ethics

i believe it is morally necessary to dismantle capitalism, facism, and all oppressive power structures, including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, speciesism, imperialism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, and religious fundamentalism. i believe that people have the capacity to change; i believe in restoration and healing over punishment and violence. i believe a better world is possible.

birth, life, and death under a centuries-old system

in so-called "developed" nations, so much of our understanding of the world is not discovered organically, but rather programmed into us through family, schooling, and media. these concepts have been reinforced over countless generations through hundreds or thousands of years. our work is to understand this deeply, and find the path to decide for ourselves what is right.

to undermine the harmful structures of our global economic system is to relinquish the beliefs it instills in us about our worth as humans with respect our ideas of labor and ownership. it is to re-examine our anthropocentrism, our reverence for the gender binary, and the white supremacist basis of the entire western cultural consciouness, among many other beliefs. it is to decolonize our minds and hearts. do we really believe that the developed nation state should have the right to perpetrate endless violence against its citizens and abroad through policing, prisons, economic domination, and war? do we believe in its right to destroy countless lives, especially in the global south, in the name of commodity production and geopolitical/economic hegemony? do we believe that borders are worth more than even a single life? who enjoys the fruits of this system?

understanding progress and growth

one particularly deeply-seated idea we are indoctrinated into is progress itself. we are made to believe that the historical arc of our species starting with the nomadic and the tribal and bending toward the stateful, industrialized and technologically advanced is in itself a moral good. the reality is more complex. much of this "progress" has come at the cost of incredible violence against and subjugation of humans, animals, and the earth. the modern expression of this is the obsession with economic growth. greater production, rising global domestic product, more bought and sold. these are our system's moral north stars. the bloodshed justified by this ideology is almost incalculable. look no further than the highly profitable weapons and surveillance technology being tested in the apartheid and genocide of the palestinian people, the colonial export of slavery to places in the global south, like the congo, whose people die for the rare earth metals in our rechargable batteries, or the past half-century's radical decline in wildlife populations directly caused by industrialization.

not only have progress and growth not been the universal goods that our culture portrays them as, it is clear that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet, and that our pursuit of it will cause climate disaster through runaway exponential feedback loops. this also means that it's likely that we will not begin to feel the worst effects of this disaster until it's already too late to reverse it. if we are not able to change course (and evidence is mounting that we may be past the point), this will almost certainly result in death and suffering on a scale that has not been seen in recorded human history. thus, i believe massive degrowth and a transition to a new economic and political system is necessary.

on anarchism

anarchism, put simply, is the belief that any hierarchy, power structure, or exercise of authority must be justified to be morally sound. an anarchist society is one that is self-managed, stateless, classless, borderless, and without rulers. it is a society where liberty for one person is constrained only by the equal liberty of others. harmony exists not through domination, but through free agreement and association.

anarchy is not characterized by a lack of order or structure, but by structures that are consensually created by the people that they serve. in this sense, despite the heavily fear-mogered reputation of anarchism, it is inherently much less violent than any other method of societal organization which relies on a state with a monopoly on violence.

anarchist thought recognizes that the state exists not to protect or enrich people, but to exploit their labor for economic purposes. it is my belief that this heirarchy is ultimately unjustifiable. the same is doubly true for corporations, which are by their very nature totalitarian.

we are all animals

through modern neuroscience, we have learned what many indigenous cultures have known for millenia-- that animals are highly intelligent, and more to the point, have the capacity to feel deeply. we know that their lived experience is not fundamentally different from human experience. they are people. they have love, joy, fear, and pain. they know what is happening to them. we torture and kill them in astronomical numbers (thousands every second in the u.s. alone). i believe that if you were to truly imagine youself in their shoes, you too would be horrified and see the moral necessity of the abolition of animal agriculture.

the argument against meat is straightforward. no being deserves to be bred for death. these species are selectively bred to be ready for slaughter as soon as possible. they live short, torturous lives, and then they are ripped apart in killing factories and their flesh is served to you, partitioned from all the depravity and suffering that goes into its production.

cows have complex social structures-- they have friends, families and lovers. the mother cows in dairy farms cry for days when their children are taken from them. dairy cows are raped and forced to give birth repeatedly throughout their lives. this is required to keep them producing milk, as well as to create the next generation of enslaved individuals.

chickens bred for egg production lay hundreds of eggs per year, while their closest non-domesticated relative lays about 15. this takes an incredible toll on their body, as they are essentially having hundreds of periods per year. ovarian cancer is an extremely common for those who survive long enough. when chickens are not laying eggs fast enough for the farmer's liking, they are starved to manipulate their cycles and cause uterine shedding. each year, billions of male chicks are shredded alive in industrial macerators upon hatching because they can't lay eggs.

this is all true without even addressing the unimaginable conditions brought about by factory farming-- creatures living their entire lives inside of overcrowded, violent prisons without enough space to move an inch, living atop piles of their excrement. nutrition only adequate enough to keep them alive and producing. rampant disease, abuse, and killing. the culling of sick individuals. systemic, mechanized sexual violence. this represents just a tiny fraction of the horrors these beings are subjected to.

it is my belief that there is no justification for the enslavement, rape, forced breeding, and slaughter of entire species for the sake of human commodity consumption. everyone who will read this could be vegan if they wanted to.

the harms of individualism

one of the cruelest tricks of the system we're born into is that it atomizes us; it isolates us from the social bonds that water the seeds of our caring and compassion. this is required to shrink our lives until our labor is the last major piece of identity that remains. it takes away our natural inclincation toward cooperation-- perhaps the one thing that humans are most adapted for-- and instead amplifies our distrust of the unfamiliar. it is a sisyphean task to swim against this current, and yet, it is of the utmost importance.

the lurching fingers of creation

the concepts and resources here are by no means exhaustive. i encourage you to do your own research. this is a paltry attempt to express something imporant. regardless of how much i revise this page, i know i will fail to adequately convey what is needed. i'm not a philosopher or a great thinker, and i can only write from my perspective as a white person living in the united states. nonetheless, i feel that i need to try.

it seems to me that all living beings are expressions of earth, or life, or god, or chaos, or whatever you want to call it. we are all small and fragile, but we exist in it, and it exists in us. there is no me without you. our limited understanding has drawn illusory lines between us, but we are not individual. like an aspen grove, you are full of your parents and theirs, every person you've ever met, every plant, every creature. you are not separate. you couldn't possibly be alone. we are all we have. i hope we can find a path together that benefits us all.

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