Anarchically Ensured Veganism

The purpose of this article is to propose my hypothesis on how the anarchic Open Empire Foundation framework will act to move people towards a vegan diet, without creating any law nor enforcement of law.

I won’t go into great detail about the mechanisms of the Open Empire Foundation, as that is the subject of other pages and articles of the site … but for those of you reading this as your first article, I’ll give you a brief summary and everyone else can skip ahead.

the framework

Ok, so the Open Empire Foundation ( OEF ) is many things:

  • a basis for the quantification of Ecological & Social Justice & Sustainability
  • based on the principles of Ecological Systems Modelling & Thermodynamics
  • woven into strategies, structures, and systems of non-species-biased, non-property/trade/currency-based, and non-hierarchical (aka anarchic) justice economics & politics
  • combining to form a Project Collaboration Development & Resource Allocation Framework
  • in which people are held accountable for the ongoing ecological and social consequences of their actions

So in other words: it is a system that neither claims nor acknowledges the notion of “authority”, but simply records and utilises data to make a motivational framework for human activity.

Even that is over-simplifying it a great deal, and not even mentioning very large parts of it … but it’s enough to get you following the conversation, and you can read more elsewhere.

how the framework influences veganism

measuring suffering and death against baselines

OK … so how does this influence people to become vegan?

Well, from what you’ve read so far in this and other articles, you should understand that one of the founding principles of your actions is that you and only you are responsible for the consequences if your actions UNLESS those actions are the result of coercion or some other causation which reduces your burden of responsibility.

Also you should understand that the principles at work are non-species-biased, so if I were to quantify the suffering and death of a human versus a cow, the results might be different, but they’d be based on the same maths and science.

We can measure and quantify the stress of a human being relative to various baselines via its heart rate, blood pressure, hormonal excretions, pupil dilation, breathing rate, body temperature, and various other factors.

The means of performing such calculations and estimations produce innacurate results, but they’re equally / proportionately inaccurate, as they’re based on the same methods, and they’re roughly ( in the ball park ) what we’re after … plus as the science evolves, that inaccuracy reduces, and past inaccuracy dilutes in the statistics over time, to asymptote towards zero.

In other words: any inaccuracy in the data is evenly spread, insignificant to our needs, and reduces over time.

Furthermore, the death of a human being can be expressed also in terms of the loss of potential of that life, with quantifiable losses of interactions, causation of stress to family, friends, and acquaintances, and the loss of probability of offspring ( and their lives ). Therefore we can roughly apply the same personal and familial / social loss to a cow or any other species, by rough proportion to its capacity for feeling and thinking, ss determined by estimation based on analysis of its anatomical, neurological, and biochemical potentials.

The fact that we will get these numbers wrong, is immaterial next to the fact that ( however inaccurate ) they’ll be roughly in the ball-park, they’ll evolve over time to become more accurate, and any inaccuracy is always evenly spread, and diluting in the statistics over time so that it asymptotes towards zero.

The other thing we’re also quantifying in all this, is the loss of symbiotic relationships, and ecological services within ecosystems. So for example, even an animal’s death is an ecological service to its ecosystem, because its body would feed other creatures, rot, and provide nutrients to the soil.

But there are of course many other interactions it has during its life, all if which are lost to that ecosystem … and while maybe we can never stop doing all damage, that’s not the point of the exercise of quantification. The point being to know how much damage we’re doing, how, when, and where, so that we can choose what we do, what we don’t do, and what we modify our methods of doing, in order to minimise our impact.

the baselines

So what could this human ( or other species ) be doing and experiencing, had we not interfered with it (?) … that is the baseline of comparison, because that is the difference in circumstances you are responsible for as the cause of the interference.

If someone really likes eating fish, in our present world they might lazily go buy it, or they might go fishing. If they buy it, they’re partially responsible for the manufacturing of a ship ( likely with a diesel engine ), the diesel fuel burned, boat maintenance, nets and other equipment, and of course all the by-catch and other ecological destruction including its flow-on consequences.

If on the other hand a person goes fishing with their own rod or net, they’re only responsible for their expenditure of resources on that fishing trip, plus the fish they kill, plus flow on consequences.

Thus the choice for them is obvious, unless they want to put effort into making up the differences in consequences somewhere else, they’re better off going fishing themselves … and if you have to make the effort of going fishing yourself, you’re less likely to go, and whereas shopping has a 100% strike rate, sometimes you’ll not catch anything fishing yourself, so you’ll have to either shop or eat something else.

So … we’ve already reduced the number of people eating fish, how often they eat fish, how they acquire fish when they do, and the consequences of the attempted fishing expeditions in all their forms.

Even the boat based fisherman has to consider ( under this economic paradigm ) a change in profession to something less destructive … and since he doesn’t actually need a job anymore anyway ( see other articles for an explanation of why ), he might as well because being a fisherman is almost wholly destructive in this economic context … and while this may not cause the total death of the fishing industry, it will significantly reduce it to the level required to support just those people only who absolutely refuse to give up eating fish – EVEN IF it means having to do many good things in other areas to make up for the damage done, and even if it also means having to take care not to waste any part of the fish, so as to maximise the use of that which is costing them in their personal statistics of harm versus benefit caused by their actions.

now extrapolate

So imagine this extrapolated to every other animal based food, and domestic/wild animal interaction with humans … and what you should see in your minds eye is a world where ( over time ), even the most belligerent meat eater comes to realise the effort required to take responsibility for the consequences of animal abuse, is quite tiresome and not really worth the effort … and in their efforts to do so, they’ve had to learn far more about the animals they exploited, during which process they come to a deeper understanding of and thus relationship with the subject if the suffering and death they’re causing.


Thus over time we teach people interspecies empathy.

Leave a Reply