By Dr. Will Tuttle

In ancient Greek mythology, the three Furies (the Erinyes) were goddesses of retribution who punished human beings for committing crimes against the natural order. It is long past time for us to awaken to the basic fact that our enslavement, sexual abuse, and killing of billions of cows, chickens, and other fully sentient animals is a dreadful and massive crime against them, against the Earth and the natural order, and, ultimately, against ourselves.

It is time for us to realize that we are indeed being severely punished for this ongoing crime of animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is the hideous spinning fury at the core of our culture, sowing seeds of disease, exploitation, and conflict that we can see erupting as tyrannical oppression and as mental, physical, and social disease virtually everywhere in our world. To free ourselves from this ongoing punishment that we inflict upon ourselves and each other, we are called to liberate animals from human maltreatment. This is the essential and hidden pre-requisite to peace and freedom.

The consequences of failing to understand this basic lesson are multiplying exponentially. As we reduce animals to livestock and as we track, force medicate, and exploit them, we inevitably face retribution for these crimes and find ourselves similarly tracked, coerced, and exploited as mere livestock. As the old saying goes, the punishment fits the crime.

Although we’ve all been given the gift of physical bodies that don’t require any animals to suffer to get all the nutrients we need, the problem is that we are all born into a culture where we are compelled from infancy to participate in meals that include the flesh and secretions of severely abused animals. We are all thus wounded in profound and intractable ways. As discussed in The World Peace Diet, meals are actually rituals that inject into us, without our permission or awareness, a toxic narrative that erodes our compassion, intelligence, and self-respect. Because our meals are our most intimate connection with nature and with our culture, with every meal we effectively disconnect from discomforting implicit realities, and practice ritually dismantling our inherent capacities to look deeply, listen deeply, care deeply, and understand deeply.

Virtually everyone in our society suffers from these same wounds, and consequently we collectively fail to realize how devastating and self-enslaving our killing machines are, and fail to understand and discuss what is actually happening, and why.  Animal agriculture ravages and harms not just the animals, ecosystems, wildlife, indigenous populations, hungry people, and industry workers, but also the inner landscape of our consciousness, which is poisoned by the denial, and by the suppressed guilt and sorrow, that this killing machine requires.

Now, as we reach the two-year anniversary of the launch of the pandemic narrative as a pretext to decisively strip away the last remaining fibers in the fabric of human sovereignty, freedom and dignity, we face tremendous dangers and challenges, because governments are notorious for not returning freedoms once they have been taken away. What we sow, we inevitably reap, and the Furies are relentless in demanding retribution, just as our enslavement of animals has been relentless and hideously brutal over the past several centuries. The irony is that without our basic freedoms of speech, assembly, and the press, our efforts to liberate animals are severely impeded.

It only takes a relatively small handful of people with sophisticated technological systems to manage the breeding and processing of millions of individual livestock animals. Correspondingly, a small and powerful elite that has gradually captured the financial, corporate, governmental, medical, military, educational, and media systems can relatively easily control the narrative and behavior of billions of people similarly viewed as livestock. All the above-mentioned social institutions interconnect, and they are pyramidically hierarchical, with every level simply enacting orders that come from “above.” The upper layers are horizontally integrated through interlocking directorships and many other devices, imposing their will and plan on the levels below.

As technocratic medical tracking systems proliferate amid sinister mandated injectables, the situation is critical. The beckoning doorway to a world of harmony, justice, abundance, and freedom is still available, but the longer we fail to question and decisively stop our commodification of animals, the more it fades from view. It’s imperative that we awaken from the culturally-imposed trance of animal exploitation and from the mentality it requires. If we continue to insist on eating meat, dairy, and eggs and vivisecting and otherwise abusing animals, we will continue experiencing the fury of the boomerang effect. Stealing the purposes and sovereignty of animals, we’ll continue to find ours stolen from us.

A vegan world of respect for animals is the essential foundation for a positive future. However, it is clear that, just as we can be vegan and be unhealthy because we insist on eating a harmful diet of processed, chemical-laden plant-based foods, we can also be a vegan and be completely deluded about the situation playing out every day all around us, especially if we drink from the deceptive trough of mainstream media and trust the misleading medical narratives spewing from doctors and health authorities, including vegan ones, unfortunately.

Gradually, over the past 120 years, the mainstream medical community has been virtually completely captured by the pharmaceutical industry (a subset of the petrochemical industry), and the wealth and power of this industry has allowed it to co-opt and subvert the environmental movement and the vegan movement, among others. A shallow faux veganism is now promoted by nonvegans like Bill Gates and it emphasizes a centralized approach to food production that subjects the Earth to harmful chemicals and humans to toxic, engineered factory-foods.

In contrast, the foundation of authentic veganism is respect for the sovereignty of individual beings, both animal beings and human beings. The essence of veganism is refusing to comply with social mandates that attack and harm the sovereignty of individual beings, and vigorously questioning the narratives put forth by animal agriculture’s primary supporter, the meat-medical-pharmaceutical-media-banking complex that is also driving the rollout of this pandemic.

As a vegan activist for over 40 years, it has become obvious that the pharmaceutical-chemical industry is the chief enemy and destroyer of animals and nature, both through vivisection and through the primary markets for their products, which are petrochemical medications for exploited animals and indoctrinated humans. It clearly follows that vegans and the vegan movement should be the “first-responders” and would logically rise up and form the immediate and primary resistance to the rollout of freedom-destroying lockdowns, mandates, and coerced pharmaceutical interventions. But unfortunately, the vegan movement has been infiltrated, like all justice movements have been, and a large number of vegans, like everyone else, fail to question the materialism of animal agriculture and of science and of our entire society, which reduces nature to mere random processes, and animals to material commodities that are sold by the pound.

Faux veganism never questions materialism and even celebrates it. It is not surprising that so many vegans are gullible to mainstream narratives, like the general population, because all of us have been wounded and deceived by the dominant materialistic narrative that pervades our educational, scientific, media, and other social institutions, and it takes a lot of effort and awareness to successfully question and unravel the falsehoods inherent in materialism.

These efforts are more essential than ever before. There are two basic steps we are all called to take. The first (outer) step is to transform our life, bringing our life into alignment with our values, so we are supporting, as best we can, only plant-based, organic, whole, and locally-sourced food and products. Becoming more self-sufficient and decentralized in terms of food, energy, and information, and supporting local producers is essential to creating a healthy alternative to the ever-expanding centralized technocratic totalitarianism. The second and more difficult (inner) step is to undertake the great adventure of spiritual discovery.  We are called to examine and introspect our own consciousness, and free ourselves from the vise-grip of the colonizing conditioning of materialism that has insinuated itself into our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.

This debilitating materialism pervades every aspect of our herding culture and going vegan doesn’t magically remove it from our consciousness. Questioning all the stories we’ve been told our entire lives is essential, especially those that reduce living beings to mere material objects and blind us to our true nature as magnificent expressions of infinite and eternal consciousness. We are called to question our internalized materialistic convictions about health, spirituality, success, sexuality, freedom, science, history, food, relationships, reality: all of it. Transforming our world starts with each of us, and the liberating and necessary revolution in our world is ignited through us as individuals, and proceeds from there.

The time is short. The Furies are exacting retribution. It’s urgent that we question materialistic narratives, spread the word, refuse to comply with injustice, liberate animals, and liberate ourselves. Future generations are depending on our efforts.