Hi James,
Thanks for your deep engagement with the report and thoughtful comment! No, it didn’t come across as blunt or rude or anything! :)
I was thinking of something closer to a vegan outreach campaign that was optimized for delegitimizing the industry when I wrote that. We did write that we think that its an institutional focus is more effective, and perhaps its abolitionist focus too, though veganism can also be framed in that way. Perhaps the report should have talked more about how other types of animal campaigns can (and should) leverage the stigmatization process.
I don’t think veganism is really a quiet act of omission. Generally quite a few other people will come to know that you are vegan and veganism gets plenty of popular press. I don’t think this would be happening if there were much fewer vegans. Maybe if veganism only involved dietary choices, but that’s not what you’re getting with vegan outreach, unless you’re really leading with the health arguments. Having said that, I agree that it looks like divestment is better at getting press, though hard to say exactly. We did cite that as the strongest reason for engaging in divestment.
It does still seem to be like basically all animal advocacy campaigns involve stigmatization to some significant extent. It’s not much of a jump from meat is immoral to the companies that are creating it are immoral. Legislative campaigns also involve pointing out serious inadequacies in the industry practice that need to be reformed, though the message may not be as strong here.
I think there is something to the idea that divestment hits closer to the pocketbook with the stigmatization that it brings, though I’m not convinced that that makes up for the paucity of direct effects.
I do think there should be people trying divestment in the animal advocacy context and seeing how it goes, but unless the results proved us wrong, based on the arguments in this report, I wouldn’t recommend a big shift of resources towards it.
Thanks so much for writing this! It’s really good to hear from other members of the community who have struggled with this. It sounds like there are a lot of shared elements, and I think talking about it openly makes it easier for other people to do so. It’s certainly been easier for me to bring up my imposter syndrome now that it’s widely understood to be a problem in the community and bringing it up helps with recovering from it.
Some things I find are helping in my case:
- Getting a lot of feedback. I find that my doubts flourish and grow in “the gaps” when I don’t have much feedback. I sort of automatically convince myself that my work is terrible unless there is good positive evidence that it isn’t, to reducing the situations where this can happen has been very valuable. This includes what you said about being more open with things like first drafts and the amount of time I spend on tasks. It’s difficult because you reflexively want to avoid doing this when you have imposter syndrome because you don’t want to be “found out”. So imposter syndrome blocks off its own solution.
– Paying special attention to positive feedback to increase its salience and make it more difficult to rationalize away.
– Psychotherapy for guidance during this process.