Speciesism as a structure

Speciesism as a structure

It’s useless to choose the same pattern, the same structure that makes up structurally the frame and the architecture of an oppressive system. But we see this happen in the environmental movement and we see this in the antispeciesist movements. The structures applied to convey informational exchange and communication of ideas and thoughts about the issues, co-constitute the effective informational outcome and co-establish the inner contents themselves.

If you apply hierarchically driven structures, you repeat humancentric patterns in “that” specific sense of humanhood. People though have a huge inhibitation to omit classical, typical human hierarchical cultural patterns. And they convey and transfer these patterns contentwise onto the fields of their activism.

With the entire plurality of animalhood having a manifold pattern, we still don’t assume their practical patterns of social self-organization, instead we discuss them on the level of our hierarchical cultural concepts.

Culturally we create clusters of “popularity” as markers of social importance, and the weight of the contents created and conveyed is predetermined and shaped thereby. With our collective constructs we practically demolish the reality of other, nonhuman-shaped social constructs, by negating their effectiveness and relevance in communicative, reciprocal terms. That means also: we could learn from the specific social forms of (communicative and therewith fundamental) self-organization of the individuals, groups, living beings and entities we defend.

The first inhibitor, also driven by our structural approach, is of course the definitions we imprint onto the nonhuman realism, and the lack of a will to understand and open up toward others with their own social codings as the standards. If we prioritize dominant, nonhuman-derogative human value systems (as kinds of specific human value systems) we inferiorize the values, the meaningfulness of other views and positions in this world.

What is a must in animal advocacy and environmental activism, is to let go the hierarchical patterns when we approach systems that exist in the not-human realm. Our own dominant patterns are not nature given and “for all to be swallowed”, our patterns of prioritization as a group of dominant human beings is restrictive and stifling as a structure itself. People who uphold our typical cultural speciesist (…) patterns, that suffocate other perspectives, are dominant by exactly aiming at social denying and negating plurality.

Gruppe Messel

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *