The repression of the unnaturalness of agricultural methods determines the world view of human civilisation
Nothing else has shaped the collective world view of human civilisation more than the mental efforts to suppress the problem of unnaturalness of artificial selective breeding and the resulting permanent subjugation of other living beings. Whether in religions, philosophies or today’s mass media, efforts to obscure and reinterpret the natural orders and its own effects that run counter to it have always been dominant themes. For example, when for thousands of years people worshipped a god who supposedly commanded the subjugation and domination of other life forms. Or when special attention was given to those philosophers who invented to humans an exclusive capacity for freedom that would not exist in other living beings. So there must always have been strong subliminal perceptions of the own unnaturalness resulting in unpleasant feelings. And these must have been so strong that people preferred to push them below the surface of conscious perception by distorting natural reality. The price for this was high. As a result, only a mutilated and distorted world view could emerge. The natural sciences remained severely underdeveloped in terms of understanding the larger ecological context and the fatal situation surrounding the evolutionary impasse caused by civilisation’s agricultural methods. The mainstream media shows that the damage by the repression complex is even greater today than in past centuries and millennia – at a time when agricultural methods are escalating as never before.
Preliminary remark: An important question for understanding the background to the cognitive and psychological mechanisms of repression discussed here is that of the underlying motives. It can be ruled out that these are primarily related to a ‘guilty conscience’ towards the bred and subjugated life forms. Emotions of conscience do play a role, however. Their effects can be observed in many social animal species, similar to those of the protective instinct. However, in an evolutionary sense, they all primarily aim to stabilise the social structure of the species, because this is the basis of individual existence and, even more so, of the sustainable continuation of the species‘ genetic information. The following metaphor illustrates the deep motives behind repression: a social structure once began to build a large house that was intended to provide lasting, stable protection and security for future generations (= agricultural methods, farming). When the children and grandchildren have lived there for many generations and could no longer exist outside it, it becomes increasingly clear that the building was constructed on unstable foundations and that the house will eventually collapse in the future, along with the descendants living in it. Since there is no apparent way out of the situation, a strong cognitive dissonance arises with very painful tensions. This is now actually a ‘guilty conscience’ – namely towards the genetic descendants. In order to reduce the agonising tensions, there are manifold suppressions and reinterpretations of the real situation.
It was therefore no coincidence that the very first pages of the Old Testament and the Bible repeatedly state that an almighty God commanded man to subdue the earth and rule over all animals. Nor was it a coincidence that the core of the philosophical ‘Enlightenment’ in modern Europe was precisely that only humans could be in a state of freedom, but not other living beings, because this required the basis of reason, which was supposedly inherent only in humans. And finally, it is no coincidence that today’s most widely used media ignore the now unprecedented extremes of unnatural practices such as industrialised factory farming, while at the same time attempting to make nature appear as cruel as possible and, in addition, using images of ‘cute’ animals in the protective care of humans to make them appear particularly ‘good’. These and many other distortions and shifts in reality form a complex whole that prevented the intellectual potential of civilisation from being used to recognise the real situation. This applies across the board, right down to the academic life sciences, which therefore only delved into details, while the larger ecological contexts remained untouchable for them.
The overall consequences of repression are like driving at full throttle with your field of vision blocked
The current consequences of efforts to repress the unnaturalness of bred and subjugated living beings can be compared, as a further metaphor, to the situation of a fully occupied bus whose driver, to the cheers of the passengers, pulls the sun visor all the way down so that he can no longer see where he is going and at the same time presses the accelerator pedal with full force. He and the passengers thus shut themselves off from reality and at the same time accelerate their journey into the inevitable disaster that will result. On the short distance that the bus still has to travel before it crashes somewhere, it leaves a trail of destruction in its wake.
In this metaphor, the driver represents the sum of all people who actively participate in shaping the world view and thus also the behaviour of humanity in some way. However, these people should by no means be regarded as pure manipulators who lead innocent masses into the abyss. Rather, in large parts of this process, it was and still is these masses themselves who demanded and continue to demand exactly what the shapers of the world view then produced on their behalf, so to speak. Those who responded well to these demands, whether as authors of religious or philosophical writings, as other book authors or as editors-in-chief of magazines, behaved in a popular manner and were rewarded with popularity, attention and customers.
The masses want to hear something that allows the subconsciously perceived contradiction between the breeding and subjugation of other life forms and the central regularities of real nature to be pushed beneath the surface of open consciousness. The pattern is similar to that of trying to hold an air-filled ball under the surface of the water in a swimming pool: While much of the body’s energy is expended in doing so, the ball still pushes upwards with unrelenting pressure. If the attempt is not abandoned, the body’s energy will eventually be exhausted. It will consequently sink and die. In the repression described here, it is not physical energy that is wasted, but the intellectual and cognitive capacities of humanity.
All civilisational religions served to elevate humans to such an extent that the unnaturalness of breeding and subjugating other living beings is no longer recognisable as such.
All of the earliest successful religious foundations of Neolithic cultures initially contained a central mechanism of repression: namely, to make humans appear so special and superior that their unnaturalness towards the living beings they bred and subjugated no longer seemed relevant. This worked in many different ways, which often require closer examination in order to recognise the underlying mechanism.
In the most successful religious foundation mentioned above, however, this recognition is very easy. For there, already on the very first pages, an almighty God is claimed to have first created the world and then man in his own image, and finally expressly tasked him with subjugating the earth. And it is even stated several times in succession that this God explicitly demanded dominion over all other animals. This is written in the chapter Genesis of the first book of Moses in the Old Testament and thus also on the very first pages of the Bible.
The text on these first three pages of the No. 1 civilisational bestseller is probably by far the most widely read in the entire history of civilisation. The fact that it is precisely here that extreme self-aggrandisement and the alleged command of God are repeated several times in succession makes the central aspiration abundantly clear. The many other stories, metaphors and words of wisdom collected in the subsequent parts of the Bible – some of which are very good and helpful for social interaction – no longer played such an important role. This is because the first pages of a book are always read the most. Above all, however, the function of this first chapter is clearly to set a fixed framework for the assumed world view, while everything else takes place within this framework.
The recipe for the most successful bestseller in the history of civilisation is therefore easy to see through. It consisted of an extreme self-aggrandisement of humans while simultaneously legitimising and thus suppressing their unnaturalness through breeding and the consequent permanent subjugation of other living beings. Therefore, no external pressure was needed to convince people to accept this worldview. If, for example, one imagines a high-ranking Roman from the first centuries of the common era, reclining on a couch with a glass of wine in his hand, reading for the first time the beginning of this great story about his own divinity, then it is easy to understand why he too quickly jumped on board and why this religious foundation spread so successfully.
It is also easy to understand the immense anger that must have built up later against so-called witches when they questioned this story, worshipped the real nature and defiled the godlike uniqueness of human beings. What happened was like drilling into collective repression, which could be compared to poking around in an unanaesthetised tooth nerve. In retrospect, it is logical to understand that hysterical mobs formed to put an end to such things by force.
The philosophers of the supposed ‘Enlightenment’ were like relay runners as successors to religion – the new craftsmen of repression.
When, from the 16th century onwards, the printing press in powerful Europe ensured that the story tailored to the repression of one’s own unnaturalness, but actually very simplistic, on the first pages of the Bible came under pressure from more and more scientific findings, the collective demanded, in a sense, a stable replacement. And this task now fell to the philosophers.
So here, too, it is no coincidence that it was precisely those representatives of the guild who were particularly eager to elevate humans and demean other living beings who were most successful. Above all, however, it was those who managed to rephrase the former story of the divine command to subjugate and dominate other living beings – and once again especially other animals – into a concept that could even withstand the pressure of increasing scientific knowledge.
For this reason, philosophers made freedom the linchpin of all their work – in the form of creating explanations that appeared as conclusive as possible, according to which only humans could truly be in a state of freedom, but not other living beings. The famous philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) once indirectly recognised this himself and wrote that the entire European philosophy was ‘nothing other’ than an ‘analysis of the concept of freedom’.
However, it would probably have been more correct not to speak of an ‘analysis’, but rather of a “distortion” or a ‘twisting’ . For the philosophers of the ‘Enlightenment’ were in fact largely concerned with using the tool of words to cobble together concepts that appeared as credible as possible, according to which only humans could be in a state of freedom, but not all other living beings.
One of the first superstars of the philosophical ‘Enlightenment’ of that time was René Descartes, born on 31 March 1596. He was like a first relay runner to take over the former main task of the Christian religion. His career was even promoted by a high-ranking and influential representative of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, after he had presented his concepts to him.
From the outset, Descartes was a genuine psychopath in several respects and was therefore ideally suited to designing a new psychopathic worldview that was now needed. Among his rapidly popularising explanations was, for example, that other animals, in complete contrast to humans, had no real feelings. And he ‘proved’ this, for example, by tying up various animals in front of an audience, then slowly dissecting them and ‘explaining’ that their cries were exactly the same as the squeaking of an un-oiled machine. With the machine comparison, the question of the freedom of non-human beings became obsolete. After all, a machine cannot be free.
The invented exclusive reason of humans had exactly the same functions as the invented command of God.
Descartes also focused on the concept of an alleged exclusive reason of humans, who were thus placed far above other living beings, as a decisive prerequisite for freedom. This was not new in itself; its roots go back to some of the philosophical schools of the ancient Greeks around 3000 years ago. Nevertheless, it was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, born on 22 April 1724, who helped this idea achieve such popularity that it has practically survived to the present day. Even today, many people still assume that it has somehow been ‘proven’ that only humans possess genuine and special ‘reason’, while other animals act solely on instinct, and that it is precisely this exclusivity that can be the true and only basis of freedom.
These people cannot really explain this. Kant’s explanations alone contain so many intellectual air pockets that they cannot be understood in their entirety. On closer reflection, much of it simply turns out to be nonsense. There has never been any empirical evidence for ‘exclusive reason,’ and there still isn’t any today. Rather, the whole concept was obviously just as deliberate a construct in the context of repressing one’s own unnaturalness as the religious story of Genesis at the beginning of the Bible, and the purpose was exactly the same: namely, to be able to suppress the perception of one’s own unnaturalness, which runs counter to natural regularities, through self-aggrandisement and the legitimisation of breeding and the permanent subjugation of other living beings.
Incidentally, it is well documented empirically that the entire range of human actions, reactions and cognitive processes, whether running, laughing, getting angry or happy, loving or lying, are based no less fundamentally on evolutionarily developed and thus innate patterns than is the case with all other animals. True reason in the logical sense of the word can be nothing other than the cognitive production of the best possible decisions and actions for sustainable existence. And it is precisely in this regard that modern humans, with their destruction of their own livelihoods, prove that, despite the high capacity for abstraction available to them thanks to their large ‘hard drive’ of the neocortex, they obviously have only a relatively weak sense of reason.
Today’s mass media are the most important successors to the former religious and philosophical providers of repression.
Some concepts of the former providers of repression, i.e. religions and philosophies, continue to largely determine the collective world view of humanity today. However, the situation has changed in two respects: On the one hand, the object of repression has become significantly more serious, particularly due to the escalation of industrial forms of breeding and keeping ‘farm animals’ since the second half of the 20th century. In view of these events, even very devout followers of the respective philosophical or religious constructs recognise that these can no longer fulfil their purpose of legitimisation. The now literal perversion has simply become too extreme to be concealed with invented gods or constructed states of reason. And secondly, the mass media have now come into play – once again, as it were, as relay runners – as the new and now primary service providers of collective repression.
In order to take a closer look at the current mechanisms and symptoms surrounding these new service providers, it is particularly useful to examine those of the largest and most popular mass media with a presence on the internet. Since they depend on advertising revenue and, consequently, on visitor numbers, they observe user behaviour with sophisticated analysis tools and align their offerings practically automatically – and largely unconsciously – so that the overall product can be used as a reflection of the collective spirit of civilisation and thus also of the mechanisms of repression. The audience determines the content of these media through its usage behaviour and continuously adjusts it.
Anything that is unpleasant for the audience cannot be dealt with on these platforms, or only in the smallest possible doses, because otherwise the medium would jeopardise its economic basis. If, for example, the heavily used general news sites of the German-speaking internet, www.bild.de and www.spiegel.de, were to publish reports and images of industrial factory farming, from which almost all of the animal products in the audience’s food originate, in the correct proportional frequency, user numbers would quickly plummet.
For this reason, such reports remain fairly consistent at around a few per mille of total reporting [1]. And even these are practically carefully measured token reports, which usually only appear briefly on the home page in order to minimise damage. This pure suppression of the escalated unnaturalness towards two-thirds of the biomass of terrestrial vertebrates is in itself an important symptom of repression. But it is one that can only be recognised indirectly. Other symptoms, on the other hand, are also directly visible.
The symptom of narrow self-centredness has reached the point where the term ‘world’ is now only used to refer to humanity.
Another major symptom of today’s repression mechanisms is humanity’s increasingly narrow self-centredness. Because real nature and its order must be ignored, perceived reality is reduced almost exclusively to humans. Anyone who examines the mass media, i.e. the reflection of collective consciousness, will find that the topics focus almost entirely on humans, while other life forms, including other animals, account for only a few percent [2].
The fact that this is not a logical matter of course, as most people today would spontaneously assume, can be seen, for example, in the fact that the rock and cave paintings of humans before the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ were dominated by other living beings and only a relatively small proportion of them dealt with humans themselves. Efforts to repress our own unnaturalness thus lead to a narrowing of our perspective to ourselves, so that everything around us, i.e. reality, increasingly disappears from our perception.
The exaggerated self-centredness of today’s humanity is also clearly visible in the fact that even the term ‘world’ is no longer used – as would be logically correct – to refer to the entirety of reality, but exclusively to the system of civilisation. The medium in question writes headlines such as ‘The world looks to New York’ or ‘The world’s hunger for raw materials’, thus reducing the world to the system of civilisation.
Applied to a sick individual, this would mean that it would be closed off in its own mental world, revolving around itselve. This reduces its ability to make the decisions and take the actions necessary to exist in the entirety of reality. And the further this self-centredness progresses, the more the ability to survive is reduced – until the person in question can no longer exist, at least without care.
The artificial “cruelty” and denigration of the real world to compensate for and repress one’s own unnaturalness and cruelty
Another symptom of repression that is visible in the current mass media, and which, incidentally, according to earlier writings, was much less pronounced in past centuries and millennia of civilisation than it is today, is the concentrated ‘denigration’ of the whole of nature and thus of non-human reality. This makes it clear that the effects of the repression complex are so strong today and distort people’s worldview more extensively than ever before.
One of the methods used to disparage reality is to make all non-human nature appear as cruel as possible. To this end, cinematic or photographic scenes of death in nature, which are thus taken out of the context of real time, are used in particular. An older viewer of television channels in past decades, for example, will have seen scenes of gazelles being torn apart by lions so often that he subconsciously assumes that the existence of gazelles in Africa consists essentially of being torn apart by lions.
Nowadays, similar effects are created in the aforementioned mass media of the internet through photographs and accompanying written commentary, whereby the cruelty of nature is often accompanied by deliberate moral elevation of humans. Following a few examples from leading German news websites:
Mass media example 2 (bild.de excerpt) [4] :
This article from the ‘NATUR BRUTAL’ section of Bild.de uses a photo taken by chance by a ‘Bild reader reporter’. The text that opens up underneath it reads:
Nature can be so cruel: just a moment ago a fluffy duckling, now merely the main course of a voracious grey heron / Head first, the duckling disappears into the throat of the voracious bird / The heron swallows and chokes the cute little animal piece by piece / It’s actually a miracle that it fit through that thin, long neck / At least the heron didn’t catch the siblings; they waddle hurriedly under their mama’s wings. (Pop-up text) [4]
First, the brutality of nature is established as a central feature in red lettering. Then, through emotional emphasis, the collective spirit learns that it is on the ‘good’ side because of its great empathy for the “sweet” and ‘fluffy cute little animal’. And to reinforce the effect, additional expressions of solidarity are produced through childlike humanisation, with the other ducklings being referred to as ‘siblings’ and the female parent as ‘mummy’. In this way, the audience of millions, and thus a considerable part of the system of civilisation, is now elevated to a supposedly particularly high ‘moral level’ from which it can look down disparagingly on the ‘cruel and brutal nature’ represented by the ‘gluttonous bird’.
The audience now feels comfortable, superficially distracted and reassured by its own perverse actions towards ‘farm animals’ who are deprived of their freedom for life and vegetate in windowless halls from birth to death. The medium has provided a tool for repression, and its users will thank it by continuing to use it faithfully.
The fact that this is actually a matter of a death process that takes only seconds is virtually negated by the photograph. A person who needs a higher dose of distraction from their own perverse effect on other animals can now view this abstracted scene for practically unlimited time. In reality, it happened so quickly that it would have been barely noticeable to him, even if he had happened to be sitting on a park bench right in front of it.
The fact that such journalistic products are actually a subconscious component of a repression complex – even on the part of journalists – and that the real aim is to shift the blame onto nature as a whole becomes particularly clear when the relevant reports are inadvertently taken so far beyond the mark that they completely depart from logic. Here is a fitting example:
Mass media example 3 (bild.de, excerpt) [5]:
The article from www.bild.de contains the following passages:
This poor snow deer has been caught in the cold. The dead wild animal lies in a field near Lauenburg (Schleswig Holstein). Three buzzards are brutally tearing at it, hungrily ripping the flesh from its bones. Bild reader reporter (…) (49, driver) observed the scene. He reports: ‘Crows had already attacked the animal, but the buzzards chased them away. Nature is very cruel.’ Unfortunately, this animal drama is completely normal. (…) [5]
The article is actually only about a carcass that was already badly torn apart, so the ‘Bild reader reporter’ did not see the live deer and the process of its death and did not photograph it. The fact that only dead biomass is being consumed here makes the term ‘cruel’ meaningless. Nor does it make logical sense to say that the carcass is ‘poor’ and the buzzards ‘brutal’. But it is only the last of the quoted sentences that reveal that this was not actually a random cognitive aberration, but that the journalistic product was aimed at a specific goal from the outset: namely, to state as clearly as possible that nature outside civilisation is, in its entirety, ‘very cruel’. And with the statement ‘unfortunately completely normal’, this alleged cruelty is also declared to be the central norm of nature.
Such mass media, which present themselves as more ‘serious’, shape the tools of repression in a slightly different way than the tabloid media
For media outlets that consider themselves more serious in terms of their style of text and image selection, the garish form of presentation used by bild.de does not fit in so well with their concept. But that does not mean that there are fewer symptoms of the repression complex to be found here. At most, they are somewhat more subtle. The example shown below is a ‘puzzle of the week’ from the “Science” section of spiegel.de (printed version was for decades the very leading German news magazine), which, according to the text, originally came from a ‘puzzle page for children’ [6].
Mass media example 4 (spiegel.de, excerpt) [6]:
Here, the motifs of the complex are served exclusively by the text. After the headline ‘Eat and be eaten’, the main text follows the statement ‘It’s brutal in the wild nature’ with another reference to mother and child: ‘An animal mother puts a lot of effort into raising her offspring – then a hungry predator comes along and snatches one or more of the young animals.’ In this case, the reference is even more curious than in example 2 from bild.de – because in the rest of the text, there is no indication whatsoever that it is about young animals or ‘animal offspring’. The description reduces the living world to mutual killing and dying. Translated excerpt:
Snakes, lions and antelopes live on a small island off the coast of Tanzania. Every morning at 10 o’clock, each lion eats three antelopes. At 12 o’clock, each antelope tramples three snakes to death. And every evening at 6 o’clock, each snake poisons three lions. If an animal cannot perform this activity, it dies after 24 hours. [6]
Somewhat incongruous with the confusing text of the riddle, the first publication featured a photo that was apparently added by the picture editors, as is customary with such large mass media outlets, showing all the animals, including the antelopes and their offspring, thriving freely in their optimal habitat – as is indeed the case in reality, except for a very small proportion of their lifespans, which is regularly very close to zero. As calculated in the journal section ‘Freedom’, the dying that spiegel.de artificially places at the centre of ‘brutal nature’ is in reality only a tiny fraction of the overall picture.
As a complement to the deliberate ‘cruelty’ of nature, humans present themselves as saviours of other living beings
Another important mechanism of repression evident in the current mass media is moral elevation through concentrated and almost always illustrated reports about the rescue and protection of individuals of other animal species. This could be, for example, a family of ducks being guided across the road by police officers, stranded whales being kept wet by passers-by, or a young deer that has become entangled in a fence and is now being freed by a whole squad of firefighters.
The accompanying texts often contain phrases such as ‘the fire brigade had to come to get the ducks safely across the road.’ The word ‘had to’ reinforces the soothing effect on the audience, because it makes the ‘good’ and morally superior people see it as their natural duty to help other animals. The fact that in reality the opposite is true, namely that humans are subjecting the majority of other vertebrates in factory farming to a perverse and lifelong hell of unprecedented proportions in the history of the earth, is thus obscured. When a reader forum is offered alongside the corresponding ‘help articles’, it is therefore very common to find euphoric expressions of gratitude there.
Below are two more concrete examples of this symptom from the homepages of spiegel.de and bild.de. An important and practically always present feature is that the saving hands or at least fingers of humans are recognisable. In addition, the reports are almost always directly surrounded by illustrated topics in which humans appear in a harmless or positive light.
The symptom of moral elevation through care and trivialisation
In addition to rescue, visible care and trivialisation are closely related symptoms of psychotic repression. Once again, the focus is mainly on photographs or film clips, with texts serving only as a supplement. Mostly, individuals who fulfil the so-called child schema are shown, because this stimulates the caring instinct particularly strongly, especially in the female part of the audience. Another characteristic is that protective human hands are almost always depicted.
Mass media examples 7, 8, and 9 (bild.de) [9][10][11]:
The symptom of self-aggrandisement through caring, generated by repression, can escalate into collective mass hysteria when it is carried by many media outlets. A bizarre example of this was the hysteria that broke out in 2007 around a polar bear born in Berlin Zoo named ‘Knut’, later also known as ‘Knuddelknut’. After his mother rejected him, humans took on the role of caregiver. Initially, two regional broadcasters picked up on the touching story – and then it suddenly exploded. After a few weeks, during which almost all of Germany’s major mass media reported daily on ‘Knuddelknut,’ the hysteria finally spread around the globe.
Around 500 journalists from Germany and abroad attended the official presentation of the polar bear by Federal Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel. Television stations reported live, and many presenters had tears of emotion running down their cheeks. The audience of millions, stirred by strong emotions, felt like collective protectors of the small, helpless bear. Incidentally, because the concept with the polar bear cub was so successful and popular, it has been repeated almost every year since then as soon as a polar bear is born in a zoo. It is, so to speak, a classic example of repression. The following piece from Bild.de asks in 2017, so 10 years after Knut: „Who is sweeter – Knut or Fritz?“
Mass media example 10 (bild.de, excerpt) [12]:
Parallel to the initial hysteria surrounding ‘Knuddelknut’ at the same time, Germany — virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media — set out to achieve historic records in important fields of technology and product exports related to industrial factory farming. As a result, this relatively small country ranked second behind the USA among the largest exporters of pork in 2008. Shortly afterwards, Germany became the global leader. The example of ‘Knuddelknut’ thus clearly illustrates the highly complex and profound interactions between the symptom in question and the repression of the escalating perversion of industrialised factory farming.
The totality of the current symptoms of repression of one’s own unnaturalness corresponds to those of a severe mental illness
While the symptoms shown may not be clearly recognisable on their own, a look at their totality makes it clear that the pattern of a severe mental illness is present here and that it has already reached an advanced stage.
If the mechanisms shown were to be transferred to an individual, this would correspond metaphorically to a severely mentally ill person who – while the weather outside is beautiful – sits in his old childhood bedroom with the blinds drawn, deeply moved and lost in thought, rocking back and forth and stroking his worn teddy bear on the head. Down in the basement lies the cause of his problems – there, victims chained by him languish in their faeces. In the kitchen, a fire has broken out due to the stove being left on, which he can no longer perceive due to his disconnection from reality and which will soon destroy him and the entire house.
The beautiful weather outside represents the reality of the great outdoors, the blinds represent its exclusion, the teddy bear symbolises the pampered compensation objects, the victims in the basement represent the billions of animals confined in factory farming, the forgotten hob represents the inability to live caused by repression mechanisms, and the fire represents the destruction of the ecosystem and one’s own existence.
CONCLUSION
The history of Europe in particular clearly shows that, up to the present day, the repression of the unnaturalness of articial breeding and permanent control of other living beings has been a central factor in shaping the evolving collective worldview. The collective sacrificed a clear perception of reality and instead submitted to various constructs that made it possible to keep this own unnaturalness as far away from the surface of consciousness as possible. For this goal, human beings themselves were artificially elevated. In addition, the spiritual perspective narrowed itself, so that almost only humans remained visible, who in turn appear to be particularly ‘morally good’ or even ‘godlike’. As a result, and not least because of the additional artificial degradation and denigration of the non-human parts of nature and thus of reality, each new generation of children has been subjected to severe psychological mutilation and further damage. In the present day, this has escalated against the backdrop of the gradual sharp increase in unnaturalness in the context of industrial methods of breeding and subjugating other life forms. The content of the repression methods also shows that the subjugated ‘farm animals’ play a decisive role. Due to their relative similarity to humans, unnatural behaviour towards these animals is perceived much more strongly than would be the case with crops, which means that the mental effort required for repression and the resulting damage are many times greater here.