animals,even humans are still driven purely and only by their self-survival instincts, and welfare of the entire group is of little or no importance.
There seems to be no trace of wise use of intelligence in the design of our social paradigm.
What we have done instead is that we have used our intelligence along the lines of primitive animal instincts like competition, self-survival, possessiveness, crude violence and so on. And this way, what we have created are more ways to effectively compete with one another for survival, or in other words more effective ways to destroy each other.
Remember that we humans came together and began staying in societies only because living in society made us feel more secure as individuals and not for the betterment of humanity. That is why in our society we see that everyone is competing with one another for everything- There is competition to get into school, then to get into college, then a job, and so on. So we see that we are merely living together and competing with one another for our individual survival, rather than coming together and thinking about the common good of the society.

Now when society is nothing but a group of people who are pretending to be together and looking out for one another, but at heart only care about their own life and needs, there are bound to be conflicting situations, and homeless, poor, hungry, and abused people in the society.

The reason we have failed to eradicate these social issues for thousands of years is because we have failed to understand the root cause of all these social issues. Unaware of the underlying root cause, we have only been trying to cure the symptoms that show up on the surface. But since the fundamental problem is still not understood, these symptoms like poverty, homelessness, crimes, wars keep coming back.

Of course there is no denying that a lot of people out there genuinely want to do something about these poor, hungry, homeless people.
But rather than trying to drill down to the root cause behind these problems, they go out there and try to fight these symptoms as if they were independently existing problems. Which is a very shallow approach.

In our current society, NGOs and other social welfare organizations are also committing the same mistake by trying to solve social issues like child labor, women abuse, poverty as individual independently existing problems. But this kind of approach will never work,because these problems are mere symptoms of the fundamental problem with our society- which is our selfish paradigm.
We see that these problems have been there since the inception of human society, and they are still around because we have been trying to cure the symptoms of the fundamental problem, rather than trying to understand the fundamental problem itself.

When I think about the possible reasons behind our failure to understand the fundamental issue behind all these problems - two possibilities come to my mind.

One could be that we have been so deeply conditioned psychologically over millions of years that as individuals we feel that fighting with one another for survival is the natural and the only way to live, and to us this selfish lifestyle doesn't seem to be the cause of these problems, instead we feel that these problems are independently existing unique social issues, and need to be dealt with like individual problems.

The other possibility could be that in society people who are in a position to make a difference are the ones who are well-off, the underprivileged themselves cannot do anything about their situation. And the people who are well-off including most of us and our leaders don't want anything to change because we have successfully competed against the weaker to secure a safer environment for ourselves.

I feel that the true reason behind our failure to understand the root cause behind social problems is a combination of both of these two possibilities. While on one hand as masses and individuals we have failed to evolve beyond our individual insecurities for life, on the other our leaders have deliberately kept us fighting for survival with one another so that they can continue to rule our society.

And in this human civilization of ours, which is already paralyzed by our selfish nature, invention of a concept like God has only further paralyzed humanity.
Religions of the world make people feel that everything that the world is, is a part of God's design, and so when they see problems in the society, they take it to be a part of God's plan and completely give up the idea that they might have something to do with these problems. Since people hold God responsible for everything, the whole concept of god takes away the responsibility of our actions away from us.

For such religious people here is a mental exercise - Let us for a moment agree that God is looking after everything, now think about the world as it is now - with humans and all their human problems.
Now for a moment imagine the world without human beings. Eventhough God is still looking after the world and other living beings, don't all social issues disappear with humans as well?
Now put humans back in the picture and we see all problems coming back all over again.
I think this simple thought experiment is enough to show that human beings themselves are the cause of their problems.

As I said earlier that except humans all other animals have only their self-survival instincts to live by, and there is nothing wrong with their selfish paradigm because that's the only way for them to survive.
But we humans can think, and yet we have not used a trace of our intelligence in trying to understand life better.
Continuing to live in this selfish social paradigm and then trying to cure the social problems which arise because of the very selfish nature of the society is naive and ignorant and is not the solution.
The only way to get rid of these social issues if we are at all serious about it, is for us to try as individuals and as societies to evolve beyond our selfish insecurities and understand that it is possible for us to live beside one another without having to fight for survival.
And once we understand that every person and every living being has the right to and wants to live as much as anyone of us, hopefully then we can come together as improved conscious human beings and create a society for the welfare of one and all.

Censorship! Another word for Hypocrisy?

Downfall of humanity has been it's closed mindedness, and a concept like censorship is one of our many self destructive methods to make sure that nobody interfers with this free fall of ours till we hit rock bottom and smash ourselves out of existence.

We wouldn't want anyone showing us the right way for humanity to take, that would be too intelligent for us foolish & petty animals.

Even though censorship interfers with artist's work to different degrees in different countries, the basic underlying reason behind it is our failure to accept another man's point of view, and also to stick to one of the most fundamental of human rights, which we like to talk about a lot, but seldom practice, freedom of expression.

Well if you are expressing an opinion that at least a billion people share in common with you then you have all the freedom of expression that you could ask for. But! if you are thinking about expressing a radical,unique, and an original point of view, you better be doing it from behind a bullet proof glass.

According to the dictionary censorship means "Counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy".
And looking at the way censor board has functioned in the past, it is clear that anyone who doesn't conform to the views put forth by the government, and wants to express his/her own, is an enemy.

It's also important to point out that censor board is actually controlled by the "Ministry" of Information and Broadcasting. So don't for one minute think that it's not political.

This is our way of isolating, rejecting, and undermining the ones who wander away from the herd mentality to find their own path, just like a herd of sheep does.
Friedrich Nietzsche very aptly pointed out that
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently".

In fact what is the use of 6 billion people walking around with almost identical point of views? It's a complete waste of human energy and time. We could just assign one person to have a point of view in every field, and we could all just follow that, couldn't we? Why do all the thinking ourselves?!

Oh! But hey, that's exactly what we are doing. Isn't it? We have one institution for every field which tells the rest of us what to believe and what not believe and what to think about and what not think about, be it religion, politics, or economics.

We are often told that censorship is necessary for a safe and peaceful society. But is it really so?

I am not sure about the safety and peace, but I do know that censorship is definitely necessary for the politicians and businessmen to make sure that we don't see or read anything that they don't want us to see or read. They very well know that ignorant public is easily manipulated and led.

Censor boards and other political/religious bodies usually have a problem with artistic work dealing with either

1) Real incidents of the past like genocides, riots, wars, political policies and so on,or,

2) Sexual content/abusive language, or,

3) Against current religious norms.

Let us explore these three points and see if the censor board and the whole concept of rejecting unpopular ideas is doing any good to the society.

According to the Supreme Court of India:
“Film censorship becomes necessary because a film motivates thought and action and assures a high degree of attention and retention as compared to the printed word. The combination of act and speech, sight and sound in semi darkness of the theatre with elimination of all distracting ideas will have a strong impact on the minds of the viewers and can affect emotions. Therefore, it has as much potential for evil as it has for good and has an equal potential to instill or cultivate violent or good behaviour. It cannot be equated with other modes of communication. Censorship by prior restraint is, therefore, not only desirable but also necessary."

First of all, most of the movies and books that face trouble with the censor boards and political-religious bodies usually deal with the reality of the state of affairs in the society, or with an incident from the past i.e., war,riot etc.
I haven't seen a single movie or read a single book which for no reason urges people to be violent, and I don't think there are too many of such works out there anyway.
And let's say for the sake of argument that there are such movies and books out there that instigate people to be violent, but what do people have their brains for? If I came across such a work, I would with an open mind see what it's about and if it seems illogical to me, I will move right on. Besides if someone is stupid enough to be influenced by a movie or a book to kill other people, then isn't it possible that the problem is the person himself and not the book or the movie?
Chances are good that he was thinking of killing a whole bunch of people for a very long time, may be he even bought a gun much before he read that book or watched that movie.
So why should the rest of the sane people be refused to indulge in free flow of art and information because of a few morons?
And even if there are propaganda movies and books out there that wrongfully instigate violence, isn't there a clear difference between such movies/books and the ones which are plain artistic representation of the reality of affairs in society?
Why do always the latter kind of books/movies face trouble?

And Why should the movies and the books be considered dangerous and unfit for the society? The movies and books are not violent, the society is. The movies and books only bring out what already is.
If the society can handle and live with the reality itself, i am sure it can handle a movie or a book about it.
And by the way it's the people of the society that brought about all the wars, riots, killings, girl infanticides, and child marriages in the first place.
So why are we trying to stop artists from talking about these facts, rather than stopping these horrible acts themselves? Doesn't it seem a little un-intelligent for us "Intelligent beings", we are so proud of saying that.

All we are doing is censoring any work that talks about the reality of social/political/religious affairs, under the pretext of safety and peace of the society. Nothing more.
What we fail to understand is that banning a book or a movie is not going to make a society peaceful.
Violence has been there since the beginning of time. Other animals are violent too, but they don't have any violent books and movies. They are violent because it's in their nature, it's their instinct to be violent for survival, they don't know any other way, neither do we.

We are violent for the same reason, we are semi-conscious beasts ourselves. It's in our nature. We are far from understanding the meaning of peace as a society. At least a few light years away, and banning books and movies, and shutting people up is not going to help.

Secondly, different modes of art appeal differently to different individuals, and I don't think it is right for an institution like supreme court to make a generalized staement that movies have more impact on people, because to some people books are more engaging than a movie, and to some others music might be.

Now talking about censoring sexual content:

There are currently 4.2 million porn websites (12% of the total) and growing. The pornographic industry of the entire world is larger than the revenues of the top technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and Earthlink.
Daily, 65 million pornographic search engine requests are made (25% of total)and 2.5 billion porn emails are sent.
42.7% of internet users view porn.
That will give you an idea how hungry people are for sex. Yet as a society we have failed to accept sex openly.
You'd think that the total sexual urge of any society would be the collective total of the individual sexual urges of the people. But even though as individuals we all want as crazy a sex life as possible, as a society we act like it's a shameful act?

As individual people we walk around with hard-ons but our society is like a 75 year old man with a limp dick.
Isn't something wrong here? I sense double standards.
Sex is alright in the bedroom, but in the living room we don't like to talk about it.
None of us would be here if it wasn't for sex, so why act like it's such a bad thing?

A lot of people blame pornography and prostitution for having a bad influence on the society, but neither are bad of and by themselves. They are demand driven markets. When people don't get sex they either go to a porn website, or to a brothel. You can't blame them for that.
Reproduction is the second most fundamental obligation of any living thing after survival. So anybody whose got his dinner sorted out is going to want to fuck, and there is not a god damn thing in the world that can stop them.

People also like to use children as an excuse against sexual content. But where is the sense in, at one hand trying to convince children that sex is an imaginary and evil thing, and on the other forcing them to believe that santa claus is real? Why is everything so upside down?
We are so weak and scared of dealing with the simple facts of life that we are forced to use our children and culture as our shield.
Besides your children are going to find out about sex anyway, either through self exploration or with the help of the uncle next door. So why not talk to them about it yourself, they will definitely appreciate that more.

And let's face it, the root cause of all sexual crimes is not prostitution or porn, it's the lack of sexual awareness and our failure to accept sex openly for what it is.

By mindlessly censoring sexual content censor board is only allowing the society to continue to elude the issue of sex, and hence is not doing a thing to help the society positively.


Last but not the least censoring of independent ideas about God, and religion:

I don't want to delve into the details of how hollow, illogical, archaic and insecure all the religions of the world are. All I want to say is that- if millions of hindus, muslims, christians have the right to proudly talk about their beliefs and gods and build their temples and churches, why can't the people who don't want anything to do with religion of any sort be proud about their beliefs?

What happened to all men being equal and all?

If a hindu has a right to be a proud hindu, and a muslim to be a proud muslim then what is wrong with me being a proud non believer and talking about it?

Why do a few non believers make billions of believers so insecure? If the religious people have so much faith in their god and religion and if they are so sure that god exists, then what can a few men's opinion do?
Why can't these self-righteous people just ignore the non believers?
I will tell you why - Because they are insecure about their own belief systems, and they don't want anyone reminding them of that.

In conclusion my question boils down to this - Where is the sense in trying to fix the society by banning books and movies?
Even if our movies are censored and our books are screened to protect the easily influenced people and children, who is going to protect them from the stinking garbage that society itself is.
All the artistic works that a censor board has a problem with come from the people of the society, and are usually about the society anyway.
So even if all the movies and books disappeared, people would find reason to be violent in the society itself.
Hence we see that censorship doesn't help the society positively in anyway and the justification for censorship being a neccessity is pure political jargon meant to serve the purpose of the establishment and not of the people.

Vegetarian & Non-vegetarian: A perspective

Can anyone please explain what the moral difference between the two acts depicted above is?

I am really sick and tired of half-dead souls trying to justify killing and exploiting other animals for food, profit, clothing and other selfish reasons.

"Oh well! Plants have life too! What do you have to say to that?" is usually their response. And from the look on their face you can usually tell that they feel really smug, and happy with themselves for having come up with that thought.

First of all, a person who immediately jumps to "Oh well! Plants have life too!", as a comeback has either not given the subject much thought or is not serious about having a sincere discussion and just wants to win the argument.

The problem with debates in general is that, people usually stop listening to each other and forget the basic reason behind the discussion, and it becomes all about proving the other person wrong. So you see it becomes a war of egos between the people involved, and the debate loses all connections with the subject being discussed.

That's what happens in a vegetarian/non-vegetarian debate too. Rather than really trying to understand what the other person means by saying - "There is a visible and obvious pain and suffering involved in killing animals that is being ignored", we straight off look for a way to find flaw in the logic by pointing out that "Hey! Plants have life too".

If you are a person who can kill a human being, butcher an animal, and cut down a tree with the same amount of ease then you have all the right to put the argument of plants having life forth because you truly feel the pain of humans, animals and plants equally.

But most people say that because they see it is a clever retort, rather than saying it because they truly see the pain of plants like they see the pain of humans and animals.

And more importantly if you are a person who can look an animal in the eye, see the fear, and see his or her desire to live and still kill it, then you definitely can't understand the pain of plants. And you are using the point about plants having life just as a way of defending your ego and point of view.

The discussion is no more about plants, animals, humans, life, kindness, cruelty, evolution, logic, honesty or all the other greater causes of humanity, you have pulled the discussion about human evolution down to your place in the gutter and have made it about you and your ego, and your need to be proven superior to another human being because you still haven't even learnt to look at other human beings equally and are fighting with other people for superiority.

And in this personal selfish war between egos to dominate over one another, the emotion/feeling that was to be understood is completely missed.

Secondly here is what I have to say about the plant argument.

We humans were in the jungle for a very long time, having no notions of right or wrong, then slowly we came out of the forest and slowly evolved into civilizations. Till now we were killing humans, animals and trees all alike.

Then somebody came along and said "Hey! You know what, all men are equal and we should treat everybody equally", and the rest of us were like OK, let us try to treat all men the same way.

But before we could even begin trying to treat all humans equally, somebody came along and said "Oh! All animals are equal and it is wrong to kill other animals for selfish human needs".

And then while we were trying to wrap our heads around the last two moral concepts, science allowed us to understand the life of plants and allowed us to look at them under the microscope and the final realization dawned upon us that plants have life too, and if we consume plants then we are still destroying life.

Now we have these three deep realizations that we need to understand and inculcate.

But wait, as I said we hardly got started on trying to treat each other equally. We humans still haven't managed to accept one another as equal.

Just pick up any newspaper or tune into a news channel and pay attention to some of it and you will get what I mean.

And if we can't even understand other people’s pain like our own, then let us not waste time pretending that we can feel pain of plants.

We just throw arguments like "plants have life" to win an argument without realizing that we have to start with trying to treat one another equally, only then can we talk about treating animals and then plants the same way.

What is important is that you start today and try to treat everybody as yourself a little more everyday and then try to look at animals around you as equal, and may be by then we will figure out a way to survive without harming anything at all. But we shouldn't just dismiss the need for changing ourselves at all right now, just because we cannot see a possibility of changing ourselves 100% all at once.

Let us try to make ourselves a little more loving every day and slowly we will see ourselves become less barbaric and more gentle and kind. 

I think to be alive means to have come into existence, (which not to mention is out of one's control), and having come into existence to survive, till death.

So having said that, it is impossible to survive without disturbing the surrounding Eco-system at all.

For example, to walk across a grass field, one has to step on the grass and that's going to cause some damage, and there is no way around that.

But as intelligent beings, we should survive/exist causing as less pain/suffering/damage to other living beings and environment.

And that is the difference between killing billions of animals each day, and not killing billions of animals each day.

It is a simple concept-Cause as less suffering as possible.

We should at least be ready to change our ways of survival and living freely, as we evolve and understand our world more, instead of just stagnating evolution by trying to justify our current way of life by arguments we don’t fully comprehend.

There is another set of people who like to play the superior species card.

"Oh! We are on top of the food chain; we are superior to the other animals. And in nature stronger animals eat weaker animals”, or something on the lines of “I didn’t evolve to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.”

I feel that there is no animal more inferior to a human being who thinks he can do whatever he wills with other animals because he feels superior to them. How is that different from rich people, politicians, and the rulers of this world treating the rest of us like insects?

But when we are at the receiving end, we complain and when we are at the delivering end we cite the same sick racial mentality as our defence.

Talk about hypocrisy.

As far as food chain and wild animals eating other animals is concerned- Let me break it down for you.

Animals like Lions/Tigers/Hyenas are biologically conditioned into their paradigm; they cannot help but feed on other animals. If they don't kill other animals for food, they will die. Also this is Nature's way of maintaining a balance. Through such food chains- the population of different species is kept in check.

But we humans are not biologically conditioned to only eat animals and if we kill animals for food, we do so for taste and appetite which are luxuries and not necessities for survival.

And there is a big difference between killing an animal because you can, and killing an animal because you need to as far as your decision making is concerned as an individual.

Lot of people love to pose this particular hypothetical when this topic is being discussed – “So if you found yourself in a situation where you had to either kill an animal and eat it or die, what would you do?”

Here the person is not really interested in knowing what I would do in such a situation. That is least bit of his or her concern. The person is only trying to justify continuing killing animals by trying to show that even I might do it if I had to.

Honestly, answers regarding such hypothetical situations where a person has been pushed to a point of desperation for survival cannot be answered sitting comfortably in a room. I don’t know what I would do in such a situation would be my honest reply.

I think I would let myself starve to death than live at the expense of another’s life.

But in a day to day reality we hardly face situations where we have to choose between life and death and we act on what we want to do rather than what we need to do. And it is this day to day behaviour that we are talking about here, not some apocalyptic end of the world scenario where there is no food around. We are talking about human behaviour in a normally functional society and so let us stick to that and not wander off topic trying to justify our current lifestyles with such ludicrous comparisons.

Also many people feel that non-vegetarians are helping maintain the balance of nature's food chain which I think is not the case. We lost touch with nature and her balance a long time ago.

Let us try to discuss this together.

We kill animals on massive scales every day, and due to the profit based structure that our food industry is fundamentally based upon, the whole process is designed to minimize costs and maximize profits, and so in this mechanical system, the well-being of animals is completely left out of the equation.

Besides that, because of the massive demand for non-vegetarian food, we are eating away all the balance nature tried to preserve through food chains. We are doing a lot of things to nature, but preserving balance is definitely not one of them.

We are over fishing the seas to a point that majestic fish like Great white sharks have been pushed to the list of endangered species, millions and may be billions of animals are killed every day for food.

The way we treat our cattle is no different from how Nazis treated Jews during WWII. If you want visual evidence of this then watch Earthlings, and you will find out where your food comes from and at what cost?

The fact of the matter is that we humans, to satisfy our taste and appetite put animals through the same torture and pain that Jews went through at the hand of Nazis during Holocaust every day and we don't even know it. Nobody wants to know where their food comes from.

Jews were at least saved from Nazis by other countries. For these animals there is no hope. I think most of these animals must have lost all hopes of living and wandering free. These animals will have no happy stories to pass down to their younger generations.
It’s a grim reality, theirs.

Everybody likes to sit in their living rooms and talk about the problems in the society, without having a clue about how they are contributing to the problems themselves. It is ignorance at individual level that creates such a clueless society.

"Nobody seems to have a clue about what is going on."

Everybody likes to hide behind- "Well! You can never be too sure you know."

I say “Well if you can never be sure, then put your empty head on the pillow and go back to sleep. As we can see you are sleep walking through life anyway!"

Everybody wants to see peace and love in the world, they want to end all wars and cruelty, and stop the useless killings and all the hatred, they want everyone to be treated equally and with care and gentleness and then these same people go back home and slit a chicken's throat, hang it upside down and leave it there to drain out all the blood, and then cook and eat something that was just alive, and looking at them a few minutes ago.

And then these same people wonder why there is so much violence in the world.

It's simple! It's the same violent tendency whether it is towards a member of the same species or another species is of little importance. A person can either be cruel and barbaric or gentle and kind, but he can’t be both at the same time.

It is our ability as human beings to disconnect one's self from the suffering of another living being that allows us humans to be violent with one another and other animals.

I am sure that this world will not know peace till there is cruelty to other animals. Pure barbaric cruelty and violent tendencies are very deep rooted in us from the times we were in the jungle and this primitive instinct knows no boundaries.

The fact that we are still so barbaric and cruel is what concerns me. It shows that evolution has still not gotten our species very far out of the jungle as yet.

We are still struggling in the deep thick jungles of our minds where darkness and uncertainty rules and the mind doesn’t know right from wrong because it can’t see anything in the darkness of ignorance. Our mind is living in constant fear trying to keep us from making any changes to your lifestyle because that might threaten our survival.

Your animal brain is keeping you from opening up to the love of other animals and from feeling oneness with other living beings.

This is not a debate about plants and animals anymore. It is about evolving out of our cruel violent tendencies. Human evolution requires us to be more intelligent and kind and loving.

No man can evolve into a better human being/conscious being and still inflict pain on fellow living being.

For me the choice between vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism is very simple. I see contact between me and another human being or another animal as an interaction, and I would like to confine my interactions with other people and other animals to ones that give love and happiness and want nothing to do with hurting or torturing anyone whose pain I can understand.

Today I can understand the pain of animals and humans so let me start by trying to treat humans and animals with a little more love everyday and maybe I will come to a point where I can look at plants the same way too, or maybe I will never understand the pain of plants. But what is important is that I am ready to go where my honest understanding takes me.

We have to be ready to evolve and move ahead and to do that we have to slowly get rid of our barbaric violent tendencies and become more kind and considerate to our environment in general.

A few quotes on Vegetarianism along Similar lines of Thought

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child, as it is to the caterpillar. -- Bradley Miller

For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love. --Pythagoras (6th century BC)

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. --Leo Tolstoy

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. --Albert Einstein

We don't need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could. --James Cromwell

As long as there are slaughterhouses in this world, there will be battlefields - Leo Tolstoy

So, eat what you want, but don't try and justify it with incomplete logic.

On an even deeper level, the discussion about vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism seems to get further detached from the argument about plants and animals and becomes more about human ego or human image.

To be more specific, the discussion becomes more about the concept of ‘me’ and ‘my’ that is the result of the image we create for ourselves and for others.

So each individual calls him/herself ‘me’ or ‘I’ and considers all people, objects, animals, places, concepts that are close to one’s heart as ‘my’ or ‘mine’.

Now the moment we bring the concept of ‘me’ and ‘my’ into existence, there automatically comes into existence something that is ‘not-me’ and ‘not mine’ and that is where all problems start.

The direction in which people channel their good, friendly, loving side and their indifferent, cruel, and selfish side seems to be based on what people consider their own and what they consider not theirs.

I wouldn’t say it is impossible, but it will be very hard to find a person who can kill torture his own pet animal or his own loved ones because for that person all these things are ‘his’, but the same person might be ready to kill an animal or a human being that is not ‘his’ to satisfy his own needs.

Everybody lives inside their own self-imposed boundary of me and my, and all people and animals are fighting with one another from behind and over these boundaries.

So people are fully capable of loving other people and other animals as long as they consider these people or animals as their own, and these same people are equally capable of being savage jungle beasts to people or animals they consider strangers.

So the main culprit behind all violence that our planet has ever seen seems to be the concept of ‘me’ and ‘not me’. All animals including humans destroy life around them to support and feed and protect what they consider precious and ‘mine’.

While other animals are hard wired into that paradigm, we humans on the other hand have stumbled upon the possibility of growing beyond this self-centred paradigm that leads to nothing more than wars, killings, fights, and suffering and actually attain peace. And the only way to move towards a more peaceful social paradigm seems to be to expand the circle or the concept of ‘my’ to involve a little more of the universe every day.

Expand your circle of love till it includes everything around you step by step, and then you will understand what it means to be at one with nature.

Only when we are ready to evolve freely to become better people as individuals, will the society evolve and only then will the world be free of all suffering, pain, war and cruelty to one another and other animals.

It is not a debate anymore. It is not about humans, animals or plants specifically; it is about coming face to face with our cruel tendencies and rising above them. Once you rise beyond barbaric cruel tendencies you will find love, and that love will extend to fellow humans, animals and plants alike.

A Brief History Of India

Violence has always been a part of human history, and the history of India like that of any other country is no different.

It's full of massacres,and blood-shed over few men's hunger for power and conquest.

The Aryans settled down in the Ganges plane and lived there in what we may call 'relative peace', keeping in mind what followed over the centuries.

As rest of the Indian history is full of invasions and conquests.

First the Persians and the Greeks, then Alexander. Followed by the Maurya period. Which reached a peaceful state under the rule of Asoka as he was deeply influenced by Buddhism. And then for a long time there were Hindu dynasties ruling most of the Indian subcontinent.
Even though the Hindu rule had it's own fundamental flaws in form of religiously defined social structure of castes, absence of other major religious groups in the Indian sub-continent allowed for a comparatively peaceful existence.

But the things that shaped the future we see today took place once the Moguls arrived in India. Because this was the first time that Hinduism met Islam.
This marked the birth of hatred between Hindus and Muslims. But the common Hindu and Muslim people had nothing to do with the invasions. It was the will of the Mogul rulers that brought about the bitterness between the two communities.

Hindus blindly began hating Islam and those who followed it, the story on the Muslim side was no different. Yet again we see, that it was not about religion at all, instead it was about a few powerful men and their will to conquer more land and attain more power.
Religion as always was used to manipulate the minds of the common people through the dirty politics of the rich, fueled by sick and perverted hunger for more power.

And one of the last rulers of this country were the English, and the damage they did to this country is still in a state of dis-repair. As the others before them, colonial raj was driven by need for power, profit, and control over the world.
They came here under the pretext of The East India Company and stayed here for over two centuries.

Their infamous divide and rule policies are well known to the world. They kept the caste system in India prevalent by issuing government policies based on caste system and religion, thus forcing people to feel kinship only with people belonging to their own social group and class, and in doing so alienating themselves from the people belonging to other castes.

While the English lived in royal fashion through out the British raj, famines in India, often attributed to failed government policies, were some of the worst ever recorded, including the Great Famine of 1876–78, in which 6.1 million to 10.3 million people died and the Indian famine of 1899–1900, in which 1.25 to 10 million people died.

It's really hard to believe that the shrewd bureaucratic minds behind the British raj, who had successfully colonized many countries under their rule that lasted for centuries, failed to come up with fitting government policies to keep the people of India alive let alone happy.

To me these famines seem to have been systematically created by the British rule in order to reduce the population and keep it in check and in turn reduce the resistance of the Indian people against the raj.
Systematic plans for reduction of human population in order to perpetuate the state of affairs, are still a part of the hidden global policies of the elite. Hence, to me it only goes on to make more sense that this has been happening for a long time.

Besides, aren't famines determined by the forces of nature? Don't famine occur due to natural phenomenon like crop-failure? Since when do government policies create famines, unless they are deliberately meant to do so?

After such racial and biased rule over India for years, when the time came for the English to leave India, they didn't do so without delivering the final blow to the Indian people.

The partition.

After forcefully thrusting the caste and religion driven identity over the Indian people through these cunning policies, the British further widened the gulf between the two major religious groups in India i.e., (Hindus and Muslims) by creating the congress party which was primarily a Hindu party.
This created a feeling of insecurity amongst the Muslim population of the country, who felt that their interests would not be addressed by this Hindu majority party. Thus Muslim league came into existence.
It was the clash between these two parties that led to the partition of India.
And if one were to believe the enormous amounts of evidence that is present, it is clear that most of the violence around the time of partition, was systematically engineered by the two parties on both sides.
Party workers instigated and took active part in the gruesome rapes and killings, and they in turn were funded by the two parties.

After the borders were announced, millions of people sought to rejoin their new country, convinced they could no longer live together. Nine million Hindus left Pakistan and six million Muslims left India. A million refugees crossed the borders on foot, forming human columns over dozens of miles long, in rags, exhausted, starved, crushed by sorrow. Others, leaving in trains, never arrived. Witnesses described “death trains” filled with mutilated cadavers, the train wheels dripping blood. There were between 150,000 and a million deaths in a few months.
The British showed least interest in trying to prevent the riots. Most of the British soldiers had been called back to the UK due to the losses incurred by the English during the World War II. And the two newly formed countries were in complete disorder and were in no shape to deal with the riots.
Thousands of Sikh women got killed by their own family members in the name of honor killing. Some figures say that around 75000 women (Muslim,Sikh and Hindu) were raped and murdered. Their breasts slit off by angry men.
Mother India just like Mother earth raped over and over again by her own sons. Her screams are long gone now. All hopes for any help have faded away.
Now she lies there with a bruised body and spirit, being raped by each one of her children one by one. Each one fighting to get some more action.
And like any mother, all she wanted was to see her children live in peace with one another sharing what ever she had to offer.
But like wild beasts we snatch at her, everyone trying to have a go before the other and get their hands full with as much as possible.

The hateful incidents of the partition created differences between Hindus and Muslims that are still as fresh even after more than 50 years. But the horrors of partition were hidden from the new generation under the false pretext of Independence.

I feel that 15th of August every year should be mourned rather than celebrated.

Besides, keep in mind that before partition Hindus and Muslims fought against the British raj together for years, when you think about how the politics of a few power hungry men mercilessly manipulates the fate of the rest.


The way events have unfolded over the centuries in the past and what they have led to in today's world is a rather sad and paradoxical state of things when we understand that we are suppose to be the "Intelligent ones". Yet we cause more blood-shed than any other species on earth.
I see no sign of intelligence in all that's happened, and in what's happening now.

The will of a few men has always decided fate of the rest of the unsuspecting people, and it has resulted in disasters of epic proportions every single time.

Don't you find it appalling that every single significant page in our human history is marked by nothing but bloodshed?

Why don't we ever read about two groups of people meeting and being elated at the same? Why don't we rejoice and understand the bigger picture! Why do we always feel threatened by another group. If you think about it that's what wild animals do too. Lions see another pack of lions coming into their territory and their only intuition is to attack and save their land and their resources for themselves. Do you see the similarity here with what we do?

And so I ask again! Where is the intelligence part of it?