Month: January 2019

Although it sounds like an impassioned plea for mice, Australian ecologist Mike Archer’s 2011 “blood on your hands” argument against veganism is really just an uncritical defence of the status quo, rightly pointing out some relevant problems but completely ignoring others.

1. First and most important of all: The animals killed for cultivating land do matter, enormously. The remedy for that is humane herbiculture, which is definitely possible, and practiced, but rarely, because of the preference for factory agriculture, which is cheaper.

2. The picture drawn by Archer is of Australia, where it is claimed that 98% of beef (and all kangaroo meat) still comes from natural range-feeding animals. This is not at all true elsewhere in the world, where a lot of arable land is used to produce livestock-feed instead of food for humans. Australia, where wildlife habitat encroachment has not yet gone nearly as far as in Europe and America, is not representative of the rest of the world.

3. The free grazing argument, such as it is, applies only to cattle (and kangaroos), not to pigs and chickens, which require agriculture to grow their feed.

4. The calculation in terms of protein percentage is greatly skewed by the fact that we eat far more protein than necessary for survival and health.

Conclusion.

A. Leave the free-grazing animals for last. Phase out all the other meat-eating that is not even implicated by the herbicultural collateral-damage argument.

B. Reform herbiculture to make it as humane as possible.

C. From the fact that animals graze freely it does not follow that we need to kill and eat them, let alone purpose breed them.

D. Worry more about wildlife habitat encroachment.

E. Not only do humans not need to eat nearly as much protein as they do, but they need not reproduce as profligately as they do, increasing exponentially the mouths to fill, the land to encroach, and the innocent victims to kill and eat, needlessly.

(George Monbiot has done a few flip-flops on this topic too…)

See also:

Bruers, S. (2015). The Core Argument for Veganism. Philosophia, 43(2), 271-290.

Matheny, G. (2003). Least harm: A defense of vegetarianism from Steven Davis’s omnivorous proposal. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 16(5), 505-511.

Every day it becomes harder and harder to believe the depths of heartlessness to which the Fidik-minded populace of Hungary has sunk.

Shameless, shameful. The historic stigma this will leave on the government and its supporters — mitigated only by that wonderful minority of Hungarians who have hearts and are helping the helpless victims of their countrymen’s odious apathy and antipathy — will be indelible.

The righteous Hungarians will one day prevail, but meanwhile Orbanistan is a pariah among nations, an odious blight on humanity itself. Shame, shame and more shame.

Read, reader, and weep.

All the horrors that humans inflict on animals humans inflict on humans too. But doing it to humans is illegal, doing it to animals is not. Why?

Toutes les cruautés qu’infligent les humains aux animaux, les humains les infligent aux humains aussi — à la différence que de faire ça aux humains est illégal, tandis qu’aux animaux, pas. Pourquoi?

In “What if Current Foundations of Mathematics are Inconsistent?” Voevodsky (2010) suggests that there are three options in light of Goedel’s theorems:

Either:
1. If we “know” arithmetic is consistent, it should be provable, so Goedel’s second incompleteness theorem is false.

Or:
2. Admit there can be provably unprovable arithmetic “knowledge”

Or:
3. Admit that “knowing” arithmetic is consistent is an illusion, and arithmetic is inconsistent.

But why make any mention of psychological states like “knowing” at all?

Surely, regardless of our intuitions, the only truths (besides the Cogito) that we can “know” to be true, i.e., certain (rather than just probably true on all available evidence) are the truths that we have proved to be necessarily true, on pain of contradiction

Why not the following?—

4. Admit that arithmetic’s consistency is provably unprovable, but that then it may either be (unprovably) true (rather than unprovably “known”) that arithetic is consistent — or it may be false that arithmetic is consistent.

5. If arithmetic’s consistency is true (but unprovable, hence unknowable), then all proven theorems are true (except that their consistency cannot be proven).

6. If arithmetic’s consistency is false, then either an instance of inconsistency will be found (hence inconsistency will be “proven”) or it will not be found, in which case it will never be known whether arithmetic is consistent or inconsistent, hence whether the negations of theorems we have proved are also provable.

“Reliability” does not seem to be a valid substitute for provability-on-pain-of-contradiction. It would make mathematics into something more like inductive empirical science: provisionally true on the available evidence until/unless contradictory evidence is encountered. That is just the conjunction of 5 and 6. It also has some of the flavor of intuitionistic reasoning (insofar as the excluded middle is concerned).

As usual, this uncertainty only besets infinities, not finite constructions.

Or does the notion of “deductive rigor” all reside in the provability of consistency in nonfinite mathematics?

(The problem of possible mistakes in proofs (and the partial solution of computer-aided proofs) concerns another kind of reliability, and again seems to be a solution only for finite mathematics.)

“Marriage” (as opposed to civil contracts), and especially its overlay of fideist fanfare and flim-flam, has always struck me as silly, irrespective of what genders are involved.

But it has also always seemed obvious that there should be an equal right to engage in such silliness, irrespective of what genders are involved.

So I (always slow on the uptake) only started to realize the importance and significance of the LGBT rights movement when I noticed who was opposing it: For, virtually without exception, those who opposed LGBT rights were the very same ones who opposed all or most of what I (and, I think, most decent people) would take to be fair and right.

So here’s Hungary’s Jobbik, a party that embodies and celebrates all the uglier sides of human nature — ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, brutality, violence — putting on a “charm campaign” in Washington to try to make itself look electable to more than just the tail end of the normal curve.

There is an important article in the Hungarian Free Press about the Jobbik/Fidesz “charm campaign” in Washington: “Tad Stahnke: Don’t be duped by Orbán’s charm offensive!“.

Perhaps the most important thing Tad Stancke’s timely report points out is that Jobbik is not the only foul emanation from today’s Hungary: The regime in power, Orban’s Fidesz party, has appropriated most of Jobbik’s ugly agenda — less out of conviction than out of opportunism and utter lack of either principles or scruples — to attract Hungarian voter and expat support.

And plutocratic Fidesz, too, is conducting a charm offensive in America to try to camouflage its affinity to its Charon.

To the point where we can just as well speak of “Fidik,” the fusion of the current body politic with its orbiting doppelganger.

The stance on LGBT rights is, as ever, the canary in the menacing magyar mineshaft.

But there is hope. Because although enough Hungarians are drawn to the Fidik mentality to keep it aloft for now, the decent side of the normal curve is also alive — if currently ailing — in Hungary, protesting against the xenophobic wall of shame under construction, and using their meagre means to help the migrants.

All you ever asked
of life
was thin little flakes
sprinkled frequently enough
so you could munch and munch
to your gentle little heart’s content.

At first I feared,
as your little belly swelled,
that you were egg-bound,
then that you were over-eating,
as your glide became a waddle,
and, alarmingly,
I no longer needed a net
to airlift you to the other tank
so the rest could eat in peace
and you would not burst:

I could just scoop you up
in my hands,
your soft, tubby little form,
and you,
too swollen to struggle,
but now I know,
also too weak.

And I thought
it’s because all you care about
is food.

When my sluggish soul realized
you were neither gravid
nor gourmande
but suffering from a fearful illness
I rushed
to purchase the paraphernalia for a cure,
but you could no longer wait,
nor even resist the filter,
grown stronger than you,
which locked you in its orbit,
so you could only linger there
gasping, helplessly.

So sudden.
Was it because I unjustly underfed you
in your last weeks?
Or failed to freshen your water enough?
Or discovered your ailment too late?
Or the world was just too much — or too little — for you?

Your waddle is still now.

You drift freely with the little whirl-pool.

I don’t know if you still are.

I don’t dare decide not.

And I don’t want to.

I squeeze your bloated little belly
gently, maybe I can expel the poison.

And soon I must umpire the learnèd paper
that confidently argues
that fish do not feel
nor see
nor suffer.

My own little lump of gold,
the only gold of value.

I won’t betray you again.

“The pain passes, but the beauty remains” — Auguste Renoir

Pronounced by someone speaking of his own pain, this statement is noble and betokens all that is good about the human spirit.

But all too often it is not that. It is about beauty (taste, pleasure) for me, and pain for others, especially non-human others.

“I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money… Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?” — J.M. Coetzee, “The Lives of Animals”

Video: The Mirror-Neuron Initiative

On June 13 2015, all around the world – in Paris, Brussels, London, Berlin, Istanbul, Delhi, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal – people gathered to March for the Closing of the Slaughterhouses.

But the slaughterhouses will not close of their own accord.

To close the slaughterhouses people’s eyes and hearts have to be opened. Opening people’s hearts is the only hope for the countless victims – innocent, helpless, without voices, without rights – who are suffering, horribly and needlessly, every moment of every day, everywhere in the world, for our palates.

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, The Ghost in Our Machine (with permission)
How to open people’s hearts?

With two fundamental facts that most people do not yet know or believe.

I. The first fundamental fact is that eating meat is not necessary for human survival or human health.

The vegans from all over the world who marched on June 13 were the living proof of this first fundamental fact (Nearly 1% of the world population of 7.5 billion is vegan today.)

II. The second fundamental fact is that in order to provide this meat that is not necessary for the survival or health of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, an unimaginable amount of suffering is necessary for over 150 billion innocent, voiceless, defenceless victims every year.

Slaughter for meat is not euthanasia. It is not the merciful, pain-free, terror-free ending of a long, happy life in order to spare the victim from suffering a terrible incurable disease or unbearable pain.

SEE ALSO:
– Video Captures Terror Of Slaughterhouses – The Dodo
– “Hurt That Bitch”: What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside A Factory Farm – Mother Jones
– Scalding Live Chickens Is Business as Usual on Factory Farms – Mark Bekoff
– Cheap Meat Comes at High Cost to Farm Animals, Wildlife – Stephanie Feldstein
– Let’s #OpentheBarns to Transparency– Matthew Bershadker

Slaughter is the terrifying and horribly painful ending of a short, anguished life full of disease and fear and pain, for innocent, defenceless victims deliberately bred and reared for that purpose. And it is all carefully concealed from the public eye.

And it is completely unnecessary for our survival or health. We inflict all this pain on the victims only for taste pleasure, and out of habit.

Demonstrations like the June 17 march are very important, but they are not enough to open people’s hearts and close the slaughterhouses.

For that, we first have to open access to the slaughterhouses, with audio-visual surveillance Webcams placed at all the sites of the abominations (breeding, rearing, transport, slaughter) — cameras that will film the horrors and stream them all immediately, continuously and permanently on the Web so that all people on the planet can witness the terrible cost in agony that our taste-preferences are inflicting, every moment of every day, everywhere, on our victims: sentient beings, innocent, defenseless, without rights, without voice, without respite, without hope.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain image)

Not everyone will look at the videos streamed on the web.

But the number of witnesses who will look and see will grow and grow. And with them will grow the knowledge of the heartbreaking truth, the reality that has till now been hermetically hidden from our eyes and our hearts.

And those of us who come to know the awful truth can provide the eyes and the voice for the victims.

The existing regulations for minimizing suffering in slaughterhouses are shamefully inadequate — how can one needlessly end an innocent life humanely? But even these existing, inadequate regulations are not being enforced or monitored or obeyed today.

As its first consequence, the crowd-sourced monitoring of slaughterhouses, based on the evidence streamed and stored publicly on the web, witnessed and reported by a growing number of informed and concerned citizens, will help to ensure that today’s existing (though inadequate) regulations – and prosecution for their violation – are enforced more and more reliably and rigorously.

In Quebec — the province that has until now been the worst in Canada for animal welfare — we have just acquired a legal basis for requiring rigorous monitoring of slaughterhouses: the National Assembly has heeded the many Quebec voices raised on behalf of protecting animals from suffering. The Quebec Civil Code has been amended to give animals the status of sentient beings instead of the status of inert property – or movable goods – as formerly. (Other countries are doing likewise: New Zealand is the latest.)

But this new status, like this public demonstration, are not enough.

Sensitizing Sentients to Sentience

In Quebec, on this new legal basis, and with the help of the new audio-visual evidence, as witnessed by the Quebec public, not only would we be able to prosecute those who do not comply with the existing (inadequate) regulations but we could also press for the passage of stronger and stronger legislation to protect sentient beings.

And the evidence provided by these surveillance Webcams would have a still further effect, apart from the enforcement and strengthening of today’s animal welfare regulations: It would also awaken and sensitize witnesses to the actual horrors made necessary by a non-vegan diet: It would sensitize us all to the sentience of sentient beings.

In place of the shamelessly false advertising images of “happy cows” and “contented chickens” we would all have the inescapable, undeniable, graphic evidence of the unspeakable suffering of these innocent, sentient victims – and the utter needlessness of their suffering.

Might this not at last inspire us all not to remain non-vegan, just for the pleasure of the taste, at this terrible cost in pain to other innocent feeling beings? Might it inspire us to abolish their needless suffering, instead of just diminish it?

SEE ALSO:
– Federal Report: Vegan Diet Best For Planet – The Hill
– No Lie Can Live Forever: Predicting a Vegan America by 2050 – Kathy Stevens
– 2015 Predictions From Vegan and Plant-Based Nutrition Experts – Sandy Pukel
– Getting from A to Z: Why Animal Activists Should Support Incremental Reforms to Help Animals – Bruce Friedrichs
– It’s About Power, Not Food: The True Causes of World Hunger – Joel Berg

Win/Win Outcome for All

Let me close with a little optimistic numerology and the world’s most benign pyramid scheme for every sentient being on the planet, with no losers other than industries that build profit on suffering:

If each vegan today inspires just 6 more non-vegans (1) to become vegan AND (2) to each inspire 6 more non-vegans to become vegan, then in just 9 steps all of the population of Quebec will be vegan, in 10 steps all of Canada, in 11 Canada and the United States, and in 12-13 the whole world.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain image)
It is also entirely fair that it should be ourselves, the most prosperous and well-fed populace in the world, who start. By the time we have closed all of our industrial slaughterhouses and converted the land to producing food to feed people instead of using it to breed, feed and butcher innocent victims, needlessly, the planet will be producing 40% more human food, 60% less pollution and 90% less suffering – with enough left to sustain natural wildlife and their habitat too.

That will also be enough food to feed the world’s current malnourished as well as to allow the last subsistence hunters on the planet to make the transition to a truly fair, sustainable, scalable and merciful means of sustenance.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SeYhE-BsWsY

Le 13 juin 2015, aux quatre coins du monde – à Paris, Bruxelles, Berlin, Londres, Istanbul, Delhi, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montréal – des citoyens se sont réunis et ont marché pour revendiquer la fermeture des abattoirs.

Mais les abattoirs ne se fermeront pas de leur propre gré. Pour faire fermer les abattoirs, il faut d’abord faire ouvrir les yeux et les cœurs des gens. L’ouverture des cœurs est le seul espoir pour les indénombrables victimes innocentes, impuissantes, sans voix, sans droits, qui souffrent horriblement et inutilement, partout au monde, tous les jours, à tout moment.

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, The Ghost in Our Machine (avec permission)
Comment ouvrir le cœur des gens?

Avec deux faits fondamentaux que la plupart des gens ne savent ou ne croient pas.

1. Le premier fait fondamental est que manger de la viande n’est nécessaire pour ni la survie ni pour la santé humaine.

Les véganes provenant de partout au monde qui faisaient partie des marches étaient les preuves vivantes de ce premier fait fondamental. On estime qu’il y a 75 millions de véganes sur la planète: 1% de la population totale de 7,5 milliards.

2. Le deuxième fait fondamental est que, pour fournir cette viande qui n’est pas nécessaire à la survie et à la santé des 7,5 milliards d’êtres humains sur la planète, une quantité inimaginable de souffrance est nécessaire de la part de plus de 150 milliards de victimes innocentes, sans défense, sans voix, chaque année.

L’abattage pour nous fournir en viande n’est pas l’euthanasie. Il ne s’agit pas de la terminaison d’une longue vie heureuse, sans terreur, sans douleur, afin d’épargner de la souffrance à la victime d’une terrible maladie incurable ou d’une douleur insupportable.

LIRE AUSSI: Dans le couloir de la mort: une ex-inspectrice d’abattoir témoigne

L’abattage est la terminaison terrifiante et terriblement douloureuse d’une vie courte, pleine de maladies et de douleurs, de victimes innocentes qui ont été engendrées et élevées dans le but d’être impitoyablement abattues.

Et tout ça, sans aucune nécessité pour notre survie ou notre santé. Nous ne leur faisons toutes ces horreurs que pour le plaisir de nos palais, et par habitude.

Les manifestations comme celle du 13 juin sont très importantes, mais elles ne suffisent pas pour ouvrir le cœur des gens et pour fermer les abattoirs.

Pour cela, nous devons d’abord ouvrir les abattoirs, avec des webcams de surveillance audiovisuelles, placées dans tous les sites des abominations – caméras qui filmeront les horreurs et les transmettront toutes, immédiatement, de façon continue et permanente, sur le Web. Comme ça, tout les citoyens pourront devenir témoins du coût terrible en termes d’agonie qu’infligent nos préférences gustatives, à chaque instant de chaque jour, partout, aux êtres sensibles, innocents, sans défense, sans droits, sans voix, sans répit, sans secours.

Photo: Image Wikimedia Commons (Domaine public)
Tout le monde ne regardera pas ces vidéos sur le Web. Mais le nombre de témoins qui regarderont, verront et ainsi sauront la vérité déchirante, augmentera de plus en plus le nombre de ceux qui le savent aujourd’hui, à un moment où la vérité reste toujours hermétiquement cachée de nos yeux et de nos cœurs. Et ceux d’entre nous qui connaîtrons cette vérité pourrons fournir la voix aux victimes.

Les réglementations existantes pour minimiser la souffrance dans les abattoirs sont honteusement insuffisantes: comment peut-on mettre fin à une vie innocente, sans nécessité, de manière humanitaire? Mais même les réglementations inadéquates qui existent aujourd’hui ne sont ni appliquées, ni surveillées, ni contrôlées adéquatement.

La surveillance publique des abattoirs, basée sur les preuves diffusées sur le Web, témoignées et rapportées par un nombre croissant de citoyens militant pour la protection des animaux, fera en sorte que déjà les réglementations inadéquates d’aujourd’hui – ainsi que les poursuites pour leur violation – seront mises en vigueur beaucoup plus rigoureusement.

Au Québec, qui avait été jusqu’ici la pire province au Canada pour la protection des animaux, nous venons d’acquérir un principe de base juridique pour revendiquer une surveillance rigoureuse des abattoirs: début juin, l’Assemblée nationale du Québec a tenu compte des nombreuses voix qui sont élevées au nom des animaux.

Le Code civil du Québec vient d’être modifié pour accorder aux animaux le statut d’êtres sensibles au lieu du statut de propriété inerte – ou biens meubles – comme anciennement. Mais cette nouvelle loi, comme la manifestation du 13 juin ne suffisent pas.

Sur cette nouvelle base juridique, et à l’aide des preuves audiovisuelles rapportées par des citoyens québécois, nous pourrons non seulement poursuivre ceux qui ne respectent pas les réglementations actuelles, inadéquates, mais nous pourrons aussi exiger l’adoption des lois de plus en plus fortes pour protéger les êtres sensibles.

Les preuves transmises par ces webcams de surveillance serviront aussi à sensibiliser tous les citoyens concernant les horreurs nécessitées par une diète non-végane. Il s’agira de la sensibilisation à la sensibilité des êtres sensibles.

Et ce sont les preuves incontournables des souffrances de ces victimes sensibles – et de l’inutilité de leurs souffrances – qui risquent à nous inspirer tous à ne plus demeurer non-véganes – sans aucune nécessité vitale, juste pour le plaisir gustatif – à ces terribles frais.

LIRE AUSSI
– Arrêtez de manger de la viande (et sauvez la planète) – Moby
– Être végane ET athlète de haut niveau, c’est possible – Élise Desaulniers
– Ma vie de végétarien – Paul McCartney
– Les végétariens vivent-ils plus longtemps ?

Permettez-moi de conclure avec un peu de numérologie optimiste et une ruse pyramidale la plus bénigne du monde: si chaque végane aujourd’hui inspire encore 6 non-véganes à devenir végane ainsi qu’à inspirer à leur tour encore 6 non-véganes à devenir végane, et ainsi de suite, alors en seulement 9 étapes toute la population du Québec sera végane, en 10 étapes tous les Canadiens, à 11 le Canada ainsi que les États-Unis, et à 12-13, ça sera le monde entier.

Photo: Image Wikimedia Commons (Domaine public)
Il faut noter également qu’il est tout à fait juste que ça soit avec nous, qui sommes parmi les citoyens les plus prospères et les mieux nourris au monde, que tout cela démarre.

Au moment où nous aurions fermé tous nos abattoirs industriels et re-dédié nos terres vers la production directe d’aliments à nourrir les gens – au lieu de les utiliser à élever, nourrir et ensuite massacrer d’innombrables victimes innocentes, inutilement – la planète produira ainsi 40% plus de nourriture, 60% moins de pollution et 90% moins de souffrance.

Ceci sera assez pour nourrir toutes les victimes de la famine ainsi qu’à permettre aux derniers chasseurs de subsistance sur la planète de faire la transition vers une consommation réellement équitable et miséricordieuse.

Compassion. One very sad fact about the animal rights movement is that it has a lot of internecine hostilities. Some of them are evident in the comments on Ashitha’s Nagesh’s article “Vegans need to stop comparing the treatment of animals to slavery“. Ashitha is a vegan. She was only objecting to the slavery analogy because it might hurt some people’s feelings. But some of the commentators have been attacking her as if she were a promotor of animal suffering rather than a vegan like themselves.

Some of this is no doubt because it is so frustrating for those who have been sensitized to animal suffering to be so impotent in the face of so much of it, and so much indifference to it. But Ashitha is not one of that vast majority who are indifferent to it. She is just concerned that the slavery analogy might be hurting the cause of the animals. And she might conceivably be right (even though I think she is wrong, and I use the analogy myself).

But Ashitha is a vegan, and acting in good faith. She does not deserve the vicious remarks being made by some of the commentators on her article. And if anything is likely to hurt the cause of animals, it’s that sort of aggression, so obviously misplaced here.

Vegans need to project compassion, not aggression. It is compassion that animals need. It is aggression that hurts and kills them.

Commensurability. No one knows what message, what approach, what evidence, what argument will help to put an end to the horrors, as soon as possible.

I am the offspring of Holocaust survivors (and I myself was a kind of Holocaust survivor, in utero). I lost 27 members of my family who were taken to Auschwitz by cattle-trains — “just if they were cattle” — to be slaughtered. I too used the “as if they were cattle” simile, without thinking, along with its implicit implication that it’s OK for cattle, just not for humans. And I too was shocked and hurt, at first, by the analogy between the Holocaust and animal slaughter (even though I too had long been a vegetarian and had more recently become a vegan).

At first. But when I thought about it more — and despite the obvious disanalogy that Jews were being genocidally annihilated, precisely because they were Jews, whereas animals are continuously being purpose-bred, deliberately, to keep on being slaughtered for our taste-pleasure — I realized that, no, the analogy was nevertheless fundamentally right in the relevant aspects, and that it needs to be said.

Slaughtering sentient (feeling) beings as if they were insentient objects is monstrous, and monstrous in exactly the same way, whether those that are being slaughtered are black or white, man or woman, child or adult, Jew or Gentile or, yes, person or pig. It is indifference toward the suffering of those one considers so different that they don’t matter. It began before racism and slavery. It was already there in merciless and genocidal inter-tribal warfare and even inter-family vendettas. Always the different ones; the ones that matter less than “us.”

And, yes, we’ve come a long way. If we’ve not stopped doing it to people, we’ve at least outlawed it, and most of us obey and embrace those laws.

Animals are the last unprotected victims of the very same horrors, and the very same human indifference. And their scale of suffering has just grown and grown. Let us not evoke their difference as a justification for treating their suffering as if it were somehow less wrong, somehow less horrible. It’s not.

All feelings matter. But the ones that matter most here are not those of the people who are offended by the comparison, but those of the victims. At least 150 billion of them per year. If they can be helped by pointing out that we are treating them as monstrously as we have treated people in the past, then let it be said.

Let me close with a quote from Coetzee:

“I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money… Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?” — — J.M. Coetzee, “The Lives of Animals”