By Dr. Will Tuttle

OK, everyone! It’s time for us to pay attention. It’s long been obvious that there are apparent forces spreading economic, environmental, and social devastation. Since 9-11, the pace has accelerated noticeably, and since Obama took office, the frequency and intensity of direct attacks on our freedom, our ecosystems, our health, peace, and economic security have further increased.

The question that everyone throughout our local district in the galaxy must be asking (and maybe placing bets on) is whether the humans on Earth will wake up, grow up, and act up, or feebly submit to de facto enslavement and ecocide. Will we awaken from our seeming complacency and distractedness, and grow up out of our disempowering gullibility? And how do we do this?

The precious and hidden key to everything is learning to understand and remove the toxic program that has been injected into all of us through our meals since infancy. It is a program of disconnectedness, elitism, exploitation, infantilization, numbing, and ultimately, our own enslavement. The vegan meme of radical inclusiveness, awareness, kindness, and concern for others is studiously ignored (and feared) in the mass media and popular discourse, but I believe that we know deep down it’s the only gate that leads to a positive future. Everything else is disaster, and horrific disaster at that.

Let me explain. I’ll try to summarize the essence of it in a few paragraphs.

There is no question that we are facing systemic breakdown and collapse across the entire spectrum, including environmental, economic, cultural, and medical. Environmentally, rainforest clear cutting is accelerating to over one acre per second to clear land for meat and dairy production, excess fishing capacity is utterly devastating marine ecosystems, animal agriculture is driving habitat destruction and the consequent spike in species extinction and loss of genetic diversity, and is the primary driving force behind climate destabilization, as well as water scarcity and pollution, air pollution, and soil erosion, just for starters. Economically, the gap between the super rich and everyone else is exploding, as jobs and housing opportunities evaporate and the world’s two main currencies, the dollar and the euro, destabilize and head increasingly into hyper-inflationary disaster. Culturally, the U.S. is now engaged in six wars, with increasing rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and violence that ripple throughout our planetary culture, added to the economic and environmental stresses that cause the increased breakdown of family structures. Medically, we find the general physical and psychological health of the world’s population declining in the face of environmental breakdown, nuclear and electromagnetic radiation, polluted and dwindling water supplies, forced vaccination programs, and increased meat and dairy consumption leading to epidemics of obesity, starvation, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, osteoporosis, and autoimmune disease.

Embedded within this multidimensional crisis are many other factors, such as the despair and genetic damage caused by genetically engineering organisms, the emergence of super bacteria and viruses through antibiotic resistance and corporate-military engineering, increasing violence toward women and children, with proliferation of pornography, pedophilia, and slavery rings, as well as spreading famine and malnourishment, and the rampant increase in psychiatric drugs for depression, anxiety, insomnia, autism, ADD, OCD, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and so on.

There are two main points that must be understood in looking at all this so that we can change the causative behavior and attitudes. One is that the law of cause and effect is in operation here: as we sow, we inevitably reap. Our routine violence toward trillions of animals for meat, fish, dairy products, and eggs is the primary driving force behind not just the environmental devastation on our planet, but also behind the cultural, economic, psychological, and physical disease we experience as well. We sow seeds of not just cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease with our violence toward animals, but also of drug abuse, family breakdown, war, hunger, slavery, and exploitation because this is precisely how we behave toward cows, chickens, fish, and other animals for food, by the hundreds of millions every day. We are killing over sixty billion mammals and birds for food annually, plus an estimated one to two trillion marine animals, as well as untold billions more animals who are killed as collateral damage as their habitats are destroyed and pesticides ravage global ecosystems. Three quarters of the food we grow is fed to imprisoned animals for meat and dairy, while roughly a billion people are chronically hungry and starving. The scale of the industrial killing machine of animals for food is so vast, it is mentally incomprehensible.  Inevitably, the violence and heart-hardening required by this killing machine boomerang in countless ways.

We are called to understand that animal agriculture is not only the driving force behind the many crises we are facing, but is also the driving force behind the underlying mentality that both causes these crises and is unable to effectively deal with them. On the surface level, eating animal foods is the primary contributor to forest and ocean destruction, species extinction, climate destabilization, resource depletion, genetic pollution (corn, soy, and cotton, the main GMO crops, are used mainly as feedstock), air and water pollution, disease, hunger, sheer violence, and yet even these obvious and critical connections are minimally made and discussed in either the mass media or the alternative media, or in popular culture.

The deeper level is virtually completely invisible: that eating animal-sourced foods is the primary contributor to the way of thinking and being that creates these problems. For example, what is the mentality required of a culture that routinely kills and eats 75 million animals daily (very conservatively) as we do in the U.S.? It is precisely the mentality that devastates the landscapes we inhabit, ecologically, culturally, psychologically, and spiritually. We are all forced from our earliest days to participate in ongoing daily rituals in which beings are reduced to things—pieces of meat—and this mentality of reductionism, commodification, exclusion, privilege, domination, and exploitation, routinely injected into us in the most powerful ways, by literally eating them, creates an essential inner environment of disconnectedness, numbing, low self-esteem, insecurity, and competitiveness that lead inevitably to complacency, gullibility, and the planetary disasters we are creating. This is our essential wound: the brutal suppression of our inner feminine wisdom, which I refer to in The World Peace Diet as Sophia (the Greek goddess of wisdom). With Sophia repressed by forcing us all to eat the flesh and secretions of enslaved, terrified animals, we become complacent and gullible, and in fact, according to sociologists, there is literally more human slavery today, both actually and proportionately, than in the nineteenth century before human slavery was supposedly abolished.

The second main point is that the environmental, economic, cultural, and medical disasters are not just befalling us; they are being consciously engineered in order to enslave us, and our ongoing violence toward animals for food, and the complacency and gullibility that follow, drain our power to resist. Because we have been forced to eat meat and dairy from infancy, and have been wounded in countless ways by the many ramifications of this toxic cultural program, we tend to be easily dominated. Unable to stop the basic indoctrinated behavioral violence that defines our culture—paying for (causing) and eating animal cruelty and murder—we tend to be complacent, and have difficulty challenging the violence we see enacted around us, because we know deep down we are also guilty of being agents of violence ourselves. We tend similarly to be gullible and easily distracted. We’d rather not see the truth of the violence and misery we are consuming and causing daily, so we regularly practice not looking deeply, being willingly deceived by corporate, governmental, and institutional lies, and pretending blindness to what is actually happening because of our food choices.

This is our culture’s essential dilemma. Eating animal foods is not anyone’s free choice. It is behavior engaged in only because every institution in our culture has indoctrinated us from birth to do so, and it is behavior that is profoundly antithetical to our own best interests. Our complacency, gullibility and distractedness are effectively increased by corporate messages and governmental policies that constantly infantilize us. One primary characteristic of emotional maturity is the ability to delay gratification, but we are bombarded with messages to buy now, have now, and pay later. The media serves us a continuous stream of images treating us all like children who want only to be entertained and distracted with sports, celebrity scuttlebutt, sex scandals, and fragmented news bites, and the government increasingly warns us and controls us “for our security” as if we’re frightened, helpless children, while increasingly attacking our sovereignty. Underlying all this is a truly massive dairy industry that keeps us as adults still sucking at the breast we never got, drinking milk like infants who can’t bear to grow up, eating cheese, cream, and butter from violently abused mothers whose babies are stolen from them, whose milk and lives and purposes are stolen from them, and as we drink and eat the milk of these sexually abused mothers, we tend to remain gullible infants, believing and trusting the false and disempowering official stories concocted by the parental authorities. Until we question the false official stories we’ve internalized, especially those normalizing eating animal foods, we remain merely ironic in our quests for ethical maturity, social justice, and spiritual evolution.

Eating the large quantities of animal foods that we do is wasteful and expensive, and this leads inevitably to massive economic inequity. The medical/pharmaceutical bills are expensive. The fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, water, and other resources are expensive. The resultant wars are expensive. Every year, this amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars transferred from the many to the few—the military-industrial-meat-medical-pharmaceutical-media complex and the banks in the background. With their ballooning wealth, it is easy for the wealthy elite to buy legislation and governmental policies, and saturate and control the media conversations to the point where now in the U.S., just one-tenth of one percent of the population now owns more wealth than 90% of the entire population combined!

The apparent forces that would steal our lives, dignity, freedom, and purposes, and reduce us to dumbed-down micro-chipped servants that do their bidding are taunting us openly now, blatantly stealing from us, lying to us, and openly trashing our economy and ecology. We seem to be so gullible and compliant that we apparently don’t see their clumsy ruses to enslave us—the multiple false flag operations such as the 9-11 controlled demolition, the ongoing flood of assassinations and media charades, the chemtrail skies, fluoridated drinking water, mandatory toxic injections for helpless infants, growing Homeland Security police state, the banker bailout and wholesale looting of our treasury and stealing of our homes and retirement funds, and the mocking irony that laughs while enslaving us.

By far the most empowering and effective action anyone can take today to halt this violence and inequity, and to reverse the enslavement of humanity, is to go vegan. As we sow, we reap. As long as we enslave and terrorize nonhuman animals, stealing their purposes for our own ends, we will find ourselves enslaved and terrorized and our purposes stolen from us by others for their own ends. As we say yes to kindness, respect, compassion, freedom, health, sustainability, mindfulness, justice, and peace in our actual behavior toward others, then and only then will we be worthy of living in a world that mirrors this.

Our world is a mirror. Our massive violence toward animals for food boomerangs ineluctably, and each and every one of us can be part of the vegan solution. We can actually remove the toxic program that has been injected into us by our dysfunctional culture since infancy, and switch to a healthy organic, plant-based diet that uses a fraction of the resources and opens our heart to the interconnectedness of all living beings and the amazing beauty of life on our precious Earth. And we can dedicate ourselves to spreading the vegan message of radical inclusion and compassion, and help others to remove the toxic indoctrinated food program from their body-mind as well. There is no more noble and vital activity than this! Ultimately, it is the path to freedom, joy, abundance, and peace. What we want for ourselves we are called to give to others. Animals are not mere props in the human drama; their suffering is as significant to them as ours is to us, as we know in our bones.

We have today an unprecedented opportunity to transform our culture and ourselves by recognizing, living, and sharing the truth that we can all thrive on plant-based diets. Acting on this realization, we can launch a new human awareness rooted in and expressing compassion, health, inclusiveness, and freedom. Out of the ashes, a new world yearns to be born, and needs every one of us to contribute by going vegan, understanding why, and spreading the word.

We are all inherently wise, compassionate, powerful, and creative, but we’ve had the faculties of our hearts and minds slammed so hard by a violent culture that we have succumbed to complacency and gullibility. Let’s no longer be tools in the hands of violence. Let’s wake up, grow up, and act up, and live and spread the unyielding truth of our interconnectedness, and freedom and peace for all.

(For further information, please see The World Peace Diet. We also now offer a self-paced online in-depth study of these issues, and training to facilitate World Peace Diet study groups: http://worldpeacemastery.com Thanks for being part of the solution.)