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 