Vegetarianism and Animal Rights
The interviewees express great sympathy with the situation of animals. "We grow animals." How we breed and consume these is likened to "concentration camps". Being a vegetarian is seen as something obvious and is even one of the criteria that the interviewees state for the future world kingdom. In the light of the many reports on the downsides of animal production that appear in the media, such an attitude is highly understandable. From a psychological perspective, however, it is possible to problematize the most radical animal ethical reasoning. That animals are "as valuable as humans" can also be understood as an over-identification, the basis of which may be that it is one's own perceived helplessness (Freud, 1927/2008, p. 390) projected onto them, and where the price may be to increase alienation in relation to the outside world.Freud writes:
The hermit turns his back on this world, he wants nothing to do with it. But you can do more, you may want to remake it, build a new world instead of the present, a world where the most unbearable traits have been wiped out and replaced with others… He who embarks on this path of happiness, as a rule, achieves nothing; The reality is too strong for him. He becomes an insane man, who usually finds no helper when he tries to realize his delusion. It is claimed, however, that at some point we all behave in the same way as the paranoiac, who, through a wishful construction, corrects a side of reality with which he cannot stand, and in the face of this delusion in reality (Freud, 1929/2008, p. 418).
The commitment to animals probably exists on a scale, from sympathy, compassion and sound identification, to over-identification. On this scale, there is paranoia. The variant closest at hand is the one called "collective quarrel" (Ottoson, 1983), that is, when the individual "speaks for a minority group against society at large" (p. 214) in a self-righteous and unforgiving way. Which minority is subject to the individual's care is possibly also more or less arbitrary, or may shift, as it is the individual's personal struggle against an uncomprehending world that is the primary one.