Bonus: Deception with John Sanbonmatsu

John Sanbonmatsu joins Claudia on the show to discuss ‘deception,’ a concept in the title of his recently published book “The Omnivore’s Deception.” We explore how deception operates in understandings of meat and human relations with animals, including how industries actively deceive the public but also how individuals engage in practices of bad faith and self-deception.  

Date Recorded: 25 February 2026

John Sanbonmatsu is Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in ethics, politics, and existentialism, philosophy of technology, and other topics. He is the author of The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and Ourselves (NYU Press) and of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject (Monthly Review Press). He is also editor of the book Critical Theory and Animal Liberation (Bloomsbury). His opinion essays have appeared in Christian Science Monitor, CounterPunch, Huffington Post, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among other places. Learn more about him on his website. 

Featured: 

• The Omnivore’s Deception by John Sanbonmatsu
• The Postmodern Prince by John Sanbonmatsu
• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
• The Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan
• The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith 
• The Women’s Room by Marilyn French 
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Bad Faith by Jean-Paul Sartre 
• The Animals versus man the king of the jinn by Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʼ
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee
• Anti-Semite and Jew by Jean-Paul Satre
• Population Balance
• Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass

The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, LinkedIn,Blue Sky, and Instagram

 Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen, Christiaan Menz, Herre de Bondt, and Carlo Salzani for their content creation and support. This episode was edited and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder. 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Transcript

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Two Kinds Of Deception

Siobhan O'Sullivan 0:00

This is another IROAR podcast.

John Sanbonmatsu 0:04

Well, there are two two different kinds of deception, I think broadly speaking, right? One is when we deceive others. You know, we do that for a variety of reasons. Everyone lies at some point in their lives. Some people do it every time they open their mouths. Uh, you know, most of us hesitate to to mislead others. But, you know, some of that is is inevitable, you know, uh, whether to spare someone hurt feelings or whatnot. Okay, so that that kind of deception on a on a personal level and actually on a societal level, right? We can talk about the way the meat industry deceives the public about the nature of the enterprise by obscuring the violence and from the consumer and so forth. So we can talk about that. But then the other kind of deception, which is the kind that I think is even worse, is self-deception. And uh I begin my book with a quote from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which of course is a a book about a fanatical sea captain who is intent on killing this whale out of vengeance and it leads to disaster. Well, Ishmael, the narrator, says this at one point when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing and tried to think of nothing. And I began that again, I begin the book with this quote because self-deception is also a universal part of the human experience. And as someone who teaches ethics, I think it is the greatest impediment, honestly, uh to moral thinking, moral deliberation and action because our ability to hide the truth from ourselves you know is it's quite a capacity.

Meet John And His Book

Claudia Hirtenfelder 2:32

If you listen to podcasts and you're interested in animal studies, you've probably heard him talking about his book elsewhere, uh The Omnivore's Deception, What We Get Wrong About Meat, Animals, and Ourselves. He's been really, I think, quite prolific with carrying out interviews and discussing this book, and it's got a very vibrant red cover, so it's kind of hard to miss. I very much enjoyed reading the book, and I'm delighted that John is joining me on the show today to talk about the concept and idea of deception. And we speak about it in a range of different scales, from the personal to the kind of political and societal. Let me tell you a little bit about John. He's a professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in ethics, politics, and existentialism, philosophy of technology, and other topics. He is the author of what we talk about today, The Omnivores Deception, What We Get Wrong About Meat, Animals and Ourselves, as well as the postmodern prints, Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject, which we touch on a little bit too. He is the editor of the book Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, and his opinion essays have appeared in a whole host of publications, including Counterpunch, Huffington Post, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. I very much enjoyed talking to John about deception. We talk a lot about kind of how processes are invisible, how they're absent. And I think deception captures I think the political nature of what we see and what we don't see, but also some of the psychological and political ways in which we're made to see and not see. Anyway, I very much enjoyed talking to John and I hope you enjoy the episode too. Hi, John. Welcome to the Animal Turn Podcast. I am delighted to have you on the show to talk about yeah, a concept that's in the title of your book, but one that I think every vegan and certainly many animal studies scholars in general have encountered and thought about, and that is deception. And I'm yeah, I'm curious to see where we go with this concept and idea. Uh but as always, uh, when I start the show, I'm I like to find out a bit about you. So, um, John, could you tell us a little bit about you and how you came to be interested in animal studies?

From Singer To 40 Years Vegan

John Sanbonmatsu 4:48

Thanks so much, uh Claudia. Great to meet you and delighted to be on this great podcast. Well, um, I think the most direct route, I suppose, was being in college in terms of how I came to animal issues. I was in college and I read uh Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation, which I came across in a bookstore. I I had already been familiar with Singer's work through a philosophy class uh on a different topic, a different essay of his I had I had read. And uh so that can that convinced me to become a vegetarian and then a few years later vegan. So I think I've been vegan now for 40 years. When I think 40 years. Yes, yes, indeed.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 5:29

Wow. And you're still standing, you're still alive, all the things, all the muscles, all the limbs.

John Sanbonmatsu 5:34

I know. Well, at my age, I begin to doubt to doubt these things. But no, yeah, somehow uh you can live on a vegan diet and flourish. But when I'm asked this question, you know, I often think about what, you know, what prepared me to be receptive, right, to Singer's arguments. Why did I, why was I willing to read the book? Uh, you know, and I think that that's an interesting question because I think there's this kind of self-selection that goes into people who who will sit down and and bother to read a book about animals. And so I think I was primed for that already, in the, you know, in the sense that I knew that other animals were interesting, that they were individuals. I'd grown up with cats and dogs in our house, and um I had a you know a love of animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 6:24

So were you studying at the time when you when you encountered this book?

John Sanbonmatsu 6:27

Because I was in college. I was a college student. Uh I went to a uh a college called Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, and it's it's an experimental college. So you you basically design your own curriculum working closely with faculty. So I was studying the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race, and I did my my thesis on nuclear weapons policy. So, you know, in the broader sense, it fell within political science, I guess.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 6:54

So you were busy reading about the those relationships, and then at the same time you were kind of reading works by someone like Petersing on the side?

John Sanbonmatsu 7:02

Yeah, that was a time when young people used to go to bookstores and just pick up a book and read it. You know what I mean? Uh and that is really one of the most devastating things that's happening right now, as you know, is just kind of declining literacy and the way young people are not uh reading books and so on. So yeah, it was not unusual at that time, I think, to be browsing books and just find a book you find, you know, looks interesting and and pick it up off the shelf. But but again, in retrospect, I think my openness to that uh partly had to do with my uh, as I said, you know, uh maybe a sense deep down, a little on uh discomfort with meat. You know, I'd never been someone who was into like raw, not raw, rare steaks or that sort of thing. Like I didn't I didn't want my thing uh my meat swimming in bodily juices, you know. Uh I wanted it nice and I didn't want to remind me of an animal. So I think I came into that already with that attitude. And then because I had read Singer in this other context, I was curious to know what he thought about this question it's interesting.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 8:14

My journey was quite different to yours, is I I um my relationship to meat was different than yours, but it was also through scholarship, I think, that I found my way to asking questions about animals. Uh, I was doing a gender studies degree, and of course, there it's a lot about asking questions about what you take for granted in the everyday. And that was really subversive, you know, being asked, what do we take for granted every day? And um, again, even there for me, finding the direct route to thinking about my consumption of animals wasn't direct. My husband suggested it, and my knee-joke response to him was, now you're going too far. Like that was the that was the response. It then took a like, I don't know, a couple of months later for me to kind of open up to the idea um more fully. But it was interesting because reading your book, I found that you know, this idea of deception is operating at a whole host of different levels. So my response to my husband there saying, you're taking it too far, that was a that defensive mechanism is speaking to some sort of self-deception. But of course, your book deals with all kinds of deceptions, from the self-deceiving, you know, what you want and how you think you relate to animals to more systemic kinds of deception. What was your intent with this book and how has it been received? It's I'm I'm late to the podcast. I know you've been speaking to people left and right about the book, uh, and I'm I'm luckily coming in a bit later than others. So what's the reception been?

John Sanbonmatsu 9:45

Well, let me say that, yeah, the the book was a long time coming. I I when when Michael Pollan's book, Omnivore's Dilemma, A Natural History of Four Meals, came out in 2006. I remember a friend of mine was suggesting I read it. And I and without reading that book, I knew that it would be really bad news for animals and animal advocacy and veganism. But my friend, you know, because of the way the book was marketed and Pollen's kind of rhetorical style, thought that it was somehow sympathetic to animals, which of course it's not at all. But I didn't I didn't want to read the book for years. I didn't want to confront that. But then kind of reading the New York Times every day, which I've been doing, and coming across dozens, actually hundreds of articles about humane mead, about do-it-yourself chicken farming and hunting and naiman ranch and you know, this idea that um there's this new animal agriculture. That stuff was really beginning to bother me. And then uh a friend of mine invited me to write something uh about Lear Keith's work. Lear Keith is a uh feminist who wrote a book called The Vegetarian Myth, arguing that, you know, we're naturally carnivores, basically, and that um you can't survive on a vegetarian, let alone vegan diet, and so on. So it just took many years to kind of work through the problems of the book. Uh and and the book widened out to it's more than just about you know humane, the the humane myth. It's really a critique of species as um as a structure, and part of that is as a kind of existential structure. Uh in terms of the reception of the book, I I was to be to be honest, I'm on the one hand very happy that I found NYU Press, which is the publisher, because it's been wonderful working with those folks. Also, you know, kind of on the other hand, because it's a smaller press, and I wasn't able to secure a trade press for this book, um, I have been disappointed in the reception. I mean, I think it's been really wonderfully received in vegan circles and animal advocacy circles, but of course, that's not my audience. My audience are, you know, the conflicted omnivores, as I call them, uh, who who want to think that they can have their meat and their conscience too, but in fact can't. And I've I've you know more or less been uh shut out of you know most mainstream media. And I now I shouldn't put it that way. It sounds a little person like I'm being persecuted. The fact is there are you know hundreds of thousands of books released every year. And so mine is just one other at a time when people aren't reading serious books, or very few

The Quiet Loss Of Reading

John Sanbonmatsu 12:40

people. You know what I mean?

Claudia Hirtenfelder 12:41

Yeah, uh, you know, as I was reading your work and also listening to some podcasts that you've been on previously, you know so many of the issues you raise in the book are issues that we've faced time and again across history. Um, you know, issues of power relations, uh, of inequality, of injustice, of oppression. And sometimes it can feel like we're on something of a wheel where we're just kind of saying the same thing over and over again. But it's important that we have these debates and these discussions. But what you point to here is something that I think we've never actually spoken about on the podcast, which is engaging with ideas through books. Uh, you know, you mentioned at the beginning that there is a disappearance of books, of people engaging with books. University campuses are increasingly not featuring books. I was stunned when I was at Queen's University to walk across, I think it was at least four stores that sold merch, but not a single bookstore on campus. You know, just a bookstore that you walk into. There was a bookstore where you could get course materials, but not a bookstore where you walk into and you stumble upon a new idea. Because it's a kind of a continuation of these echo chambers where everybody is just in the space that they already agree with. I agree with these people, and we just reinforce our own ideas. And stumbling like you did all those years ago onto a different book can be a real gift. It can open up a whole new world for you. So I think you're you're speaking here, yes, was focused on on animals and the humane myth and the deception that we tell ourselves and others about our relationship with them. But there's this other huge thing happening at the moment where we're not exposed to new ideas in the same way.

John Sanbonmatsu 14:24

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's a whole other podcast, I suppose. But um there there's some evidence, right, that that young men are not reading novels, for example, or men as such are not reading novels anymore. And uh, as a kind of uh nerdy kid who had a hard time integrating as a youngster teenager, uh I I was my consolation were consolation was literature, and I really was immersed in you know, Dostoevsky or Marilyn French as the women's room, and novels really broaden your horizons in so many ways. I know that sounds like a cliche, but it it to be able to encounter other minds, other experiences than your own. For example, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers had a huge impact on me when I read that as a teenager, to be able to imagine myself into the the experiences of a uh 13-year-old girl in the deep south, or into uh, you know, the the lives of uh uh you know a deaf mute and his kind of troubled friend. And you know, this is why teachers in high school used to teach, and some some still do teach, uh, Ernest Hemingway or whatever. But but we're finding even at the junior high school and high school level, because corporations are so powerful, the publishing industry is so powerful, they've taken the novel out of the curriculum mostly, right? And they're giving instead, they're giving them online uh quizzes and short readings.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:01

Uh yeah, it's devastating.

John Sanbonmatsu 16:03

And that's been one of the one devastating, what's one of the great frauds, actually, is the way the high-tech industry has mutilated education, public education in this country, and I assume, you know, to some extent in Europe as well.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:17

Yeah, I so I I read somewhere the other day um that the SATs have now become a series of instead of long-form questions and long-form answers, they've become a series of short digital questions requiring short answers. So the the capacity to build an argument, to move away from a this or that understanding, a black and white understanding, this requires space to think, uh to read. And I think reading and writing both offer that space. But before we get too sidetracked with this really important uh topic, let's let's switch now to the focus of our conversation today, which is deception.

Defining Deception And Bad Faith

Claudia Hirtenfelder 16:54

Um let's start basically at its base. If you were to define deception, what is deception?

John Sanbonmatsu 17:03

Well, there are two two different kinds of deception, I think broadly speaking, right? One is when we deceive others. You know, we do that for a variety of reasons. Everyone lies at some point in their lives. Some people do it every time they open their mouths. Uh, you know, most of us hesitate to to to mislead others. But, you know, some of that is is inevitable, you know, uh whether to spare someone hurt feelings or whatnot. Okay, so that that kind of deception on a on a personal level and actually on a societal level, right? We can talk about the way the meat industry deceives the public about the nature of the enterprise by obscuring the violence and from the consumer and so forth. So we can talk about that. But then the other kind of deception, which is the kind that I think is even worse, is self-deception. And uh I begin my book with a quote from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which of course is a a book about a fanatical sea captain who is intent on killing this whale out of vengeance and it leads to disaster. Well, Ishmael, the narrator, says this at one point when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing and tried to think of nothing. And I began that again, I begin the book with this quote because self-deception is also you know a universal part of the human experience. And as someone who teaches ethics, I think it is the greatest impediment, honestly, uh to moral thinking, moral deliberation and action. Because our ability to hide the truth from ourselves you know, is it's quite a capacity. And this is something that the existential existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith. And bad faith really is at uh a lot of our failings as humans to to examine difficult topics, to be honest with ourselves about how we might be implicated in an injustice or structure of power and so forth, right? So when you you described coming how you came to these issues through gender studies and feminism and how uh you know asking a question about what is it that's right in front of us that we are not seeing or not wanting to see, I think I think that I think that that latter part of that, I don't know if you put it exactly this way, but that but there's also this not wanting to see what's right in front of us, right? I mean, it's not simply the case that people are missing the information, because they are they people have no idea what we do to animals. They do not have any idea for a variety of reasons, but they don't want to know either. And that's why they get really bent out of shape if a vegan says, Oh, can we go to a different restaurant? Or um, you know, have you ever thought about this or that? They go, they they don't like that at all. And I understand it. I used to not be vegan. So yeah, so I think I think deception functions in both of these ways to entrench and protect uh systems of power and inequality. We guess it's not just the animal issue, it's every every system of power and inequality.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 20:58

I really like it as a concept because it can straddle these ways of these different scales, right? So you can think about industries, you can think about particular actors engaging in deceptive behaviors, choosing to deceive, making an active choice to deceive, to mislead, to misconstrue. Um, I mean, we can think about the tobacco industry, you can think about the sugar industry, we can think about a whole host of different industries at that kind of broad level that function to deceive. Um, and that you can understand their motives for doing so. You know, they want to make money, so they deceive, and they'll use, let's say, discussive strategies to do so, and they'll appeal to your psychology. So I really like that deception can crap, like um, I was gonna say crap, uh, capture that kind of structural dimension. But it's great because it also functions and dips into the psychology, this idea that you can self-deceive. That might strike some people as odd. How do you self-deceive? Uh, how is this not ignorance? Uh, could you could you unpack that a little bit more?

John Sanbonmatsu 21:58

Yeah, I mean, it is paradox. Because to literally lie to yourself suggests that you know the truth. But then how you know how do you hide something from yourself? So it's it's psychologically, you know, a little complex. The way that Sartre describes this is that he he sees humans as free beings, free beings who can choose we can choose how to be in the world, what values to affirm, uh, and it's up to us to kind of bring our values and our actions into some kind of harmony, or not, as the case may be. Sartre rejects a certain Freudian conception of consciousness where there's this unconscious that tells me what to do or makes me do things. He really doesn't like that, right? He wants to really affirm our freedom, because with that freedom, therefore, is a kind of ultimate responsibility. I don't have an excuse. You know, the devil made me do it. My uncons because uh, you know, something happened to me in my childhood, therefore, that's why I killed my neighbor with the rake, because, etc. Now, I'm not, I I am not at all disputing, I don't want to like uh defend Sartre on this this particular point about the unconscious, but my my point in going into that is just to suggest that there is something valuable in what Sart is saying about uh the way we are our discomfort around particular issues or about things that we we perceive as vulnerabilities in our own character, the way we you know ref kind of steer clear of those issues, either that or on the contrary, uh get very defensive about our values and our behaviors, right?

Truth Versus “Your Truth”

Claudia Hirtenfelder 23:50

I wonder how this is tied, because you've mentioned there there's the kind of knowing of the truth, and we we live at a moment in time now when, uh and I think to some extent rightfully so, the idea of how the truth has been mobilized to um facilitate different oppressions has been critiqued, but we've ended up in a place where ideas of a truth have also become, you know, in the post-humanities where having a single truth has become a problem. Um do you see this playing or functioning in this kind of self-deception? So, yes, you're critiquing meat eating. You're saying eating meat is a problem. This idea that you can, as long as you eat meat locally and it's happening at a small scale, then you're not causing harm. Some people might say, well, it depends on the way you define your truth and what harm is. And this is a very, I want to say modern and contemporary way of conceiving of problems. Anytime there's a critique, it depends on what your truth is. Yeah, I'm just curious to know how you think this comes into play with the question of deception.

John Sanbonmatsu 24:51

Yeah, that really drives me nuts when people talk about, you know, your truth. I mean, this is this is part of the post-structuralist turn, which I uh critique in my first book, The Postmodern Prince. It's been very damaging. I mean, because it it arrives, you know, there's a kind of genealogy or or history to how this idea developed. It goes back to Friedrich Nietzsche, especially. What's called prospectivalism, then gets taken up by other Nietzschean thinkers like Heidegger and so forth. But but that idea, like that everybody has their truth, is it's it's so absurd because there's a kind of straw, straw person argument that is set up in defense of this, which is that capital T truth, right, it suggests a kind of naive reverential theory of truth that we can all, the truth is transparently, it's it's transparently knowable, that everybody can agree uh you know relatively easily. So it's which is all nonsense. We know that it's it's hard for humans to come to consensus on on what is real, what's true. That doesn't mean there isn't uh there isn't some uh something in the real that that is true that we can point to with evidence and logic, you know, reason and so forth. So I'm a big believer in truth. And in fact, I think that you know, Nietzsche in particular didn't didn't care about the oppressed or you know, people who are subjugated. On the contrary, he identified with the predatorial class, not not the rich, but with you know, the kind of powerful men uh and uh and also artists, but but people who were not connected to social movements or to uh defending the interests of those without power. So he he criticized what he called the slave morality in Christian civilization, the idea that you should turn the other cheek and so on. Okay. Sorry for this. Uh divers uh dis what's the word? Whatever. But um the reason I mention this is in fact, what do the oppressed have but truth? That is really all that those who are marginalized, those on the periphery, right, uh of any system, whether the world system or the species system, those who whose voices aren't heard, they they only have the truth as a consolation. And to and to trivial and to say, well, it's your truth, and here's my truth, it's it's a kind of moral relativism and epistemological relativism. And it fits rather too neatly, doesn't it, with what we're what's happening in capitalist culture, which is to silo us all into our own so-called perceptual realities by algorithm. The algorithms are sorting us into bins of consumption and you know behavioral data, data uh manipulation. And so, no, we have to hold on, we we have to reject a kind of post-structuralist uh framework, I think. In general, I find there are a lot of problems with post-structuralism, but particularly around questions of of truth.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 28:25

Yeah, and I mean uh when I think about any social rights movement, uh there has been a call to draw a line in the sand to some extent, to say that this is right or this is wrong. Uh, these practices have continued for this long. So, relativism, when we say anything goes, you you can't really be political with that. If everything is permissible, then everything is permissible, um, which is not uh fair and I think leads the most vulnerable more vulnerable, as I think you rightfully state here. Um maybe we could bring in some specific examples about how this operates with regards to

Beyond Capitalism To Domestication

Claudia Hirtenfelder 29:03

animals. So I know you you're pretty clear that yes, capitalism is one of the mechanisms that is causing harm against animals now. Industrialization has led to massive increasing levels of harm done against animals, but you don't think that this is the root cause or the main and leading problem. Um, that, you know, because it could be easy to say, well, one of the reasons why we harm animals so much in the way we do is because it's in capitalists' interests, as we spoke about earlier. It's in industry's interests' interests to convince us that eating animals is good. But you think this goes back further, that there's a deeper, uh, more fundamental question at play. Can you can you explain that a bit?

John Sanbonmatsu 29:45

The the animal advocacy movement has had some success in getting the term factory farming right onto the agenda and for people to have enough exposure to think that there may be a problem with that, quote, factory farms, right? Industrialized animal agriculture. But the downside to that focus, right, is to is implicitly to suggest this is a bad way to do it. This is the bad way to exploit and kill animals with the unspoken follow-up, which is so there must be some better way. And I think that has been a real mistake, you know. So and also just to say that capitalism is the problem. Well, capitalism is recent, that's only you know five centuries old or so, whereas humans have been on the earth for 300,000 years, and animal quote domestication extends back um 11,000 years. So what happened before capitalism? Well, there's all sorts of stuff that was happening, and in terms of our relations with other species, that included hunting, probably the evidence suggests, on balance, I think, hunting certain species to extinction uh and then enslaving animals in what we call domestication. Uh and out of that material practice of keeping and reproducing animals for human use, that led to an ideology of natural hierarchy and natural domination. So I'm, you know, I don't I I think that the problem with uh a strictly ecological Marxist perspective is that it it may over-emphasize, depending on who's saying it, right, may overemphasize uh capitalism as the problem facing animals, right? But in my book, I talk about this fascinating text, The Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, which is this 10th century work by uh Islamic scholars in what's now Basra, Iraq, where the animals of the earth one by one send representatives to appeal to the king of the jinn, the genies, these powerful supernatural beings, to intervene on behalf of the animals. And what's there's so many fascinating things about this epistle, this letter that's in the book-length thing that was sent out to other scholars at the time. Again, this is the 10th century, and the animals enumerate the horrors, uh, the cruelty, the fact that animals had no peace, that they were uh tracked down and hunted, you know, in the in the glens and in the mountains, you know, chased across the face of the earth, and then when they were captured, they were put to uh violent uses. That's in the 10th century, long before capitalist relations. And in the in the book, the the humans describe the animals as their slaves. And that's something also I emphasize in my book. There's a certain uh understandable uh trend in animal studies to feel you know some discomfiture around talking about slavery. But as I emphasize in my book, even though those concerns are warranted, slavery is a system both a both a set of relations and a set of ideological uh and discursive systems that uh preceded racialized slavery, you know, by thousands of years. So in the ancient world it was it was understood that the status of enslaved humans and enslaved animals was in some sense similar, and the evidence suggests in fact that human slavery was modeled on our prior enslavement of other species. So I think that's more.

Slavery Genocide And Animal Systems

Claudia Hirtenfelder 33:49

I really I really appreciated that throughout the book you didn't shy away from what some of these more contradictory, uh, not contradictory, um, I was gonna say conflating. It's controversial. There we go. I got the word. Um I really appreciated that in the book you didn't uh veer away from kind of some of these more controversial arguments and debates. Like you say in animal studies, um, we're almost very quick to any time a comparison between humans and animals and the ways in which they have been oppressed comes up. You almost have to have a follow-up sense and saying, I'm not conflating these two together. I'm not saying they're one and the same. They came about in very distinct ways. And that's important with good reason because sometimes these comparisons have been done uh superficially in bad faith, uh as speaking about bad faith to kind of just you'd often see this, for example, happening with um folks who have uh disabilities of sorts saying, okay, well, you know, you would compare animals to have a conversation about their cognition with using differently abled uh humans to have that conversation, often done in bad faith without thinking sensitively about them. However, I think there's been a bit of a chilling effect to now drawing any comparisons because folks are a bit concerned. What happens if you draw a comparison? Are you going to be cancelled? Are you going to be, you know, is it going to be the end of your career if you start to have a conversation that's a bit controversial and that brings humans and animals into the same frame? Not only in terms of animals being oppressors of oppressed, but both humans and animals being oppressed in similar ways by similar structures. And you do this with your conversation about slavery, but also in some of your conversations with speaking about Nazism. Um yeah, could you why did you think it was important to bring these into the same frame? Why was it important to speak about sorry, I'm laying on like five million questions. It's a problem, it's a problem of mine. But just as you were speaking with slavery, um, I've my my work has looked at the history of cows. And what's interesting is whenever I use the word cow to describe things, people will say, Well, you mean cattle? And I purposefully do not use cattle because it's derived from chattel. And chattel historically was the word used to describe any movable property. And that was not just cows, that was any movable property. That's cows, that's pigs, but that at the time was also people. So I know I'm like answering the question I gave you here, but I feel like that's a good example of showing how these were really entangled systems of oppression.

John Sanbonmatsu 36:25

Yeah, absolutely. It's it's it's it's anti-intellectual, frankly. Um it's kind of like an abdication of scholarly responsibility to deny these entanglements, historical, uh, discursive, uh, you know, in terms of material social relations, they overlapped. And then, as I said, out of these material relations, these elaborate ideologies developed. So it was it was important to me to to note this. I mean, partly for just as uh to be true to empirical reality, to describe the system, you can't just begin with the factory farm, which is what say Michael Pollan does, as though, well, everything was fine before you know Upton Sinclair writes the jungle 1906. Uh things weren't okay. And human violence as a problem within human cultures and then vis-a-vis other species has been a problem for for many thousands of years. So I didn't sit down thinking, okay, well, I wanna I want to talk about slavery and genocide uh to make a rhetorical point, right? I mean, and this is what you're saying. There are ways to treat these issues glibly or to get a rise out of the reader, or to Now I wanna I want to uh grant the point that like others who you know once you peer into this this heart of darkness in civilization and the the true horrors of what we do to the other beings, we do grasp for metaphors and um historical precedence to try to to name what we're seeing. Now, the animal system does not have precedence in human in human-human relations because of its scale, because of the diversity of harms we inflict on all the animals. It's an omnicidal system. So, in that sense, uh, you know, I don't want to say it's worse than slavery or genocide, but it, you know, when people get offended even at the analogy between what we do in animals and these other uh human atrocities, they you know, it's typically from the point of view of someone who doesn't truly understand the the depth of the horror that we're inflicting. Now, the the question about slavery, I think it's pretty clear. We just talked about that, why it's important to mention that historically and in terms of the way the cultural conditions are created in order to reproduce a system like slavery or animal agriculture, say. Nazis, you mentioned Nazism. I felt like, you know, when we talk about the Holocaust in animal studies, again, we see a similar and and understandable backing off in maybe some quarters about that. Is that an appropriate analogy? I think the question needs to be broadened out, first of all, to genocide as such and not simply the Holocaust. At the same time, because the the Nazi Holocaust is the most studied of all the genocides, and we know a lot about it. And also because of the kind of weird ideological resonances between Nazism and animal agriculture, you know, industrial animal agriculture, I think that it's it's very hard to avoid that discussion. And I don't think we should uh avoid it. I mean, right now Temple Grandin is the world the nation's most outspoken advocate of using gas chambers, putting living beings, chickens, pigs, into gas chambers. Not figurative gas chambers, actual gas chambers, right? Uh so there are all sorts of ways in which kind of the Nazi system uh has these uncanny resonances, or vice versa, with industrialized animal systems. So again, I don't I don't see what's to be gained by uh from avoiding it, even though, yeah, some some people will find it controversial.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 40:54

I guess it's not a matter of conflating them with one another, right? Um, you know, when you want to speak about deception, you speak about what happened in Nazi Germany. There was a whole host of deception happening, right? To to hide the horrors that were happening from the mass public, the mass public generally having a sense of what was going on, but also opting to not see or not really see. Um, I mean, those extents of deceiving oneself, but being also deceived by bigger structures, um, you know, resonate when you think about those massive horrors and those massive structures. And then you've got something, I mean, like slavery uh in in North America that was relatively accepted, that wasn't hidden away, right? With the deception, the way deception operated there, it operated out uh by lying and creating a narrative of value that operated slightly differently to what we would speak about as operating in Nazi Germany. So, I mean, it's important to pry them apart, look at their historical specificity, but that's and then when you talk about animals, it's not to conflate animals with these two particular moments in time. It's about saying, well, how does power operate? How does domination operate? How does violence operate? And you start to see similarities in spatial organization, similarities in discursive organizations, similarities in the ways in which populations are organized relative to one another. So when you zoom out a little bit to see what's happening, I mean, isn't it barbed wire? Barbed wire was originally used in farms and then became a technology to use in concentration camps and now prisons. The gas that was used in the Holocaust was originally used to eradicate rats on ships. Uh, and you know, then the connections to what was happening in in pigs uh with the wake of swine flu. Um it's just that there are these these threads running through. And I think, like you say, to not talk about those connections is also to perhaps deceive and not see the interconnections between these and to see how different populations have been impacted by this oppression, by this violence.

“We’ve Always Done It” Excuse

Claudia Hirtenfelder 43:08

But then I think the question becomes if this has been going on seemingly forever, since humans have been around forever and ever, um, I'm sure you get asked this question all the time. If it's something we've always done, is it worth fighting against? If it's something that's always happened, why concern ourselves with it?

John Sanbonmatsu 43:28

Well, I mean, the you know, the the immediate, obvious answer, which is the more important answer, is that it's what we're doing is simply wrong. And and so it has to stop, even if we don't know how to stop it, right? So that's that's number one. Number two, that idea that it's always been happening is of course one of the central pillars of the bad faith that keeps us enmeshed in the in these behaviors and in the system. Right. It's what we do to animals is in some sense natural. Even genetically modifying animals is seen in this ideal ideology as quote natural because it's simply another example of predator-prey relations or whatever the animals are there for us. Either God gave them to us or providential evolutionary order provided them for our use, et cetera, et cetera. So those those are the first two things I would say about you know the the longevity of this system. But I think when I've looked more deeply into this question of how we treat animals, you know, over the years, I've been thinking about it for a long time, as you have and many other people have, it just became clear to me that this is my third point, that that the longevity of the system, its ubiquitous nature, it has to say something about the human condition and about the choices that we're making existentially. What you know, what is the significance of a species that that enslaves all the other species around it? And I don't think that in fact I know that you know, 99% of intellectuals have no idea what I'm talking about, or would be hostile to the the work of self-examination that would be required to really grapple with that. Now, anybody who's involved in in caring about animals and animal advocacy, whether it's critical animal studies or just activists, they everybody gets we we all know, you know, it's like you pass through a door, you get to the other side, and you see it's like the red pill thing and/or blue pill, whichever it is in the matrix. You you you know, it's a paradigm shift in the sense of Thomas Kuhn, where you you you're in a new world, you see different phenomena. And once you see what's happening, you you can't help help but feel a kind of rage and shame about being a member of a species that uh could have these pretensions to being the only moral, reasonable being on the planet, and yet is engaged in the most immoral uh and unreasonable behavior on the planet. So that disjuncture between kind of our high-flown ideals from the humanist tradition in the classical period, you know, the Renaissance, up through enlightenment to the present, where we see we have a certain conception of human dignity, as uh Pico della Mirandola described it in the Renaissance. This idea of our inherent dignity and reasonableness, our we're made in the image of God, and then that on one hand, and then on the other hand, essentially concentration camps all over the world for these billions and trillions of animals and the seas that we're killing. And uh, as you know, this is this is what uh Kutzia uh explores in his novels The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello, where this professor uh visits a humanities, uh a liberal arts school and gives a humanities lecture, comparing what she sees around her in this quiet suburban community to, you know, the the countryside of Poland or Eastern Europe, outside uh the concentration camp in Treplinka or whatever, it's all naturalized, normalized. Uh so I think we should be very concerned that that this is how our species understands itself and not only understands itself, um, how it affirms itself every single day. Because, you know, if you read Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, you think, okay, well, what could be wrong with Joel Salatin's polyphase farms? You know, he has this whole thing about visiting this farm with regenerative agric animal agriculture. You know, the animals have a nice, quote, nice life. Um, and then they have one bad day, right, in the nomenclature of this stuff. And um but actually what what Pollen is doing in that book is defending mass violence against animals, against trillions, quadrillions, septillions of animals forever. Like that the project isn't simply to defend Joel Salatin's farm. It's to say that that is what we as human beings are, that's what we should be doing forever, is inflicting uh mass violence against our fellow sensitive beings. Well, the fact that pollen is the number one intellectual gone to for any questions having to do with food or animals just shows the bad faith of society, right? It isn't we engage in bad faith as individuals, but then there's a way in which there's societal, and I would go further and even talk about civilizational bad faith. It isn't even just a particular society. It's all humans are part of what we might call the species contract. You know, some of your listeners are familiar with the racial contract, Charles Mills and Carol Pateman's the sexual contract. In other words, we're all in a kind of consensual reality where we we're humans. We are we're the in-group, and then those out there, all the other species are the out-group and they're killable. This should really disturb us in terms of what it means to be human.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 49:44

Yeah. Yeah, the idea that we've always done it is a reason that we can continue to do it is a nonsensical argument. Anytime we've made a substantive change, that was never a good enough, it was never a good enough response to to continuing to do what is damaging and violent and repressive. Um, but trying to pry that apart, thinking about how our human psychology works, why we've continued to sustain this, that's where the real, I always get my phrases wrong. I was going to say that's where the real mustard is. That's what the phrase is now. Um, because I think it taps into our psychology. It asks us to question, like you said earlier, what is it we want to see and what is it we don't want to see? And and to guard against that desire to ignore. Um and then the question becomes, well, what comes after deception? Yes, people engage in a whole host of activities that deceive themselves, that you open up your book also speaking about how at nauseum you have people kind of tell you, oh, I tried to be vegan once, but um, you know, I tried it for a week and I couldn't do it anymore. There's there's this constant kind of confessional stuff happening where people kind of know, but they don't know. And this is what you've kind of been saying. You've you've said, yes, people are aware of factory farming, but they don't really comprehend just how devastating it is. So there's, it appears to me, based on what you're saying here, there are different scales of deception happening, different approximations that maybe hedge closer towards ignorance, completely just not knowing, which I guess at that point we're no longer in the realm of deception, um, towards heading to really just self-sabotage and lying, where you know that you're lying and you are just purposefully lying. So there seems to be a kind of scale of deception. And I'm sure there are many people that have written about it and said it in much more eloquent ways than I am here. But there seems to be something particularly troubling about folks who are studying or researching or looking at food systems and animals, and that continued the narrative. So, someone like Michael Pollan, who you said is an expert on this, surely he's encountered the critiques that you've raised in your book. Surely these are not new critiques for him. Have you seen him engage with these critiques at all? Um,

Pollan And The Mob’s Protection

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:07

has he engaged with your book? Has he engaged with um anyone who's leveled these kinds of ethical and political questions to him?

John Sanbonmatsu 52:14

Uh no, I don't I don't believe that Paulin has ever had to grapple with any of the arguments in my book. Um I I don't mean specifically my book because I'm sure he's never read it or even heard of it. You know, it's not a national bestseller, it's not selling millions of copies, in which case he might have to address it. But I I can't imagine he will come across it.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 52:33

Um That's so wild because your book is like huge in our circles. Everyone knows your book. And the idea that other people the other people the idea that other people don't know it, I'm like, is just crazy.

John Sanbonmatsu 52:43

Thank you. That's very flattering. Checks in the mail, as we say. Um, you know, I think that I would be it would be interesting to see what Paulin could say about my book, right? Because the examples I give of sadism, just outright blood-minded, bloody-minded sadism uh in the book, it's these are things that are occurring on these smaller farms, family farms, this the so-called femivores, women who have uh given up you know well-paying jobs to go and buy a cattle ranch, quote unquote, uh, or or to raise chickens and pigs, to get in touch with the land and connect to animals, and then they they're just so brutal in the way they treat these animals. What can he say? And then his own book, I mean, in his own book, The Omnivores Dilemma, he he goes out of his way to harm animals, to kill animals. He describes going to hunt uh pigs, wild pigs, and kills this uh wild pig, probably a mother who was nursing at the time, and he just he just has a sadistic uh pleasure in killing. What is he gonna say? It's it's ugly. It's just ugly. But the but here's the thing: he's protected by the mob. The mob is society. He is buffered and protected because he's speaking to the mob. And this is something that I found really helpful in my own research was reading a book by by Sartre called Anti-Semite and Jew, where Sartre gives a phenomenology of antisemitism. In other words, how does what is the function phenomenologically, existentially, of this belief that you know, there's this whole group of people who are inferior to me and are just they're the reason that society's messed up, you know, there's the scapegoat. And and really what anti-Semitism is, is a form of bad faith systemically and societally. I mean, Sartre is writing this in the post-war period, trying to understand why, even after the Nazi experience and the Vichy regime and so forth, people are still anti-Semitic in France and elsewhere. What is it about that? Because it's not just an opinion, he points out. It's not just having a belief. Because if you tell me, oh, it's not gonna rain today, and I say, oh, well, look, here's this uh weather prediction from the National Weather Bureau, it's gonna rain. He says, Oh, you'll revise your view, right? But if I'm a racist, a misogynist, an anti-Semite, a speciesist, whatever, and you give me the facts, it's not gonna have any impact on me in many cases, right? Because I'm not interested in the facts. And the bad faith comes in in pretending uh that that I'm interested in the facts or in arguments. But you know, we know as vegans, if you you you point out one thing about the animal system or you you show that, well, plants aren't conscious, contrary to the discourses we keep hearing, as far as we know, there's no evidence actually that they're conscious in the sense of having a subjectivity. They'll they'll move on to some other terrain of bad faith argument. It doesn't, they're willing to cede any ground uh in order to get on to some other excuse for their behavior. So I think that that that you know, we have to take a step back and look at these these kinds of uh arguments as part of a larger structure that society uses. And that's why I mean Pollen is a beautiful writer, he's a smart guy. Don't get me wrong, um, and that book was was original at the time it came out in terms of what he was trying to do, but it's also a kind of sleight of hand. It's uh it is deception. That's why I call my book, The Omnivores Deception, because he's he's like saying, Okay, reader, there's some of you who are uneasy about what we're doing to animals, and I yeah, and I feel your pain. What are we gonna do? And so he he goes over some of the arguments for animal rights and then knocks them all down. At least he you know, he pretends to knock them all down so that the reader can pat themselves on the back and go off and eat their burger in good conscience. They can even eat uh at McDonald's, because in the heart, they're heart of hearts, they agree with Pollen that we need to find a better way, but unfortunately, there just isn't any free-range uh chicken available at the moment. So that's anyway, sorry to go on about that, but I think it's really important to know why someone like Pollen would never read my book or have to read my book, right? Because he's buffered. He's protected by all of this power, the intelligentsia, the capitalist intelligentsia, which by the way has now been revealed through the Epstein files for anyone who didn't know what was happening anyway, to be a fraud. All of these Ivy League professors who were, you know, cozying up to Jeffrey Epstein, you know, talking about Columbia and MIT and Harvard and Larry Summers and et cetera, like that is the that is the brain trust of the capitalist patriarchal speciesist world system. They produced the conditions for someone like Michael Pollan, Temple Grand, and Barbara King Solver, et cetera, to succeed. Uh so for us, kind of on the outside of that, who are who are excluded from the mass media, it's quite frustrating. And again, it gets back to our earlier discussion. Well, what do we have? Well, we have the truth. We have justice on our side. And that's not that's not that's not uh something to to minimize. That's really important.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 58:23

No, that is really important. And uh,

After Deception Hope And Strategy

Claudia Hirtenfelder 58:26

you know, I I can't help, I keep coming back to that question of what comes after deception. Um, just because hearing you speak, it can seem insurmountable, right? When you're you're you're looking at the odds that the odds of um achieving any sort of equal uh system in which animals are not treated so horribly just seem insurmountable. You've got massive money, massive structures actively working towards deceiving consumers, deceiving the populace. You've got um politicians, and I mean the US is particularly bad with the lobbying system who are buying into uh maintaining these systems, right? So there's there's active forms of deception happening. And then on your account now, people who are psychologically predisposed to not seeing that because they're invested in the system for their own interests, um, or they were psycho psychologically and culturally brought up in such a way to not see that, are unlikely to be swayed by any of the arguments that we are speaking about yet to be presented. So we're just engaging in another echo chamber, right? They're gonna speak over there to their racist buddies and their species buddies, and they're gonna call vegans idiots, and vegans are gonna stand in their circle saying, oh, those guys, they just can't see the truth. And um, I mean, maybe vegans and uh critical animal studies scholars are engaged in our own kind of deception where we're thinking that maybe there is chance for change, there is potential. I mean, I certainly am in that camp where I think, well, if there isn't a chance for change, if we're just talking about a fatalistic society, then what's the point? Like, what's the point in writing these books and doing these things? But maybe that's just a delusion. Like, is that just a more benign form of fatalism? Um, and yeah, I I mean, I put it to you, what what comes after deception? And I think this again probably straddles the personal and the the structural.

John Sanbonmatsu 1:00:17

Well, there's no question fatalism can be a form of bad faith. And we know, you know, historically that things that seemed you know immutable, systems that seemed immutable uh changed. They didn't remain immutable, s slavery being you know an obvious example. Nonetheless, I think my own pessimistic view is that we're on the equivalent of the Titanic, you know, the whole system is going down, the ecology, the planet is shutting down. Um, I personally don't see any way to halt it. But even if but I can't say that. I can only tell you, you know, as a just soberly, when I look at the situation, I don't I don't see the signs of hope. But that that doesn't change what I do, and it shouldn't change what you do. Because if you're on the Titanic and it's going down, you still have to make some existential choices. Are you gonna be one of the jerks who jumps in the lifeboat and shoves the other people out of the way? In other words, you just, oh, well, it's all gonna go to held in the hand basket anyway, so I'm just gonna go see the Galapagos. I'm gonna get on that jet plane, or I'm gonna get on that uh cruise ship, and I'll be contributing to the end of the world, but at least I'll have a good time. Right? Or am I gonna be like the musicians on the deck of the ship who continued, you know, to play a string quartet as the ship was going down to calm the passengers and to relieve suffering? Look, the Buddhist Buddha said, you know, life is suffering. We're never gonna end suffering. That's that's part of the nature of things. But what we can do is our best to relieve it and to, as activists, to eliminate the structures that give rise to it, right? But I think in terms of the animal issue, it is it's tougher than any other issue because everybody's implicated in it. And nobody and therefore, and therefore the structure of bad faith is really thick. Also, capitalism is it capitalism works by reshaping our subjectivity around its own imperatives, right? It fashions the world after its own image. So the so-called, so instead of having citizens, we don't talk about citizens anymore, we talk about the consumer, right? Consumers want this, consumers don't want this. So too many vegans, I think, get into that. Well, what do we how can we speak to the to the consumer? Well, first of all, we stop calling them a consumer. We see them as citizens and humans with moral agency. Um so as you say, we have these powerful, powerful institutions that are entrenched, uh allied against us, greater inequality than ever in the history of the world, more dangerous people running the world than ever before, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really, really, it's too much. It's too much for anybody to think about. All of that said, all of that said, it's clear that that the animal movement somehow, uh, I think a priority has to be to get sectors of the environmental movement, sectors of the political left to understand these issues and for us to just hammer that home again and again and again. Because in our, you know, our own, like to remain in our own lane about animal advocacy uh is is in a certain sense it's to miss it's to miss the boat, because we we we cannot have animal liberation under capitalist relations, under, you know, patriarchal relations. Never will happen. And by the same token, socialists, ecological Marxists who think that we can have a socialism with democratized animal products where you know everybody gets a stake, no pun intended, uh, you know, is equally bankrupt morally and a non-starter. And it is, it is it's frightening and extraordinary to see how the left just generally has no comprehension of of the origins of the ecological crisis, no moral concern whatsoever for animals. So I'm not at all blaming the animal movement at all, you know, for for this. But I think strategically, somehow we need to make some some inroads there. Because what's because what's uh happening is is I say it's the collapse of everything. Liberal capitalist democracy is kind of kaput. We're not it looks like representative democracy was a blip, you know, a little bump in the road in in a long tradition of autocracy and absolutism and human in the state, you know, in the formation of the state. And so it's an all hands-on-deck moment, uh, to I guess hearken back to the Titanic uh metaphor. Um, but we need we need a mass movement that puts animals at the center, but also addresses these other structures. I'm sorry, that's too much I know to put on uh put on us all.

Convenience Consumption And Coming Scarcity

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:05:23

No, no, no, no. It's it's um, but I think it's true, and I think this is why we tend towards fatalism and throwing up our hands because it does seem insurmountable. Um and I think, yeah, like I'm also frustrated by narratives that are like just live your best life and be happy. And like there's a lot of discourses and strategies. I mean, we we spoke about books earlier, right? And the the decline of books is also the upswing in social media and the the atomization of different groups and interests leads to us not being. able to speak across and and this is what you're saying is we need to speak across we need the strength quote tech people to be speaking to the people who are jumping in the boat and realizing that um they're they're in it together but then you have people use that phrase that phrase we're in it together and it's often done in bad faith without seeing structural inequality you saw this during COVID right everyone being like we're in it together um I remember this happening in Kingston everyone saying oh you know you just have to buy local we're in it together you've got to buy local we're not in it together the folks who are working have to work their minimum wage jobs are much more threatened and on top of that your desire to get people to buy local is putting in harm's way other populations who are reliant on the structure as it currently exists to have um products move across the world so then it becomes this kind of you end up in this really strange utilitarian space where you're like well whose lives matter more whose interests matter more and um the rise of EA is I think also showing this where people just want a calculus they want an easy answer right if I give this money I will solve this issue because I think all of these measures these discourses uh the rise of EA speaks to the fact that these are huge huge problems and people want to do something they want to I I really do think people want to do something and they want to be part of the solution and I've said for a long time I actually think the crux of everything is convenience. We have to realize that life isn't supposed to be inherently convenient and easy. Getting a pizza in five minutes and having your food delivered to you and having every convenience available to you all the time is a problem. And it's a that sense of entitlement that you can have everything all the time available to you at a minimum cost is driving global collapse. There I said it I have my own diatribe so we're easy Oh no thank you so much.

John Sanbonmatsu 1:07:59

Yeah I want to uh kind of give a shout out to Nandita Bajaj at Population Balance who her she and her organization uh you know are are talking about very you know openly the problem with a consumption based system. Of course degrowth activists say something similar my friend Troy Vitesi uh has written about uh half-earth socialism and he you know used a term that perhaps is unfortunate ecological austerity um but but he's he's right in in terms of what he's talking about. We can't and when I say we I mean those who you know are in the privileged north and are privileged privileged even within the north, right? Because there's a lot of poverty and uh suffering within the the industrialized north but the the overconsumption of goods and the organization of of our societies and identities around consumption, the fact that people still is shocking to me they get on a plane without I mean friends of mine, you know, without any compunction about it. Now I you know in my own bad faith I do justify occasional air travel for conferences or to see you know an ailing friend or something but I I feel bad about it and I'm not and I think you know my better nature is to say no none of us should be dry uh getting on a plane right but again capitalism changes the the capitalism doesn't just create new desires it creates new needs right try to live in our society today without a cell phone all right a smartphone it's it's practically impossible because you need to have for just security purposes they want to send you a a passcode and da da da da da so then we all get addicted to our cell phones which have all sorts of other kind of knock-on effects in terms of the way it changes our relationship to time and space and relating to others and but at the same time it's it's part of the system destroying the ecosystem of the earth right so yeah I think I think one of the the challenges is that we are speaking of AEA uh effect of altruism and so forth is we're we're entering a period of scarcity which we haven't known actually I mean there have been droughts and starvation and so forth but those have been those have had to do with the distribution of goods under the capitalist relations. But but now because of the ecological toll all the w fresh water is actually disappearing you know on the planet and because of the droughts and fires and floods and also cold waves as well as heat waves you know because of global warming you know the breadbasket is is going to shrink while population grows. So then to your you know utilitarian problem is like well that then is going to be uh weaponized and politicized by the far right and the billionaire class so that only certain people are going to get to have water and only certain people are going to get to have food. Now that's in a certain sense for sure that's always been the case right the these inequalities but it's gonna get worse I see I'm not helping. I see I'm not helping finding some hope here.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:11:16

Um you know at the I mean yeah it's it's if it's a gloomy conclusion it's a gloomy conclusion and I don't want to act in bad faith if that's what the indicators are pointing to you. Um perhaps before we close I think you already read your quote earlier is that correct or did you have another quote in mind? I I have another quote that I can Okay let's let's hear it.

A Sanctuary Vision Of Another Future

John Sanbonmatsu 1:11:37

This is from the conclusion of my book where I taught I describe a visit that I took with Sapora Weisberg to the Vine Animal Sanctuary in Vermont which is run by Patrice Jones. And uh so this is what I say towards the end of my book many people fear that a world without meat, dairy, eggs and fish would be one without pleasure perhaps even without purpose. Yet the visitor to Vine would be hard pressed to say what is missing from the rich, purposeful lives of the staff there. Vine is a struggling nonprofit and its personnel are underpaid. Yet even staff who've been on site for many years remain excited about their work. We found them eager to share their experiences with us. And because everything the staff does is grounded in a genuine ethos of care rather than in the illusion of care, the work at Vine has an existential and moral authenticity that one never encounters on a working animal farm. For here there is no violence and hence no betrayal. We have come to view our relations with other animals as a zero sum game, fearing that to promote their interests is to threaten or diminish ours. But Vine and similar experiments show us what we ourselves stand to gain in addressing other beings as thou's rather than as it's as persons rather than things. Standing outside the barn that afternoon at Vine watching the goats lacing about in the shade to escape the summer heat, the guinea fowl chasing one another through the tall grass, the cows nudging the staff for neck rubs, we felt we had caught a glimpse of the peaceable kingdom the lineaments not of some mythic Eden, still less of a fraudulent past golden era of animal agriculture, but of a more advanced civilization, a future society which having chosen to bury its whips, prods and chains to dismantle its slaughterhouses and to recall its trawlers, had won for itself the higher spiritual goods of compassion, mercy and love.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:13:36

Really beautiful and I think maybe that speaks to I really love how that contrasts to the the gloomy hole we were going down just before you read it because in in some ways people are enacting what a different future is. People at Vine for example are doing something possible. So it's a it's a question of scale it's a question of accepting and maybe that's the biggest deception of all is is is the understanding that it could be otherwise that yes we've been on these train tracks for a long time but there are people that are experimenting there are animals that are experimenting with different ways of being and the question becomes about legitimizing those practices as seeing them as valuable and of realizing that it's it's not it's not a loss to to to to walk away from that system. Or maybe there will be losses but those losses are not catastrophic not in the same way as if we stay on and continue with the system.

John Sanbonmatsu 1:14:37

Absolutely and and what we stand to gain is is just it's vast I mean in terms of self-respect in terms of a livable world in terms of a a richer deeper more meaningful connection with the other beings who live here and who are worthy of our love and and so I think I think this is it's really hard I think as advocates to balance these needs on the one hand raising awareness about the the reality facing the other beings of this world and what we're doing to them, the horrors because it's people need to know that and at the same time not to to shut them down so much emotionally that they don't understand what they and what we as a as a species stand to gain by by heading down a different civilizational path. So I think that is that's the challenge.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:15:31

And I I think it was Nelson Mandela right who said it's impossible until it's done you can live in systems and structures that are completely violent, that seem insurmountable and then when there's enough of an upswell change can happen and you can find yourself looking back at a time and saying how was that ever something that we did um and I hope I really hope that we're on that journey and not uh not the Titanic. I hope that we're on a on on you know because when change happens it can sometimes happen quite quickly. And um yeah and maybe I think part of tackling the omnivore's deception is creating a new a new vision a new option uh a different way of moving forward so thank you so much John for these thoughts I've got so many more questions I feel like we've just uh hit our stride here but I don't want to keep you too long and I know you're getting over

Where To Find The Book

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:16:24

a cold. Before we close I I don't know if you have uh what are you currently working on if you want to let folks if they're interested in learning more about the book or about you where could they find out more?

John Sanbonmatsu 1:16:34

Well thanks so much for having me Claudia and um and I I feel the same way there's so many uh interesting s side conversations we might have because you know we're we're in a kind of world historical crisis and everything's connected right uh in terms of what's happening in the in the culture and also to animals. I'm at the moment I am I'm still in the mode of promoting this book so I don't have anything new I've been working on per se. I uh I hope to have an op-ed out in the major newspaper shortly but I'm not gonna jinx it. Anyone interested in my book can just Google my name johnsandbotmotzer.com or just uh Google the title of my book Omnivores Deception. So yeah and I just want to thank you for the work you're doing uh and the work that your listeners are doing to to help uh the animals who really are in desperate need of our assistance. So thank you.

Claudia Hirtenfelder 1:17:33

Thank you so much and maybe we do a bit of a call to action. If you see that John's book is not in your local bookstore wherever you are make a make a request get it there um and this is a bit of a hark and back to our conversation about books and getting people who don't encounter these types of readings so if it's not there and it's missing go speak to your local bookkeeper person and um bookkeeper librarian that's the word and uh and and get the book in there. Thank you John it's been a delight talking to you have a have a lovely lovely day. Thanks so much thank you to Jonathan Bamatsu for being an amazing guest as well as to Animals in Philosophy Politics Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring this podcast to Gordon Clark for the bad music and Jeremy John for the logo. A huge thank you also to Rebecca Shen Christian Mentz Harry DeBont and Carlo Solzani for their content creation and support behind the scenes this episode was edited and produced by myself this is the Animal Turn with me Claudia Hirtenfelder For more great iRule podcasts visit irall pod dot com that's ir o r podcom