I believe this is because many of us lack a real purpose in life, something to give our lives a moral and spiritual center.

I believe that it’s difficult to know our purpose or work to achieve it when we’re blocked from our full potential as human beings.

I believe one reason for that block is that we are not living according to our values, whatever those values may be.

It’s almost impossible, these days, to be true to our values, because our post-industrial, commercialized culture is designed specifically to subvert and confuse our sense of ourselves.

If you know who you are, you don’t need some company to tell you what you need in order to be a complete person.

If you know who you are, you don’t need a brand name to give you a sense of belonging.

If you know who you are, you’re less likely to believe that purchasing a product from some corporation will make you happy, make you fulfilled, make you beautiful and healthy and successful.

Corporations hate happy people. People who are happy and living life to the fullest tend not to spend as much money as the unhappy and unfulfilled. They have what they really need in life, which is not a profitable state of being.

So corporations have helped create a world designed specifically to cultivate in people those qualities that cause them to buy products from corporations.

Identity confusion. General dissatisfaction. Unfulfilled desire. Idealized, unattainable fantasies.

And all these things turn around a single axis: you don’t know who you are, what you believe, or why you’re even here.

Having a system of moral/ethical values, and living in a manner consistent with those values, is one way to help establish and maintain a coherent sense of self.

Most people in our society believe industrial animal agriculture is inhumane. It violates their sense of what is right, or moral.

Yet, most people in our society purchase and eat factory farmed meat and animal products.

Which means most people in our society are not living according to their values. And not only that, but the area of their lives in which they are being so profoundly untrue to themselves is food, the most basic, elemental aspect of existence.

When our lives are built on such a shaky foundation, is it any wonder that there’s so much unhappiness and discontent within us and around us?

When corporations create the culture that dictates who we are and what makes us happy, is it any wonder that we turn to corporate-produced meat-based products for pleasure?

Or that we turn away from the very choices that offer us liberation from that culture?