Waste AM
Errantly Consuming. Buying and having less of everything
3
Let me give you one personal example of where you could say ‘science’ or more specifically medical intervention brought about by science actually serves to make a problem worse. It’s deeply personal, but it’s part of my experience and worth sharing because it is in some way related to my spiritual awakening (see previous post).
In 2005 I developed depression. Within the space of two months I had been fired from two jobs, had been dumped by my then boyfriend, and had moved to live with my cousins in the countryside.
My mum encouraged me to see a doctor. I had one appointment and came out with a prescription of prozac.
I couldn’t understand where the depression came from. I had ‘no reason’ to be depressed. One minute everything was fine, and the next minute I alternated between feeling angry and tearful all the time. My social life fell apart because I didn’t want to see anyone and I started messing up at work, which led to me being doubly fired from different jobs.
Only later did I get some insight into the trigger for this depression. I had been having contraceptive injections. By means of a cocktail of hormones they stop you menstruating for three months and then you go and have another one. Around the time of the first injection I was unaware of any side effects, however, it was the time of the second injection that everything began to fall apart.
Only later did I learn that a known side effect of this injection is depression in some people. Had I been aware of this, I would never have taken it. Taking it was in no way worth endangering my mental state.
I have no idea whether the prozac had any beneficial effects. The sporadic fits of crying stopped, my sadness was deadened, but I also lost the ability to laugh or indeed feel any emotion whatsoever. Things that would usually irritate me went by unnoticed. I was like a robot going through the motions and not feeling anything.
I don’t remember exactly how long I took the prozac for. I never became dependent on it because I didn’t like the robot feeling. I don’t know if it did anything to lift my mood, all I know is that I didn’t have another injection and after a couple of months I started to gradually feel better.
I know a few people who swear by antidepressants but I don’t think I’d ever take them again. I also feel angry that I was given an injection that I feel certain triggered the lowest point of my life. It makes me think the medical establishment is seriously fucked up to push an injection that may cause depression to a teenage girl. It’s even more fucked up that antidepressants were doled out without the trigger having been identified. I think I would have naturally picked up anyway, once the hormone cocktail leached out of my system.
I write about this because it is related to my spiritual awakening. Part of my spiritual awakening involves questioning the culture I live within. I think a lot of the stuff we are doing is insane. If we could step outside of our culture and look at ourselves from the outside, or from a point of time in the future, things that we take to be rational and logical are in fact totally nonsensical and even damaging. What I am trying to say is that not everything science provides for us is in fact logical and rational and therefore ‘best’.
Science caused my depression (by means of a hormonal injection) and science tried to cure it (by making me pop a pill). But my mind is not merely rational – I have feelings and a soul that doesn’t respond merely to medicine. The treatment for the problem science created did not in any way seek to address what was going on in my emotional self; it just tried to stop me from feeling any emotion.
An even bigger question is why are so many of us depressed anyway? Why are there even depressed children whose parents consensually medicate and eradicate their feelings? When 10% of a culture at any one time is depressed it is clear and apparent that there are problems with modernity and what we are experiencing in the here and now isn’t just merely progress.
I’m not saying I have the answer, I’m merely picking at the conceit that science knows best. In the split that exists between science and spirituality, or science and art, science is always championed by default in practically every area of public life – from school to governmental policy. Science shouldn’t always be the default position. We have gained a lot from the scientific world view occasioned by the enlightenment but we should be careful about how much further we take our ideas of rationalism. I am an irrational being experiencing desire; I do not always fit within a science-shaped box.
Humans have always killed animals for meat; in circumstances eating flesh has been fundamental to the survival of our species.
These days however, we wholly disrespect the sacrificed animals that give us meat. Dissociated from the chain of production, we treat their slaughter with blinkered flippancy, waste their flesh, and habitually over-consume what our evolution should have taught us to value.
The very survival and prosperity of our ancestors depended on the animals they reared and hunted. It made them respect the animal and its carcass, would have imbued them with a sense of restraint while hunting, and on a merely pragmatic level, made them take proper care of their livestock, which they couldn’t afford to lose through either neglect or abuse.
In recent years mainly due to over-population of the planet by human beings, monstrous farming practices have become standard. Over time they have enabled people in Western cultures to grow fat, so fat that around two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, while elsewhere in the world more than one billion people are hungry or undernourished.
To supply our voracious appetites and keep the multitudes fed, a gargantuan corporate meat industry has developed, and with it, additional ethical questions related to the consumption of meat have arisen. While awareness has grown about the monstrous conditions and maltreatment of animals in factory-farm conditions, the issue of endemic cruelty in slaughter houses, or abattoirs, has not yet attained the coverage it deserves. However, a small band of concerned people are making it their business to alert the wider public to what our brutal system of food production really entails.
Over eighty-five million animals were slaughtered for meat in North America in the year 2000, and since then the rate of production has increased by twenty percent. It is by any stretch of imagination a massive industry.
It is difficult to infiltrate and report on the atrocities committed in abattoirs. It would seem a prerequisite that employees should have absolutely no feeling for animals as sentient beings, as attested in this secretly filmed footage:
Clearly, to gain employment in such a place, it helps to be a sociopathic sadist. The pay is poor; there can’t be much of a financial incentive to work in one of these disgusting dungeons in which it is permissible to openly inflict malice and suffering on fellow creatures.
In a recent high-profile case, in order to save himself the cost of a shotgun cartridge, a pig farmer let his workers bludgeon a young pig. What dispicable behaviour! And what a shock it is to learn that DEFRA offensively and barbarically condone death-by-bludgeoning as a means of despatching sick animals under 6-weeks old.
The whole industry is rife with abuse and corruption and these hellholes would be shut down tomorrow, did we not demand and expect cheap meat for fast food. The organisations are allowed to self-govern and self-certificate, so as long as all the right boxes are ticked, they receive a big rubber stamp to do as they wish, unless of course they get caught on film, and all hell breaks out.
In the case of halal meat, not even the RSPCA is interested in the welfare issues arising from this mode of killing, whereby a mechanical conveyor lifts an animal up by of its legs – be it a cow or sheep – onto a conveyor where it’s neck is slashed, either by an operative with a ‘blessed’ knife or my ‘blessed’ rotary blade fulfilling the same function, mainly for chickens. The animals die in agony, it taking somewhere between ten and thirty minutes to be put out of their misery.
A simple human conscience tells us that animals reared for the plate must be disposed of by humane means, and that any acts of cruelty or abuse witnessed should be punished by law: these animals are after all sentient beings like ourselves. Yet the abuse and sadism goes unpunished or worse, undetected.
Just imagine all the unrecorded events going on, and the cruelty-provenance of your average hamburger.
Man going over the cliff with his fragile craft
with the wings flapping, and the man flapping the wings.
The wind’s in his face, the poor fool thinks he’s flying!
But in fact, he’s in free fall.
He just doesn’t know it
because the ground is so far away…
The high cliff represents the ALMOST unlimited resources we seem to think we have at the beginning of the journey before our craft takes flight.
Of course the craft isn’t going to fly; we’re taking a running jump right over the cliff face in a craft subject to gravity that isn’t built according to the laws of aerodynamics.
Our civilisation isn’t flying because it’s not built for civilisations that would fly.
The ground is still a long way away, but is coming up faster with ever wasteful technologies.Some people have seen the ground sooner than the rest of us. The visionaries have seen it, and they’ve been warning us that it’s coming.
There’s not a single scientific paper published in the last twenty-five years to contradict this scenario. Every living system belonging to Earth is in decline. Every life support system is in decline. The sum of all these suffocating parts constitutes the biosphere, the biosphere that supports and nurtures all of life, not just our life, but more than 30 million other species that share this planet with us.
The typical company of the 20th 21st-century is a extractive, wasteful, and linear in all of its processes. It leeches from the Earth, wasting its products, spewing them into the biosphere, or wasting them in landfill.
And what remains is a terrible legacy of poison and diminishment for our children or our children’s children. Some people have called this generational tyranny – a form of taxation without representation whereby we decimate future generations through our brainwashed actions in the present, animated by the puppet strings of corporate greed.
Riding an air current of ignorance and denial – it really is exhilarating to fly. As long as we don’t look down we need not anticipate our fate, and the wreckage it will leave in its wake.
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