Did you see #1275?
The reason we put animals down is because animals -- unlike human beings -- cannot make sense of or transcend suffering ... like we used to do, during the Christian Age.
Eric von Keunnelt-Ledhinn has a remarkable little passage about suffering in his book LEFTISM.
Fear, loneliness, alienation, aimlessness, anguish, and melancholia are more prevalent than ever. There is not the slightest reason to believe that "progress" has made people happier. It has (above all in its technological form) an inflationary character. Technology means more regulation, the need for more controls; it increases responsibilities, makes us more dependent, more vulnerable.
All this is evident to the New Left which therefore assumes the anti-technological stand of young Marx. Not only in this respect but in many other ways, the New Left repeats knowingly-unknowingly the nineteenth-century conservatives' critique of modern society. When the latter felt that they were defeated, that the immediate future belonged to "progressive" industrial society, their prophecy as to the shape of things to come was roughly this:
Indeed, if we read Marcuse carefully, we shall discover just these accusations, just this lament.
You think that you can establish a social, political, economic order based merely on the profit motive, that you can achieve happiness for yourselves or for the masses with the aid of technology, medicine and the provider state. You think that your "system", your establishment, will guarantee liberty for everybody, that you will be able to eliminate a feeling of inner independence by destroying the old historic estates.
You are wrong! You will actually lay the foundations of a society in which servitude will assume a more subtle, more ubiquitous, a more oppressive character than ever before.
Life will cease to have color, to be spiced with adventure, and people will revolt against the inhuman boredom and drabness you offer them. In the long run, man will not be satisfied with a social system giving him nothing but security and a near anonymous government of laws and regulations—rotating, impersonal, lacking all glamour. Emperors, kings, princes, cardinals, bishops, and noblemen will be replaced by general dictators, bureaucrats, manufacturers, bankers, trade union bosses, party bosses and dictators: This will make rule not less burdensome, only duller and, in many ways, more oppressive.
Young people especially will rebel against an order based on the counting of noses, an order giving them nothing to live or to die for. Once all great dreams are gone, this society of identical and equal people in their purposeless solitude will start to scream!
The New Left ... <<<<<---- More on Marcuse, Nunya.
The first part of the chapter is here ...
The Present is Largely Leftist Inspired ^
Posted by Askel5
On News/Activism ^ 05/17/2004 7:46:04 PM PDT · 4 replies · 67+ views
LEFTISM: From DeSade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse | Erik Von Keunnelt-Leddihn
Viewed from a biological angle, the New Left Movement is carried largely by the young, but its original minds belong to men of an advanced age, to a European generation which has become successively disillusioned by Wilhelminian grand bourgeoise Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, Stalinist communists, and the materialistic society of consumers. Having been formally on the left (and often still publicly professing to be so), they have seen all their gods fail, all their illusions destroyed ...