Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the conflict between ethical awareness and the meat industry, suggesting that a lack of consciousness is necessary for its survival.
John Robbins's quote critiques the meat industry by underscoring how awareness and conscience regarding the treatment of animals and the implications of consuming meat negatively impact business practices. It implies that to thrive in the meat business, owners must cultivate a state of denial to ignore the ethical dilemmas and suffering involved, pointing to a broader commentary on the necessity of moral awareness in societal practices.
In practice
In a discussion on animal rights, you might use this quote to illustrate the moral conflicts in industries that rely on animal suffering.
Our food chain is in crisis. Big agribusiness has made profits more important than your health—more important than the environment—more important than your right to know how your food is produced. But beneath the surface, a revolution is growing.
I believe that eating simple food in a healthy body with a clean conscience is more pleasurable, and infinitely more satisfying, then eating decadent food that makes you and your world ill.
The joy is that we can take back our bodies, reclaim our health, and restore ourselves to balance. We can take power over what and how we eat. We can rejuvenate and recharge ourselves, bringing healing to the wounds we carry inside us, and bringing to fuller life the wonderful person that each of us can be.
The level of consumption that we identify with success is utterly unsustainable. We're gobbling up the world.
Every time you make a choice that expresses respect for life, you bring a little more love in your body, into your family, into our society, and into a world that is calling out for this blessing.
A reduction in meat consumption is the most powerful single act that you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and preserve our natural resources.
Give me a different set of mothers and I will give you a different world
Civilization is a work of peaceful co-operation.
We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.
For some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the metaphysics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a firm foundation for ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that was our only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger. Only one small problem remained. I must find a way to convert the world to my way of thinking.
Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words.
From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things.
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