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I'm sorry, are you saying that everyone who isn't Indian is an "unhealthy mind" or are you saying that everyone who eats meat is? This entire bit is confused as hell - quality of life is often psychological, and having meat taken out of my diet for the benefit of animals sure feels like an objective reduction in my quality of life to improve theirs. Status too is objectively changed - if I am not allowed to eat animals then by necessity this indicates an increase in the position of animals and a reduction in my status - from dominion over the beasts of the land to a sad sack of shit who gets less respect than a pig.
And I see no charitable justification for inserting that analogy to slaves, only a cheap appeal to emotions - it didn't improve the clarity of your point, if anything it obfuscated it, since you immediately went straight back to talking about animals.
I think there’s some confusion here over “reducing the position of…humans.”
@KnotGodel was arguing that vegetarianism isn’t inherently low-status, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions who choose it even when meat is available. Therefore advocating for it does not require reducing the status of meat-eaters.
You correctly observed that forcing meat-eaters to stop is obviously reducing their material position and status. Animal rights advocates might well be expected to implement such a reduction.
Frankly, I think the blame here lies with the guy who insisted animal rights was an “identity movement.” Putting it in the same category as woke politics, white nationalism, or civil rights feels like a poor choice.
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Are you suggestion that subsisting on an exclusive diet of psuedo-marxist po-mo bullshit might not be psychologically healthy? ;-)
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Any feeling full stop really. Any cognition at all in fact. I'm actually only capable of engaging with reality using my brain, I didn't realise that made me psychologically unhealthy.
Actually I think you need to define psychologically healthy, because you don't seem to be describing it in my eyes. You also don't have to feel like you are losing status if I fuck your wife in front of you, or force you to blow me, but I would suggest not doing so demonstrates a lack of self respect (or a fetish, if they can be separated) not good psychological health.
Is that a dodge, or are you actually saying that you wouldn't feel like you lost status if I banged your wife in front of you? Because I wouldn't consider the status loss the biggest problem in either of those scenarios, but I would still consider it a problem.
I get the impression that you have a warped understanding of psychological strength. Status very often - if not always - is zero sum. To be the most popular or most hated requires that someone else is not occupying that spot - if they are, you have to take it from them (otherwise you are not the most popular/hated). Being psychologically healthy is not ignoring attacks, or being apathetic to them, or writing your pain off as an artifact of your brain, it is (assuming fighting back isn't an option) enduring the suffering without being broken by it. That doesn't mean it doesn't affect you or hurt you. I don't know what the psychologically healthy way to respond to either of those scenarios would be, but I'm sure it's not a thumbs up or yawn or intense rationalisation. Those strike me as closer to denial than anything else.
Status is a person's placement in a social hierarchy. Most people don't think in terms of status, they simply feel shame or embarrassment when it is taken from them or pride and confidence when they take it. You don't need to think about becoming more popular by taking it from others - simply by being more popular you do so inevitably. Just because it isn't a concious effort doesn't mean you don't care about status.
Re banging your wife, we can add your peer group to the dynamic - do you think their opinion of you would change at all if I banged your wife in front of them? It might not affect their opinion of your competence, but I bet it affects their respect for you - but status is an element even between the three of us original parties - you me and your wife. If you walked in on that what would you think my opinion of you was? Would it be different from before you entered the room? What about your wife - if you saw that would you immediately assume she loved you as much as she did on your wedding day? If not, you do care about status.
I'm going to start from here, because I think if I can explain this right you'll understand how it applies to the earlier part of your post. Status is zero sum within each social hierarchy, social hierarchies form the basis of every relationship and are nested - the social hierarchy of you me and your wife is different to the social hierarchy of you me and your friends, which is different to the social hierarchy at work, but if they have overlapping members the hierarchies can inform the others they are tied to. They might not, depending on how you manage your image however. And, as you say, social hierarchies feel (and as a result are) less important the further you move away from formalised hierarchical structures like work or school or church. But they are still there. Cliques are social hierarchies, inside each clique there are people whose opinions matter more and those who matter less, but removed from formal structures of hierarchy they can be a lot more fluid.
In the situation with your wife, you thinking she loved you less is the loss of status, and that social hierarchy is between you and your wife. It is not unidirectional, it is multi-polar, and it is zero sum - you can't be equally loved and loathed by your wife at the same time, one feeling has to take precedence. Same with your friends - they can't both feel sorry for you and admire you, or despise me and want to introduce me to their wives at the same time. The closest you can get to zero sum in status games is apathy, and we only feel apathy towards people and things that don't matter to us.
Another way to put it is status games are kind of like proprioception. Just because you don't use the academic language of status games and social hierarchies doesn't mean your brain isn't picking up on those things. In fact, I'm pretty sure academics developed those terms because they didn't know how to talk about this stuff without them.
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