Who Do You Trust?

Trust is down, and for some more than others

It’s a bit of an obvious cliché to say that trust is down. The Trump trial either confirmed that he is the most untrustworthy, dreadful person in the world or, for the other half of the country, that the justice system is broken and completely untrustworthy.

And, yes, this has been going on for a while (it’s probably been going on for forever, but it’s clearly gotten way worse). From vaccines to fake news to climate change, etc., etc., we not only disagree, we tend to think those who disagree with us are nuts.

Even the press seems to have given up on it. The years of diner interviews in the rust belt with Trump voters trying to get at what they were thinking seems to have ended. We all just accept that half the country is, if not outright evil, at least inexplicable.

Take climate. Except for the people who are completely panicked, most other people don’t seem to care. I mean, they really don’t seem to care. Do people not trust the scientists? Do people just choose not to trust anything that they don’t like? Do people agree that it’s happening but just feel like someone will come up with a solution so there’s no reason to worry? Why is no one talking about it? Are they too scared and in denial? That would seem like a legitimate reason to avoid talking about it, but the fact is that most people really don’t seem scared.

Have most people gotten to the point that no one trusts anyone, so we can’t “know” anything based solely on trust? In most people’s minds, is there such a thing as “experts?” Here in upstate New York, there aren’t really very obvious signs of climate change (well, if you don’t count last year’s wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada and two years with virtually no snow). So are we entitled to wait until we can see everything for ourselves because we refuse to trust anyone else? Or is it just because there is so much noise out there, so many people saying different things, that we don’t know which one to pick?

Maybe we are all on our way to going back to being flat-earthers. I mean, when I think about it, I suppose I really don’t know why we know the earth is round; I just trust the people who tell me it is. It could certainly be argued that the flat-earthers are more believable. I mean, it looks flat, right?

So, given this refusal to trust institutions on anything, how do so many people manage to believe that they are against factory farming while continuing to buy meat? In fact, while 74.6% of people in the US reported feeling some discomfort with the animal farming industry, 57.3% somehow manage to believe that farmed animals are treated well, and a whopping 78.4% reported that their usual sources of animal products treat animals humanely.

So, what is happening here? Do they trust their supermarket to make sure those particular animals were ok? The meat industry? The government? Seriously? These are the people they trust?

And it’s not like climate or vaccines or even a round earth. With those things, you really do have to trust someone. With climate and vaccines, you actually have to trust them, to a large degree, about what might happen in the future. But when it comes to what’s happening to animals, there’s plenty of evidence that we can all understand showing what’s going on, so we can witness it, and we can see for ourselves. I guess you do have to choose to watch the videos, and then trust that they aren’t fabricated. But once you do, we all understand exactly what is happening. It’s not rocket science. And all the industry has in response is the ultimate Orwellian command, right out of 1984, to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” We say it’s humane, so it is humane.

So who do you trust — really trust — to tell you the truth? By and large, I trust the animals.

Though it’s true that I have known a few dogs who have tried to fool me, particularly when they have done something they know I disapprove of, I have generally found them so comically bad at lying that it doesn’t interfere with their overall believability. And I guess there are those amazing birds who pretend they have a broken wing to draw predators away from their nest. And I’m sure there are many other examples in nature of that sort of deception that I don’t know about. But, for the most part, they — the animals — are who they are.

But people? I don’t know. Once you’ve been betrayed, really betrayed about something very serious, it changes your relationship with trust. And I imagine most animal rights folks feel pretty betrayed. We were led astray, and then we found out the truth, and then they pretended it didn’t matter. And when they were called on it, and the evidence was presented, they decided to still pretend.

That lack of trust can permeate your life, sometimes in insidious ways. Just the other day I was reading Pico Iyer’s The Half Known Life/In Search of Paradise — I love good travel writing, and this is a beautiful, thoughtful book — and he mentioned having chicken for dinner. Just a meaningless remark on what he was eating. Not a big deal, I guess, but it caught me up short.

This happens all the time. Someone you are connecting with — in person, or on the page — turns out to be, like the vast majority of people, a casual meat eater for whom it’s just as easy to say he ate a chicken as it is to say he ate an apple.

So do you stop reading the book, or being their friend? By and large, I don’t. I just paper it over and move on. But it’s there. It’s always there. I may like someone who isn’t vegan, I may be friends with them, I may find them interesting, or funny, or even charming. But there’s always a bit of myself, my real self, that stays behind a wall.

It's even harder when the person is family, or a close friend. We may love them. We may depend on them. We may trust them in many, many ways. We may know they would never steal from us, or commit violence. Maybe they would even be there for us in need, and vice versa. We may know that they are truly good in so many ways, often much better than we are in every other way but this. Generous, thoughtful, kind. Sometimes they are the kind of people who have devoted their lives to helping others. But really trust them to understand who we are? Down to the ground? Somehow, something is just … off.

I recently mentioned to Jasmin that I was her age (mid-40s) when I went vegan and she said that there might be other things ahead of her in life, but going vegan will always be the most meaningful thing.

Yeah, exactly. I think that’s true of a lot of vegans. It certainly is for me. As we all know, for most of us, being vegan is not about some kind of a food preference, and it’s much more than a boycott. It’s about discovering something about the extraordinary richness, beauty, and tragedy of life on earth, and deciding to try to relate to it in a new and deeper way.

So what does it do to us when someone we care about, and who cares about us, doesn’t even remotely understand the most meaningful thing we’ve ever done?

Knowledge of what is happening in the world has us all stressed out, and every day, we are reminded that people are suffering in ways most of us can’t even begin to imagine. But, as vegan animal rights people, we carry something extra. We carry the knowledge of what is happening to animals in slaughterhouses, we carry the panic and despair of the mother cow whose calf is taken from her, we carry the awareness of pure unadulterated misery compounded by billions, occurring all over the world. And, increasingly, we carry the growing realization that there are simply no arguments left that it is necessary in any sensible meaning of that word.

One of the toughest things to carry is the knowledge that we can’t really trust those who look the other way, which is almost everyone, including some of the people we love. We need to constantly decide whether we should say something about the animals involved in some travesty, like tonight’s barbecue, or whether we should let it slide because we know it will just annoy everyone and not accomplish anything. We need to tuck away the jolt of pain, the failure of connection. And we need to overlook somehow that they refuse to understand that it’s even happening, much less that it is making us not trust them.

And we need to face the fact that if they knew, they might very well just laugh it off, as if the best thing about us were some sort of joke.