The Fight for Animal Rights is a Fight for Beauty

The "neoliberal hallucination" has brought great ugliness to the world. Only liberation can bring beauty back to life.

Even in the grotesque conditions inside a factory farm, one can find scenes of great beauty – like this curious piglet gazing up at me from a farrowing crate.

What’s up this week

• The #SonomaRescueTrial – and the fight for animal rights – is not just a defense of animals but of beauty. For hundreds of years, the underlying code of human civilization – what I call the “neoliberal hallucination” – has created unprecedented ugliness on Earth. But if we rewrite that code, we won’t just save animals, we’ll preserve the beauty of life on Earth. I discuss how in the newsletter below.

• National Geographic published a resounding defense of open rescue this week. The article, written by one of the best journalists covering animal issues, Rachel Fobar, goes into the history and theory behind open rescue and ends with a powerful quote: “Institutionalized animal exploitation will end in our lifetime.”

• One of the leading Republican (yes, Republican!) Presidential candidates is apparently a strong supporter of animal rights. The Wall Street Journal, in a feature piece on Vivek Ramaswamy, recounts his statement that it’s “wrong to kill sentient animals for culinary pleasure.” It’s only a matter of time before all the candidates agree.

• Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has been on a tear – regularly publishing some of the most important opinion pieces ever written in defense of animal rights. But his latest – The Truth About Your Bacon – is among the most compelling articles he’s written yet. Go read the piece, but his last words are worth repeating:

  What I am confident of is that… future generations will look back at videos like these and be baffled that nice people like us could blindly tolerate such systematized cruelty.

• The Sonoma Open Rescue Leadership Summit is this weekend in Berkeley— and it’ll be my last chance to hang out with you before we go to trial. This week has been hell, and it’s only going to get more intense as trial approaches. And that’s precisely why it’s so important that Priya and I share everything we know, at the Open Rescue Experience that’s happening on Saturday. Register here.

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The neoliberal hallucination

Sunrise Farms, a major egg producer in Sonoma County, California, is one of the ugliest places on Earth. The sheds, which rise approximately 50 feet high, are filled with feces and disease and death. Massive conveyor belts, on a machine called the Flying Dutchman, run constantly to carry out all the filth. And when one examines the living creatures inside, it gets even worse. Animals with infected sores on their bodies; their internal organs ripped inside out; some that hardly look like living beings at all but, rather, like rotting zombies come to life. For exposing scenes like these, I face a felony trial in less than a month.

A broken hen, found at Sunrise Farms. She is a living zombie.

The very fact that activists are being punished for exposing this, however, shows that the problem goes far beyond one bad farm. There is an entire engine of ugliness destroying the beautiful things on this earth. I have written previously about this system, and compared it to a hostile artificial intelligence. It is a set of norms and rules, enshrined in our very legal system, that direct all of us, like the instructions in a computer’s code, to pursue objectives that are misaligned with the things that actually matter. Economists and AI researchers call this the alignment problem: what happens when the things we build start pursuing goals that are not good? What happens when an all powerful AI, for example, decides its goal is to turn us all into paper clips?

The risk posed by AI, however, is remote and hypothetical. The risk posed by misaligned corporations, on the other hand, is ever-present and real. Every public company in America has a legally-mandated obligation to maximize shareholder returns; every corporation, in other words, has a duty to churn all the life on this earth into corporate profit, if it is able to do so. The corporate code is like a hostile AI, run amok. And almost all of us are deeply affected by this code.

For example, millions of Americans spend their entire lives enriching those who are already rich beyond their wildest imagination – corporate tycoons like Ronald Cameron – and undermining the future of our planet in the process. Even the Nobel Prize winner who invented the concept of GDP, the North Star of modern capitalism, warned us of the dangers of pursuing economic goals without checks. And yet the pursuit of profit is the driving force behind most human activity on this earth.

However, the name I previously gave this force – corporate kleptocracy – does not fully capture how it does its dirty work. Because it’s not just that this system directs our resources towards bad things. It’s that the system deceives us into thinking that those bad things are… good. It is a hallucination, like the manipulative rants by ChatGPT that left one columnist “deeply unsettled” about the future of artificial intelligence. Our system manipulatively tells us, “Pursue career, and wealth. And all will be good.” All the while, the world burns.

The best way to describe such a system is to call it a neoliberal hallucination. It is neoliberal because of its focus on markets and money. It is a hallucination because it tricks us into thinking that this focus is actually bringing good into the world – even when great evil is being caused. And the most vile example of the neoliberal hallucination is what we have done to animals. Animals, after all, will never be happy market participants. They’ll never care about investments or wealth. And our society’s relentless focus on those goals is turning animals — the most majestic beings on this Earth, miracles of evolution — into living zombies.

Rewriting the code

But there is a path out. We simply have to rewrite the code, like a software engineer installing a new operating system on a computer. Instead of focusing on profit above all else, as the neoliberal hallucination directs us, we can refocus our society’s efforts – in our laws, our social norms, and even our nation’s constitution – towards goals that actually matter. Towards beauty and life.

This is, fundamentally, the goal of open rescue. By showing people the implications of pursuing profit over life — namely, sentient beings turned into living zombies — we point out a dangerous error in our society’s code. And by going to court, after giving aid to animals, we have the opportunity to rewrite that code by setting a legal and political precedent that animals are sentient beings to be rescued, not things for a corporation to abuse. And when we win this fight, we can reverse the ugliness the neoliberal hallucination has inflicted on the world. We can restore the world to beauty, instead.

The rotting hen, hours after rescue. The glimmer in her eye has been restored.

This little hen, rescued from Sunrise, is an example of exactly that process. By challenging a corporation’s misuse of her for profit, we restored a little beauty to the world. But her beauty is just the beginning, not the end, of the story of rescue.

Because when we show the people of this nation what we have done with open rescue – and ask them to support us in defending the right to rescue – we can permanently dismantle the neoliberal hallucination and replace it with a world where every animal is safe, happy, and free.

It’s a vision of beauty in a world filled with too much ugliness. And it is that vision, not our so-called crimes, that will be on trial on September 8.