Going Vegan Changes Your Plate; It Doesn’t Automatically Change Your Mind

You and I didn’t choose to be born into this system, and neither did anyone else, because nobody was consulted when the culture decided that certain beings exist to be owned, controlled and exploited, and nobody was asked whether they wanted to inherit a worldview built on dominance and disconnection before they had the language to question it.

You and I simply arrived, and like every human being who came before us, you and I were shaped by it long before you were conscious enough to see it.

The Ubiquitous Nature of Herderism

Dr. Will Tuttle calls this Herderism, a more than ten thousand year old mentality required by the practice of herding animals, owning other living beings as property, controlling their reproduction, their movement, their lives and their deaths. His perspective, developed nearly five decades of vegan advocacy and deep study of human psychology and culture, is that this mentality does not stay in the field or the factory farm but saturates absolutely everything we have inherited as human beings living in this culture.

• It is in our religious traditions, which teach us that certain beings are sacred and others are simply resources to be used.
• It is in our education systems, which train us from childhood to rank, sort and evaluate rather than to connect and include.
• It is in our economic structures, which measure the value of a life by its productivity and its usefulness to others.
• It is in our family dynamics, where love is often conditional and hierarchy is rarely examined, let alone questioned.

And it is, most uncomfortably of all, still running quietly inside us, not because we are bad people or because going vegan was not a profound and courageous act, but because the operating system runs so much deeper than the food on our plate, and changing what we eat does not automatically rewrite the code that has been installed in us since before we could walk.
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The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s what that actually looks like when you’re honest enough to sit with it.

It looks like the vegan who went plant based out of genuine compassion for animals but who still speaks to non-vegans with a quiet contempt, who still ranks people by their dietary choices, who still needs to be right more than they need to be in genuine relationship with another human being, because the domination is still there, it has simply changed its target.

It looks like the activist who fights tirelessly for animal liberation but who cannot tolerate disagreement within their own community, who controls the narrative, who shuts down dissent, who mistakes urgency for wisdom and forcefulness for effectiveness, because the herding mentality is still operating, it has just put on different clothes.

And it looks like the person who is genuinely doing personal development work, reading the books, attending the programs, going deeper into their own psychology, who still has a quiet voice underneath that says I have already done this, I do not need to go further, and that voice, more than almost any other, is worth listening to very carefully indeed.

Herderism is not a flaw in your character and it is not something to feel shame about. It is a feature of the culture you were born into, and it is extraordinarily good at making itself invisible, especially to the people who are most sincerely committed to dismantling it.

Dr. Will Tuttle spent a couple of years in his twenties in a Zen monastery, thousands of hours sitting quietly with his own mind, learning to witness his conditioning rather than be unconsciously driven by it. Coupled with decades of doing his vegan advocacy, he says this with complete clarity:

“If you do not have genuine freedom over your own mind, you are still a slave to the conditioning of your culture, even as a vegan, even as an activist, even as someone who has been doing the inner work for years and believes they have already come a long way”. (paraphrased)

The invitation in all of this is not to feel bad about what you have not yet seen in yourself, but to get genuinely and compassionately curious about it, because the moment you can name Herderism, the moment you can actually see it operating in your relationships and your communication and your inner dialogue, something profound shifts and you stop fighting the system from inside the system and begin to genuinely step outside it, which is where the real work of transformation, both personal and collective, actually begins.

That is the beginning of what Dr. Will Tuttle calls the 90 percent of developing True Veganism, and it is exactly the territory that the Vystopia Transformation is designed to help you move through.

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Invitation
If this has landed somewhere real inside of you and you want to explore honestly what herderism might still be running in your own life and communication, I would love to have a conversation with you, a genuine exploration of where you are and what your next most meaningful step might be.

Find a time: https://veganpsychologist.com/conversation