EA - Rethinking the Liberation Pledge (Eva Hamer) by Aaron Gertler

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethinking the Liberation Pledge (Eva Hamer), published by Aaron Gertler on September 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This article is a really interesting example of people in a prosocial movement trying radical tactics and eventually changing their minds. I'm not sure there's any one lesson here that the average Forum reader would need to learn; I'm just crossposting because I enjoyed it.See parts two and three for how the Pledge has evolved.The Failure of the Pledge and a Better Way Towards Vegan TablesIn 2015, animal advocates with Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) launched an inspired new campaign among their members. It took courage, required sacrifice, and greatly backfired. This three-part series examines what the movement learned from the Liberation Pledge, how we might energize the intention behind the Pledge in a better way, and a piece to share with friends and family to do just that.What We Learned From the Liberation PledgeHow It StartedThe Liberation Pledge was a fascinating idea and a bit of a disaster. Instead of energizing supporters' social networks to create change, as its creators intended, it often had the opposite effect- to isolate advocates from their closest relationships.In this piece, you'll learnWhat it wasWhy it was a good ideaWhy it failedThe next piece in this series suggests a better way to energize the intention behind the pledge, for animal advocates to align their actions with their values in their personal relationships.The Liberation Pledge was a three-part public pledge tolive vegan,refuse to sit at tables where animals' bodies are being eaten, andencourage others to do the same.Enthusiasts of the pledge hoped it would create a cultural stigma around eating animals similar to the stigma that has developed around smoking over recent decades. That is, even while smoking is still practiced, it is prohibited by default in public and private spaces.Before we had the Pledge, many of us felt alienated from friends and family who continued to eat animals. We were forced to choose between two options: speaking up and risking being seen as obnoxious, angry, and argumentative, or keeping the peace with painful inauthenticity, swallowing our intense discomfort at watching our loved ones eat the bodies of animals.The pledge gave us hope that there was another way: being honest with those around us while continuing to spend time with them. And, on a larger scale, we hoped that if we all joined together, we could create a world where eating meat is stigmatized: a world where someone would ask, "Does anyone mind if I get the steak?" before making an order at a restaurant (or maybe even one in which restaurants would think twice before putting someone's body on the menu).Some people took it a step further, arguing it was immoral not to take the pledge, saying, "You wouldn't sit quietly eating your vegan option while a dog or a child was being eaten, would you?" According to this view, it was our duty not to sit idly by while violence was committed in our presence.While some beautiful and inspiring stories were detailed on a Facebook group for the Pledge, it seemed to me that there were many more instances of total disaster: people experiencing huge ruptures in their oldest relationships around the Pledge while often lamenting that those they had just discarded "care more about eating dead animals than they care about me."From where I stood, the biggest effect of the Pledge was for advocates to lose relationships with family members who didn't comply. Upon taking the Pledge, a close friend at the time experienced a years-long estrangement from their family, including those who were already vegan while many others decided to skip birthdays, weddings, and holidays with family. It's possible that all of this added stigma ar...