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| Not related to this post, but IMO hilarious. |
No Enemies, No Friends: On Chickens and Coalitions
Q&A
What is your core message? If you could convince everyone of one thing, what would it be?
Matt Ball: Please don’t eat [factory farmed] chickens.
What do you see as the main obstacle to this message being accepted?
Everything and everyone (vegans included) are telling everyone to not eat red meat. And that inevitably leads to many more chickens suffering horribly on factory farms.
Who is your target audience? How does your target audience differ from your actual audience?
Who the fuck knows? One Step’s main outreach is online videos. We do many experiments, and we’re often (but not entirely) maximizing for whoever will watch 95% of the video to get the message. So in that sense, our audience finds us. “Obey the algorithm.”
But we just don’t know. Our primary goal is “Do no harm,” as discussed on One Step’s About page.
I hope these results are real and we aren’t making things worse:
What steps are you taking to expand your audience?
Trying to raise money to spend more on outreach. Continue to do experiments to maximize 95% views per dollar. The former’s not been going so great lately.
What do you see as your persuasive strengths?
That we aren’t telling people, “GO VEGAN OR GO FUCK YOURSELF.”
What do you see as your persuasive weaknesses?
Everything and everyone (vegans included) are telling everyone to not eat red meat. One Step is basically spitting in the ocean.
What have you changed in your approach to persuasion over time?
In addition to “The End of Veganism,” see this.
What is something significant you’ve changed your mind on recently?
That suffering doesn’t sum. “Biting the Philosophical Bullet” in Losing My Religions (writing that chapter solidified my change) and much of this.
Is there anything we can learn from the way you were persuaded?
Almost certainly not. That is one of the biggest problems with vegans. “What worked on me will work on everyone!” (The converse is even worse. “People are selfish so we have to appeal to self-interest. Environment and health!” Which inevitably leads to more chickens suffering horribly.)
ANALYSIS
Was I persuaded?
The short answer is yes. I have been thinking a lot more about animal suffering recently and thus was probably primed to be receptive to his message. I was for a long time one of those people who thought, “Well, I know humans can suffer and I have no idea what the subjective experience of an animal is, so I will focus on human suffering.” I still hold to part of that, and I value humans more than animals. But I’ve had to wrestle with the fact that if I saw someone torturing a dog, a pig, or a chicken, I know that it would be wrong. And I have a hard time believing this is just a cognitive mistake, where I am misplacing human empathy.
What’s more—and I will write more on this later—there is a religious element to it. While not a dogmatic LDS true believer by any stretch, I have promised God that I would only “eat meat sparingly.” I should take that promise seriously. Unfortunately, it seems few in my church do take this seriously, including myself. An active member would be deeply embarrassed to be seen drinking a Bud Light but would not bat an eye at being seen scarfing down platefuls at a Brazilian steakhouse.
But beyond being primed to be receptive to the message itself, I am also a fan of the fundamental strategy.
Thin Wedges
What I find most interesting about his advocacy is not the form (the only thing I have to say on the subject is that it might be a bit too abrasive), but the substance. At its core, this advocacy starts with the thin side of the wedge.
(I’ve noticed a tendency, in a variety of contexts, for people to start by trying to convince people to make far too drastic changes to their worldview, when they could be much more effective by starting small. More on this shortly.)
People who are effective at bringing unintuitive ideas into the broader discourse did not do so by strongly asserting these claims until people relented. They gradually explored the ideas and brought others there slowly. They used a strategy, often associated with Abraham Lincoln, called “using the thin part of the wedge”. They focused on easier to accept arguments first.
Ball’s basic message is: don’t eat chicken. This doesn’t mean you have to stop eating cheese, milk, beef, or pork. What has always struck me about the animal-suffering debate is: (1) most people agree that torturing animals is wrong, and (2) most people agree there is nothing wrong with eating animals and animal products. But instead of capitalizing on the former, animal advocacy often focuses almost entirely on the latter. If you focused all your messaging on the torture aspect, you could be much more effective. I genuinely think gradual factory-farm regulation could be electorally successful.1 Asking someone to vote requires much less sacrifice and viewpoint change than fundamentally changing their diet. The same is true of removing one food item from their diet (Scott Colom’s Senate campaign notwithstanding).
When the Big Tent Becomes a Circus
Why do other movements pick the extreme uphill battle? There are two potential answers I see: (1) they have different goals and (2) different motivations. Many vegans advocate for veganism on emissions-reduction grounds. Chicken is not a comparable source of emissions to beef. Thus, allowing people to substitute beef for chicken is seen as a step backward. The only thing I’ll say on this is that I think the well has gone dry. Anyone who would be willing to give up beef to reduce emissions has probably already done so. This is where I find Ball’s criticism of the “What worked on me will work on everyone!” approach especially insightful. You need to be putting yourself in the shoes of people who have incredibly different worldviews than you.
I would recommend that climate advocates focus on higher-yield and creative solutions to emissions. ...
Is there a future for climate activism once we accept what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working? Of course there is! It’s going to imply a hard pivot for a movement not much given to pivoting, granted. It’s going to take unlearning a bunch of old instincts and learning a bunch of new ones. It’s going to imply being…
It may be fair to say climate focused veganism is not making the climate better it’s just making animal suffering worse.
The other explanation, one I feel cynical pointing out, is that all advocacy involves a bit of counterproductive hypocrisy. Some vegans want to preach “repentance” but in their hearts just want to feel superior.2 It’s about drawing a line between you and them. This attitude is totally at odds with any of the stated goals of animal advocates.
Conclusion
This was a bit short (I apologize for the way my articles tend to come to a screeching halt), but I hope there was something interesting here. I will be exploring these ideas in more depth shortly.
[From me, Matt: Separately, this person told me he stopped eating chickens and is going to write more about that.]
