The protagonist in Nobel Peace Prize laureate and author Isaac Bashevis Singer’s book, The Letter Writer, stated, “In relation to animals, all people are Nazis.”
Ah, the Nazis; who can forget them? They were those goose-stepping narcissists who had the arrogant audacity to think themselves superior to all other races. Hell, “Nazi” even sounds like a derivative of the word “narcissism.” Thank God that kind of grandiosity is a thing of the past.
Or is it…
Not if you, like Isaac Singer, consider the attitudes human beings have toward their fellow animals. When you allow yourself even for a moment to ponder the plight of non-humans at the hands of man and connect the dots, you’re sure to come to the logical conclusion that: in relation to animals, all people are Narcissists.
Although Galileo and Copernicus have long since put to rest the notion of Earth as the center of the universe, so engrained is the belief that humans themselves are the center of all things that they even imagine their omnipotent creator in the image of man. (When the Good Lord was handing out personality disorders, he must have decided to make humankind the narcissists of the animal kingdom—in His image, perhaps.)
So what’s the problem with people having this perception of prowess, self-importance and excessive sense of entitlement (undeserved as they may be)? As those who study aberrant behavior have found, like the Nazis, the vast majority of serial killers have overblown narcissistic tendencies. While the serial killer objectifies his human victims, the human species is comfortable exploiting other Earthlings for their own selfish gains—no other life forms seem to matter much in the human scheme of things. The human race as a whole considers only the treatment of their own kind worthy of consideration.
Instantaneous creation and miraculous wand waving aside, how did Homo sapiens become so narcissistic as a species? It has been well established that hunters share many of the behaviors and rationalizations of serial killers. Although most people don’t live by hunting any more these days, a long, long history of proving oneself the baddest spear-throwing, fire-wielding, big game hunter on the planet doesn’t fade from the collective psyche overnight. No wonder the species has been so quick throughout history to take advantage of every other animal with such indifference to their needs or feelings. All others are just background—props on their stage.
Never before in the history of mammals have seven billion large, terrestrial, meat-eating members of one species single-handedly laid waste to so much of the Earth’s biodiversity. Human carnivorousness is killing the planet one species at a time, one ecosystem after another. Yet meat has never been so readily available worldwide. That’s because living conditions for farmed animals has taken a backseat on the bus of human hedonism. For all the recent advances made in regards to human rights, the treatment of non-humans has never been more deplorable and demonic.
Like the ordinary German civilian who chose to look the other way during the Holocaust, the everyday meat-eater chooses to remain willfully ignorant of today’s ongoing atrocities. But some who choose a vegetarian or vegan diet purely for their health can be about as narcissistic as a meat-eater.
Even the severely deformed and consequently down-trodden title character in David Lynch’s classic film, The Elephant Man, voiced his perceived human superiority when he told a gawking crowd, “I am not an animal! I’m a human being!” Of course he was an animal, and so are you, and so am I. I’m proud to be an animal. I’m sure if John Merrick, “the elephant man,” had had a chance to get to know many non-human animals, he would have realized that most animals are far more accepting and less judgmental than the average human.
Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, a conscientious objector and Holocaust victim who was sent to a concentration camp for “being a strong autonomously thinking personality” wrote in his Dachau Diaries, “I have suffered so much myself that I can feel other creatures’ suffering by virtue of my own…I believe as long as man tortures and kills animals, he will torture and kill humans as well—and wars will be waged—for killing must be practiced and learned on a small scale.”
Human beings are unique only in the extent of cruelty and destruction they inflict. While each and every human being does not suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, the species Homo sapiens is a lot more like a narcissist than a Galileo or Copernicus.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was one of those who was able to shed his deep-rooted human narcissism, a fact made clear by his statement in Judaism and Vegetarianism, “I am a vegetarian for health reasons – the health of the chicken.”
Exposing the Big Game 
Reblogged this on Sherlockian's Blog and commented:
Well said.
Wonderful, and so needed. This, I believe, is our species’ core problem. All the wars, environmental destruction, enslavement & killing of other beings, human over-population, & other planetary degradation, is a result of our Humanist ideology, (narcissism). If, somehow, Homo sapiens, as a whole, could have changed its attitudes about itself and how it perceives Earth and her other life, things might have been different. But I don’t think this will happen now, if it ever could have. We are a very flawed, sick species. I am thankful that there have been, and are, some who understand this human sickness, and have broken away from the bonds of our self enslavement to Earth Domination. Those of us who have, must now humbly and with great reverence, try to save whatever we can of Nature, and her non-humans. It will be the last and most important thing we will ever do as members of the species Homo sapiens.
People enjoy dominating the Earth too much to want to change.
Thank you so much. It is good to know people of like mind.
Beautifully put. Steven Best’s descriptor “murderous humanism” aptly encapsulates the mindset and its consequences. The only thing I would add is to tack on to your next-to-last sentence Malcolm X’s qualifier “by any means necessary.”
I.B. Singer also said “for the animals, it’s an eternal Treblinka.” And what do we all now think of those stoic, law-abiding volk who stood on the other side of the barbed wire fence and did nothing while the Holocaust was happening except to allow how “sad” it made them feel. Great evil merits robust and proportionately harsh reprisals.
Reblogged this on Girl for Animal Liberation.
Stewards of the Land:
Large parts of our society, an element of western heritage, elevate themselves to ”stewards of the land” and all other species to something lower and them as above and superior to other sentient beings like the wolf, so they thereby reduce other sentient beings to objects to eliminate, use, kill, manage.
Many of the same mentality manifest an unawareness or lack of concern. So many people are concerned only with their narrow spheres of living that they are oblivious to larger concerns that ultimately affect them and their offspring, such as the environment and biodiversity and a wilderness that is good for us all. They don’t see that we are all in this together, including our wild brethren.
Many humans see themselves as the only sentient beings, something God created in his image, and the rest as the Garden of Eden, to take from and use as stewards of the land. But they are failing as stewards of the land, with only vestiges of what once was. While collecting their coupons to Heaven, they are unconcerned, because this is all ends anyway, and they await Nirvana, not realizing that it was here, and they were in it, and that is really all they ever had to take care of and they failed.
We play stewards of the land through our wildlife agencies who reflect us. So, we play God over the landscape using it all as our needs and rationalizations dictate to suit our needs. It is about all gone.
Regarding thinking that man is the only sentient being on earth and that other animals are inferior and think only by instinct and are capable of great brutality: Actually, I think that the wolf, whales, porpoises and many other “animals” are equal to the human “animal” and that we, from our anthropocentric point of view overestimate our morality, our intelligence, our ethics, our own survivability. We kill animals by the millions to billions in slaughter houses every year, we hunt and trap for sport, we are usually at some kind of war and although disguised really for economic reasons. We pollute the air, poison the earth and waters, and fail to aid one another daily. Animals other than us do not decide by instinct alone and we think more by instinct that we like to think. We engage in vicious battles over territory, resources, and sexual matters. Other animals are able to reason, think outside the box, and consider consequences of actions, to make complicated plans and execute the plans. Wolves protect their families; will fight to the death for love ones, will feed the less able among them. Other animals teach their young to survive, it is not just instinct. Other animals have complicated communication skills, not exactly like humans, but sophisticated. The rest of the animal kingdom is not destroying the planet and atmosphere, but we are, and we are destroying all the other animals, having 1 in3 flora and fauna threatened or endangered. Man: Not superior.
Thank you for your wonderful comments.
Reblogged this on Wolf Is My Soul.
i would highly recommend that everyone read “The World Peace Diet” by Will Tuttle which goes into depth about this and many other related subjects. you can donwload a free PDF version of the entire book here: http://www.worldpeacediet.org/download.htm
it is by far the best work i have read about making the connections between all forms of violence, oppression and exploitation.
Reblogged this on The Extinction Chronicles.
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