this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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But it has to be both if only because somebody has to show the way. Governments are not going to clamp down on meat ag when the whole electorate is cheerfully eating meat.
Personally I see the argument "I can't do anything, it's about the system!" as a extremely convenient cop-out. Any system is made up of individuals.
And all ills in the current world are the result of a very small set of people. A small group of people has been pushing meat eating like crazy.a small set of people placed tiny taxes on meat.
A tiny percent of people are the reason why shipping is so big and so polluting. I can't change that, nobody can change that, except a tiny amount of people.
A tiny percentage of people are the reason why we have such differences in wealth in society.
It's a tiny amount of people that are the push behind all wars
I could go on for a while but blaming the common people for the world's ills is disingenuous from my perspective.
You want everyone to eat less meat? Start taxing meat properly. That requires politicians to do their jobs: make decisions that will make the world better for everyone, instead of making decisions that will make him or her get elected again.
Most politicians are lazy and or think people are stupid. People would understand meat being more expensive if explanations of why would be clearly posted everywhere and alternatives would become cheaper and more abundant.
Then again, we now live in a world where all idiots have a bigger megaphone than any scientist ever had. That too should change. I'm aorry, fuck your free speech, not everybody should be allowed to have a megaphone and talk about stuff, but that is a slightly different subject. Either way, that too could be solved by a tibt sliver of people
The gulf between your worldview and mine is so wide as to make a productive discussion impossible. Unfortunately.
That says more about you than me.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. If you look at the history of regulating substances or practices deemed harmful to the public, it's almost always led by governmental oversight. We knew asbestos was harmful way before it was regulated, but that didn't stop corporations from utilizing it in everything.
The whole point of federal governments is to moderate corporations at the systemic level. Corporations know they can win the fight against individual responsibility, but they're terrified of regulation.
We've already done this with the environment once before. The creation of the EPA popularized the push for clean air and water at a national level. Prior to the regulatory action there were of course people worried about pollution, but nothing really came of it until there was a regulatory body put in place.
Yes yes, I understand all that. It remains that people are using the systems argument as an excuse not to change their own lives. I've seen this in action and so have you. No democratic system is going to change when citizens are not lifting a finger individually.
There's a legitimate argument to be had about the hypothesis where voters continue not to lift a finger but vote for green parties that promise to force them to. But that scenario seems to me too absurdly hypocritical and schizophrenic to be worth considering.
Of course it's necessary to change the system, but that's never going to happen until a critical mass of individuals put their actions where their mouths are.
I mean everyone including you does that to some level, otherwise we'd all be eco-terrorists. The small sacrifices you or I make are virtually meaningless, and are really just ways to make ourselves feel better. If you or I really put all our eggs in the basket of individual impact then we'd be blowing up oil wells. But we don't, because we want to be comfortable just like the people "not lifting a finger".
I would say that we don't really live in a democratic society..... More systemic change in America is driven by the will of a few powerful individuals than the voting majority.
How do you quantify lifting a finger? To reach a "critical mass" we'd still have to enact systemic change for items like education and economic safety nets. People aren't going to "lift a finger" for something like meat consumption when they are living paycheck to paycheck in a food desert where most of their calories are coming from premade food from convenient stores.
Or simply to act to with moral coherence and avoid unnecessary cognitive dissonance. So that's one difference between our attitudes.
That would IMO be a negative impact. Ecoterrorism does not work. Wrong ethically, and counterprodutive. So that's a second difference.
These are questions of deep philosophy, not simply judgements based on facts. You don't see things as I see them, and vice versa. In a pluralistic society that should be manageable.
Hence this third difference. The very fact that we can express disagreements like this and not be arrested is proof of something. The fact that our politicians are useless or malevolent is because we are those things. No societies in human history have been as free and democratic as the modern West. Things were (much) worse before, and soon they're going to get much worse again.
Anyway. An unbridgeable gulf. Others can decide which of us, if either, is "right".