The Real Enemy: The Right Use of Righteous Anger

Vegan and Angry

We, the vegans and the animal advocates, hold a lot of anger. Anger is a natural, empathetic response to injustice and we have enough injustice to last for many lifetimes. If the injustice weren’t enough, we also have to deal with scorn and ridicule.^[1] So anger is an essential part of the vegan and animal advocate experience. That’s important. When we get mad, we’re motivated to do something. It pushes us to fight for the animals, to protest and evangelize, to take matters into our own hands. Anger is the emotion of change and we’re all about changing the world.

Of course, that’s not the way that anger is typically viewed. Anger is typically regarded as a negative emotion that should be resolved promptly. It’s understandable. Anger is great for short bursts of activity, like when you need to flee a lion, but it’s not a fun emotion to stay in. Long term, it’s hard on the body, leading to elevated risks around heart disease and a weaker immune system. It’s also hard on relationships - most people would not want to be friends with someone who is angry too often. While anger can be a useful place to visit, it’s generally not somewhere you want to live.

All the negative side effects and social implications of anger put us in an awkward position. In addition to experiencing it, now we have to deal with the stigma of anger. Not to mention the Angry Vegan™ stereotype and the knowledge that running around being angry probably isn’t the best way to recruit for our cause. Perhaps most importantly, a lot of us are deeply empathetic people, which is why we’re in the movement in the first place. We’d rather connect with people than be mad at them, but we feel like we have no choice. Our anger is here and here to stay. So we have to figure out what to do with it.

A few vegans and other activists lean into their anger and the feelings of strength and conviction it provides. These are often the folks picking fights with everyone, including other vegans and activists who don’t live up to the standards they set. Most of us, I think, find a more ambivalent relationship with our anger. We keep it tucked away on a shelf, to be let out in the company of other like-minded folks where we can vent about the injustices of the system. We try to be friendly and open to people who don’t share our beliefs in the hope of winning them over to our side.

There is a problem, though. Tucking away our anger is not a permanent fix. It limits our ability to connect with people outside our movement, since we feel like we cannot share our anger with them and be our authentic selves. It flattens many of our discussions inside the movement, since inside is one of the only safe places we can vent. It keeps our emotions bottled up, unresolved and unable to be used to its full capacity. Instead, we need to examine the roots of our anger and the stories we tell that bring it into being.

Stories shape and direct all of our emotions, including anger. They tell us who to be angry at and what to be angry about. They set expectations. If your significant other does not take out the trash, you’ll have a very different reaction based on whether or not it was their turn to take out the trash, how busy you are, other nice things they’ve done for you recently, and so on. The action is the same, but the stories are different. One of the best ways of channeling our emotions is to examine the underlying stories and seek more generous or constructive alternatives. With that in mind, let’s look at two stories about our culture.

The Story of Moral Failure

Here’s a story: Animals are sentient beings who feel pain and suffer just like we do. This fact makes consuming meat morally unjustifiable. Consequently, everyone who chooses to consume meat or support the production of meat, from the CEO of Tyson Foods down to your mom, is doing something deeply wrong. The only ethical choice is to go vegan and opt out completely. Anyone who doesn’t is causing inexcusable harm.

The Story of Moral Failure is the story that brought a lot of us into veganism. We saw that what we were doing was wrong and changed. It was a revelation. After getting our own diet in order, we promptly went out and started proselytizing the same story to anyone who would listen. This usually didn’t work. We might have convinced a few individuals, but most people around us weren’t ready to change. We’d push harder and get bogged down in a pattern of arguments and counterarguments. After trying and failing, our inspiration warped into frustration and anger that people can’t see or don’t care about what’s wrong. Not every vegan followed this track^[2], but it’s a common enough experience that it’s shaped the character of our spaces and the general sense of anger with non-vegans.

Notice how the Story of Moral Failure focuses our energy and anger on the people around us. By doing so, it throws us into conflict with our loved ones. We want them to live up to our ideas of being a good person, which means giving up animal products. At the same time, the story makes it harder for us to convince them: Any non-vegan who adopted this story would be subjecting themselves to self-judgment and shame. Not something most people would sign up for. The only way they can join is by relinquishing their former lives and adopting our belief system wholesale. So people dig in their heels and we end up in a grueling back-and-forth.

What makes these dynamics worse is that the story also splits the world into heroes (vegans) and villains (non-vegans). Seeing ourselves as moral exemplars is great for morale and group cohesion, but seeing ourselves as different or even better than the people around us is a fast-track to triggering our outgroup biases^[3]. We start looking down on non-vegans, sometimes even taking pride in our superiority, and that attitude leaks through in our interactions. In turn, it becomes a lot harder to build bridges between groups or collaborate on campaigns focused on changing policies.

The Story of Moral Failure leads to an animal activist movement that’s focused heavily on individual responsibility. It encourages us to push people through a moral reckoning with their choices, which effectively puts us in the same position as every other religion that’s trying to save people. Unfortunately, that’s not a place we’re well positioned to be. Going vegan and becoming a good person is a much tougher sell than converting to Christianity and going to heaven. No religion has managed to convert the whole world, and we’re certainly not going to be the first one to do so.

It’s probably pretty clear by now that I don’t like this story. It has a lot of negative side effects. I want to stress that just because I don’t think it’s a good story, doesn’t mean that the opposite story is automatically true, i.e. it’s okay to eat meat and everyone is absolved of responsibility for their choices. Stories can both contain truth and be harmful, as demonstrated by anyone who’s ever used the truth to hurt a loved one in the middle of a heated fight. We do not have to give up this part of the truth; we just need to find a different way of holding it.

The Story of System Failure

Here’s another story: Animals are sentient beings who feel pain and suffer just like we do.  The reason people eat animals is because it’s deeply woven into our cultural and social institutions, which come from a time when eating animals was more necessary for survival. It’s only with industrial farming practices that suffering started taking place on an unimaginable scale. Technological advancement also made meat consumption totally unnecessary. There is no single person choosing to perpetuate the system; the system perpetuates itself through countless rules, beliefs, and choices. Everyone is a victim to the system, albeit to different degrees. If given a real choice for a better world, most people would take it. The real enemy is the system of modern, industrialized farming and the culture of eating meat^[4].

This story is a weird story. It's born of systems thinking and second-wave feminism^[5]. It focuses on environment over individuals. We like to think that people are responsible for everything, not far away and abstract forces. Abstract forces are much less fun to be mad at. It also cuts against the grain of the Western notion of individual choice and responsibility. This story is about as native to our usual modes of thinking as veganism is to our usual mode of eating.

What the Story of System Failure offers us is a target for our anger that lives outside of any individual. We are working against a malevolent force that permeates our world, a monster with no head. Rather than trying to convince people that they are the problem, we can spend our energy trying to convince people that there is a problem. If we keep our righteous anger pointed at larger institutions, there's space for omnivores to join without immediately overhauling their life. They can keep their diet and relationships the same while exploring their anger at the larger systems and working towards change. We can be angry together and that anger may in turn motivate them to change themselves.

By directing our anger towards these larger forces, the Story of System Failure gives us a banner to unite under. It’s no longer vegans vs. non-vegans; it’s people vs. suffering, waste, and ecological disaster. Instead of splitting us apart, it allows us to focus on what we share: an anger with the harms of the current system. Those harms are how we should be bringing people in - letting people know not what wrongs they have committed, but how they have been wronged. It’s a much easier way to get people to join the party.

The Story of System Failure pushes us towards an animal activism movement built around coalitions and policy change. It encourages us to think about what points of leverage we might have in the larger system, whether social, political, or technological, and how to apply those for greatest effect. It reminds us that the real goal is the overhaul of the system rather than the mass conversion of non-vegans to vegans. It lets us keep our anger and channel it outwards, rather than against people we need to swell the ranks of the movement.

A Choice of Stories

It’s not a question of which story is true; there are elements of truth to both the stories. It’s a question of which story is better for healing and power, which story brings us closer to the people we want to be and the movement we want to build. Stories are self-fulfilling prophecies. Whether you treat someone as an enemy or a friend, that is what they will become. There are some limits to that ability — you’re probably not going to talk an introvert into enjoying loud bars. But people will live up to their roles enough of the time that giving people a more positive role is worthwhile.^[6] 

Changing our stories does not happen just because we’ve read a blog post. Stories live in our groups and our minds. Shifting them takes discussion and reflection. Watch how your vegan friends talk about non-vegans or how non-vegans talk about vegans. Pay attention to your own thoughts when you grow angry. Who are you blaming and why? What’s the worldview underneath those stories? How do those stories make you act towards yourself and others? The stories described here are two broad archetypes with countless variations. It’s up to you to find the stories that resonate with you, help you be a better person, and promote our ultimate goals. What story will you live?

Three Things to Try

1. Journal about your stories: Reflect on a time you got angry about veganism and write down what the underlying stories are. Pay attention to who or what your anger is directed at.
2. Try the "wronged, not wrong" pitch. Next time you bring up factory farming with someone, lead with how they've been lied to or failed by the food system rather than what they're doing wrong. Notice if the conversation lands differently.
3. Invite someone into the anger. Share something outrageous about factory farming with a friend who cares about food waste, climate change, or worker rights. Don’t share it as an argument, but as "I saw this and I'm pissed about it." See if they're pissed too. You might be surprised.

Informed By

• Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly
• Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
• The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein

Thanks to Beta Readers: Kim Evans, Aditya Nair, Sam Bernecker, and Maddi Laffitte

1. ^{^}

    Not everyone treats us like this. There are tons of people who are curious and supportive, but just like with any minority group, that doesn’t erase the general atmosphere of indifference or hostility.

2. ^{^}

    There are a number of vegans who are motivated by health and may feel less of a compulsion to proselytize.

3. ^{^}

    There’s a boatload of research on how seeing people as part of another group leads to diminished empathy and regard. Balliet, D., Wu, J., & de Dreu, C. K. W. (2014). Ingroup favoritism in cooperation: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1556–1581. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037737

^{^}

 Melanie Joy coined the term Carnism to capture the idea of how eating animals is normalized.

^{^}

 Second-wave feminism emphasized that patriarchy hurts men as well as women, an idea that’s been washed out somewhat in recent years. See The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004) for a more detailed breakdown.

^{^}

 There’s some fun research on Stereotype Threat - a phenomenon where people will live up to stereotypes (ex. Men are bad at language) if you remind them about the stereotypes before a test.

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