Cunt. Is. Curt.

Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.

In attempting to describe the world in make-believe terms, we have forgotten what is real and what isn’t. We pretend the world is silent, whereas in reality it is filled with conversations. We pretend we are not animals, whereas in reality the laws of ecology apply as much to us as the rest of “God’s Creation.” We pretend we’re at the top of a great chain of being, although evolution is nonhierarchical.

Here’s what I think: it’s a sham. It’s a giant game of make-believe. We pretend that animals feel no pain, and that we have no ethical responsibility toward them. But how do we know? We pretend that other humans—the women who are raped, for example (a full twenty-five percent of all women in this culture have been raped, and an additional nineteen percent have had to fend off rape attempts), or the one hundred and fifty million children who are enslaved to make soccer balls, tennis shoes, Barbie dolls, and the like— are happy and unaffected by it all. We pretend all is well as we dissipate our lives in quiet desperation.

We pretend that death is an enemy, although it is an integral part of life. We pretend we don’t have to die, that modern medicine can cure what ails us, no matter what it is. But can modern medicine cure a dying soul?

We pretend that violence is inevitable, and in some ways it is. But can it be mitigated through better science? Rather than answer that question, most often we pretend, sheepishly, that violence doesn’t exist.

Science, politics, economics, and everyday life do not exist separately from ethics. But we act like they do.

The problem is not difficult to understand: we pretend that anything we do not understand—anything that cannot be measured, quantified, and controlled—-does not exist. We pretend that animals are resources to be conserved or consumed, when, in reality, they have purposes entirely independent of us. It is wrong to make believe that people are nothing more than “Human Resources” to be efficiently utilized, when they too have independent existences and preferences. And it is wrong to make believe that animals are not sentient, that they do not-form social communities in which members nurture, love, sustain, and grieve for each other, that they do not manifest ethical behavior.

We act like these pretenses are reasonable, but none of them are intuitive or instinctual; nor are they logically, empirically, or ethically defensible. Taken together, a way of life based on these pretenses is destroying life on this planet. But a real world still awaits us, one that is ready to speak to us if only we would remember how to listen.