The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

The Nature of Intelligence / 41
tion. The larger wholes, which the system is harming through its loss of
intelligence and sensitivity, will naturally, as part of their intelligence,
restrict and remove it.
It is as if our nerves have been deadened and we are cutting off
pieces of our own limbs, feeling no pain, unaware of the damage being
done, and are thus unmotivated and unable to stop the self-destruction.
For example, Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson discuss in their
book Raising Cain the rapidly climbing suicide rates among adolescent
boys, with fourteen percent of fifteen-year-olds contemplating suicide
on any given day. 8 Yet does anybody know, or grieve, or even care about
this tragedy? Ninety thousand acres of rainforest are destroyed every
day, causing nearly one hundred plant and animal species to go extinct
daily, 9 yet we have mastered the fine art of disconnecting and deftly
ignore this and other ongoing human-caused tragedies. How can we
remorselessly devastate oceans by overfishing, destroy wildlife habitats
with toxic agricultural runoff, and decimate vast, intricate rainforests
through cattle grazing, causing the extinction of many thousands of
species every year? How can we be so reckless in our profit-driven
quests, genetically engineering living creatures and increasingly despoiling
our living planet with military and toxic waste?
It is the socially driven act of eating animals that is primarily
responsible for this loss of cultural and personal intelligence. Confining,
mutilating, and killing animals for food is so fundamentally cruel and
ugly that we must deaden large aspects of our private and public intelligence
to do it, especially on the grand scale that animals are slaughtered
and abused today.
Beyond cognitive intelligence, there is ethical intelligence, which is
the urge to act to relieve the suffering of others. Harming animals so we
can eat their flesh, milk, and eggs is so inherently disturbing and repulsive
to us as spiritual beings that, in order to get us to do it, the herding
culture must systematically numb us from birth, reducing our natural
compassion. This suppression of the healthy compassion that is basic to
our true nature is perhaps even more serious than the withering of cognitive
intelligence. There is substantial evidence that children in our culture,
especially boys, are brought up to be tough and to disconnect from