Being Good, Being Rich

If you asked a person to picture a farm in their mind, then describe it. They'd talk about green grass, animals, and maybe a family running the farm. We have a farm like that just a couple of miles away from my house, for example. You can go there and see the animals and even interact with them. They have a sort-of petting zoo on site. It's pretty cool.

Almost nobody would imagine factory farms or centralized slaughterhouses.

The reality is a large portion of the meat and eggs that we eat comes from factory farm scenarios. When people watch videos of those places, they are generally quite disturbed.

So why are there factory farms when we have an ancient pattern of "normal" farming imprinted on our minds? The centralization of food production isn't all that recent. I think it probably happens any time there's a mass civilization because it's "cheaper" to handle animals that way and there's profit to be had. Inevitably some people will come up with a system to grab those profits, even if it means treating animals in a weird inhumane manner that is almost entirely contrary to deeply ingrained, even instinctual patterns about how we should treat other living things.

Indeed in our civilization, factory farming still leaves some potential profit on the table, so "scientists" have added GMO animals, and now are aiming to eliminate sexual reproduction. They want to "grow" meat, and even animals like chickens, in a lab in the "optimal" way.

How does this even happen?

Everyone wants to be good and live in a good world, but we fail. We make hell. It's fucking weird.

In the case of factory farming the explanation is fairly obvious. People might want to be good, and treat animals well, but they also want to be rich, and want to "save money", which is really born from the same root as the desire to "be rich". We tend to focus on the money part and just forget the "being good" part. That's actually really weird.

The tendency for tangential movement, or tangential action is really hard to overcome. We obsess about money--really just numbers. We don't obsess about goodness or states of being, or the outcomes of our actions. It's fucked up.