Carnism & Our Fear of Death

May 04, 2020

"The soul is the same thing in all living creatures, though the body is different."
-Hippocrates

Fear of a Word

When we're young, death is nothing but a word. A word for an unimaginable concept, far away from our realm of understanding. It's just something that happens, usually to old people, sick people, but not to us. We're invincible. As a little girl, I knew that I should fear death, but I didn't. Because why should I? It was not coming for me any time soon; I had decades before I needed to worry about that. But as I've gotten older, I've found that my fear of death has grown, become more complex and tangible. Something I don't think about due to genuine fear of where those thoughts might lead me, not because I still feel invincible.

All conscious beings fear death; it is the greatest fear of all. And fear is the single most powerful emotion. It can drive anyone to do nearly anything, turn a saint into a slayer or a civilian into a dictator. Fear -- of otherness, shifts in power, religion -- is the core of some of the greatest tragedies this planet has ever seen: genocides, holocausts, wars, crusades. Advancements in technology -- the atomic bomb, nuclear weapons, biological warfare -- are crafted through fear. Even personal tragedies -- bullying, suicide -- derive from a fear of something. But what makes our fear of death so poignant is that it combines our fear of losing our lives with our fear of the unknown, the uncertainty of what follows death.

Our will to survive is what drives our every decision, what controls how our bodies function and adapt to our environment, what morphs our minds and thought processes. But our survival instinct isn't governed by some joie de vivre. Even in the bleakest of circumstances, where simply surviving -- not living comfortably or being happy -- is all we have, we still fight for our lives because it must be better than death. Every second we live, we are fighting to prevent death. But what happens to us when this grand concept of death we fear so much is actually integral to how our society functions and how we've survived? How do we cope with the knowledge that our fear of death causes the deaths of others? Are we so afraid of facing death that we can't even acknowledge that this fear is killing us?

Our Hope to Conquer Death

Humans, being the power-hungry creatures we are, seek to conquer our greatest fears. Of course, death cannot ever truly be conquered, but there are ways in which we make ourselves feel as if we have control over it: action movies, video games, normalized real-world shootings. Imposing death on others gives us a sense of control over our own death, as if by killing others, we tell death that we are unafraid, so unafraid of the consequences of these actions that we normalize -- sometimes, even glorify -- them.

And nowhere is this more prevalent than with what we do to nonhuman animals. We kill them for food, fashion, beauty, entertainment, medications, and so much more. By exerting our will on innocent creatures, we have incorporated death into our daily lives in an attempt to prove that we have no need to fear death anymore because we are the sole perpetrators of death. But, of course, as we've morphed ourselves into unnaturally ferocious apex predators, we fail to recognize that the death we deal is killing unintended targets and, ultimately, will slaughter us all.

Circle of Death

When we cause suffering and death to others, that same fate comes back around to us, a form of karma. Our leading causes of death -- heart disease, brain diseases, cancers, diabetes -- are almost entirely caused by our eating habits: a diet rich in death. Eating the rotting flesh of other creatures, full of saturated fat and cholesterol, weakens our bodies, makes us susceptible to illnesses, and breaks down our natural ability to fend off our own body from killing itself. Because we cause the death of others to live this way -- gluttonous for their meat, milk, and eggs -- we are inadvertently eating our way to our own demise.

We often fail to recognize how these products are made, not realizing how many others -- how many other humans -- suffer for our hunger for death. Because of the massive scale of animal agriculture in the developed world, we have taken essential resources from less "worthy" people, stripping their lands of crops to feed to our meat machines. We in the western world, while we occasionally like to care about helping others, are forcing families into starvation in countries far away. But we don't have to see that every time we go to the grocery store or order a $1 flesh burger at a fast-food chain, so we can continue exerting our power over them and preaching ignorance.

Even more, we can force the less fortunate in our own nations to kill for us. Because, though we pretend to have conquered death, we are still too afraid to do the act ourselves. We say it's natural and necessary and normal to slaughter animals, but we can't even bear the thought of holding the knife. So we bring all those "others," the people that are supposed to be equally free but are actually nearly as oppressed as the innocent animals, to man the killing factories. Each day, they are drenched in blood, and each night they lose a little part of themselves. They are driven to alcohol, drugs, domestic abuse, homicide, and suicide. Because we want to eat death, we unintentionally terminate the ones we force to kill.

Lastly, in our quest to conquer death, we are creating the death of our home. The only planet we have is quickly succumbing to the plague of humanity. Rainforests are burning alive, the ocean is suffocating on fishing nets, and the air is fogging up from greenhouse gases. But the rainforests are being cleared to grow crops for livestock. And nearly half of the plastic in the ocean isn't from complimentary straws at restaurants -- it's from industrial fishing, killing 2.7 trillion marine animals per year. All the transportation in the world is but a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of billions of animals slaughtered for food production each year.

Death of the Soul

And what happens to our souls, if there even is such a thing, when we continuously feed ourselves with death? What happens to the souls of those we ingest? Does their pain and misery live on within us? Do the crimes against nature we commit to live the way we do damn us all to Hell? If there is some version of Hell in our realm of existence, surely we are all going there for our complicity in the abomination that is animal agriculture. Is there any hope for redemption, not just for us as individuals, but for our entire species? Do we even deserve redemption after the atrocities we've created? Can years of abstinence from death, of activism for life and kindness and pacifism, ever be enough to, in some small way, right the wrongs we caused in the past?

Live to Die, Die to Live

We have turned the vibrant, beautiful world we live in into a cold industrial machine. Because we so fear death, we have removed ourselves from the organic order of life, isolating ourselves from nature. Now, we live this way because it's easier, because we're used to it, because we can. But there is nothing strong or powerful about a society that kills to survive. We cannot thrive, cannot flourish, if we choose to continue down this road of death and destruction. It will only ultimately result in the deaths of everything and everyone on the planet.

be conscious, be kind, be vegan