WORLD NEWS TRUST: Like the Little Satans We Are (Jason Miller)

[Tace]

By Jason Miller -- World News Trust

For Sylvia

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

–William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

Enlightened as he was, even Inge’s thinking was tainted by the toxin of ego. Who are we human animals (whose collective knowledge of our own capacity to think, learn, and know is still significantly limited), to presume to know that non-human animals do not conceptualize a Devil of sorts? And whether they are able to conjure such a mental abstraction or not is ultimately irrelevant. Objectively speaking, we human animals ARE Devils toward our non-human counterparts, whether they perceive us to be or not.

The Devil Wears Prada

That’s right. We’re all wearing Prada. Whether we’ve winnowed our wardrobe down to a couple of items or are still amongst those who don the apparel of speciesism with the pride of a redneck whose just beaten “his woman” back into submission, we’re all complicit in the systemic infliction of cruelty, oppression, torture, and murder upon our non-human animal brethren.

As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.”

“Might is right” has been a staple of our repugnant reign over this planet throughout the history of human “civilization,” a mode of existence which is so severely malformed that anarcho-primitivists like Derrick Jensen have concluded that the only cure for this cancer upon the Earth is to blow up and start over.

Self-delusional and mentally masturbatory as it may be, we human animals invest insane amounts of energy into maintaining our perverse illusion that we are separate from the “natural world” and possess an omnipotence that enables us to bend the forces of nature to our wills.

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