Regardless of whether the concept of ‘decision’ is philosophical or belongs to psychology, everyday life is full of decisions that lie behind everything we do and everything we encounter. The question is what leads us to the decisions: are they conscious or mostly ingrained procedures that were sneaked into us during our upbringing and up to who we are today? How can you know? It can make a big difference where the incentives come from.
All actions are political actions.
Someone told me that a squirrel's brain expands by 15% in certain situations, so I ask the question, "Who gave you that number?" A squirrel's brain! How to get there? Is it even possible to learn anything about a squirrel's brain without cutting, measuring, attaching electrodes and using violence?
Is it not the case that we gain our knowledge of the living largely through coercive means? In any case, rarely through humble listening, but more by shutting in, tightening and cutting open. Split, divide. What does it do to a person to be fed this kind of knowledge?
Is the violence in the world something to be surprised by when violence is one of the pillars of the kind of knowledge that shaped the world?
The world is full of extermination camps for non-human animals; the slaughterhouses are incessantly filled with new victims; living beings that gain value only when they are dead.
Violence is present in freezers, at beach parties, during cozy evenings at home, the cooking of television programs. The taste of dead animals is built into society's communal rites and is rarely questioned.
A garden snail will never complain about taxes or worry about next month's rent. Knowledge is a reflection of a reality unique to each species.
Bats experience the world differently than we do. They are social, have family and friends, share food, babysit each other ... but they would understand our view of the world as little as we understand how they see the world. Our minds are calibrated differently.
A common inner essence despite the differences?
In ‘bufomadam’ I show representative and valuable Youtube fotages (‘citizen research’) as tools to open the viewer's heart. An emotional relationship with non-human animals is a prerequisite for understanding the pain and sorrow our civilization causes.
My belief is that while there may be some (limited) benefit in focusing on animal suffering, species loss and the like, this may just as well create a backward movement into the darkness of ignorance, a place where comfortable habits, painful insights, and anything that creates cognitive dissonance is buried. No one wants to know about the suffering behind the food they eat.
I seek is a way to break through the wall of cultural graft so that the human view of animals reflects them as living beings to be respected and cared for. So that nature is no longer a resource, but the one who, without asking for anything, gives us life – our Mother.
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Bufomadam's first chapter is about industrial civilization's relationship with nature and scientific findings made the very last decades.
Under the heading MIRRORS there are examples that highlight common features between humans and other animals.
The Video Review is about our ability to rate videos in general.
Behind the scenes is a comment on the contrast between the animal industries' propaganda images and what reality looks like. (Click on the propaganda image!)