High cultures are actually just subtle ways of concealing reality, so that pretentious people can pretend that they are above the level of the lower classes, whether animal or human.
By now we are all too good to go crudely banging a bull on the head with a mallet or sticking a knife through it and tearing it apart and eating it. All that is done for us way off in the stockyard, and the meat comes to us in the butcher shop as a completely neutral-looking thing called a steak.
But steak is something wrapped-up, packaged. Almost nobody picks up a steak and thinks "Poor cow." A plastic-wrapped steak doesn't even look like a cow, and it doesn't remind you of one in any way - that's culture.
(Alan Watts)
By now we are all too good to go crudely banging a bull on the head with a mallet or sticking a knife through it and tearing it apart and eating it. All that is done for us way off in the stockyard, and the meat comes to us in the butcher shop as a completely neutral-looking thing called a steak.
But steak is something wrapped-up, packaged. Almost nobody picks up a steak and thinks "Poor cow." A plastic-wrapped steak doesn't even look like a cow, and it doesn't remind you of one in any way - that's culture.
(Alan Watts)
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