Magnus Söderlund, a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, said eating human meat would help combat the effects of global climate change. Eating dead people could reduce livestock production and the burden on the environment. The professor, of course, is aware of the difficulties - for this it will be necessary to "overcome the conservative taboo."
The reaction was varied - someone directly considered Söderlund's proposal delusional, someone began to explain what medical problems eating meat of the dead could cause. But the call itself - a person openly advocates cannibalism, and this is being discussed as a perfectly acceptable possibility - is very indicative.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, there is no need for cannibalism - and it does not solve any nutritional problems. Gloomy predictions that the Earth will not be able to feed a growing population have been put forward for a very long time, but the problem was solved by increasing agricultural productivity, in particular, the so-called Green Revolution, during which more productive varieties were introduced and irrigation techniques developed.
Even if humanity comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to reduce the consumption of meat, this will not lead to cannibalism, but to a wider use of plant proteins.
Therefore, from the point of view of catering, Söderlund's proposal is simply meaningless. Its meaning lies in a different ethical and ideological sphere. And Söderlund is not the only one who speaks with interest about cannibalism.
The well-known atheistic publicist Richard Dawkins also repeatedly addressed this topic - for example, in a conversation with another prominent atheist philosopher Peter Singer, they discussed the possibility of eating human flesh and came to the conclusion that there is nothing unethical about it - if "meat", for example, died in a car accident, and you are thus not responsible for his death, and the relatives of the deceased do not mind.
Dawkins later came up with the idea that the taboo on eating human flesh could be overcome if human meat was learned to grow in a test tube - and thus not kill anyone. However, we note that in this case, such meat will not be taken from, in fact, the human body - and the question remains whether to consider it human. But the keywords for both Soderlund and Dawkins are “overcoming taboos”.
Cannibalism looks so attractive and interesting not because people are plagued by unbearable hunger. They are all residents of prosperous countries where people are forced to struggle, rather, with overeating. And not because they foresee a terrible need for humanity to eat their own kind - such a prospect is hardly visible.
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Namely because it is a taboo, something absolutely forbidden and disgusting in most cultures of the world and especially in European culture. These people voice the idea of cannibalism not despite the ban, but precisely because it is prohibited. Any talk about "fighting global warming" is nothing more than an awkward excuse. The goal is precisely to break the taboos. But why?
Several reasons can be seen at once. The first is on the surface - scandal is a relatively cheap way to gain fame. Soderlund is a marketing specialist, author of several books, perhaps after his speech, they will differ better. People working to break taboos may not have any particularly far-reaching plans. They just want to cause a scandal and then monetize it.
Another reason has to do with the fact that perversion, a commitment to something that most people would find disgusting or criminal, works well as a marker of elitism. It helps to form "their own circle" in which people recognize each other, find themselves bound by dirty secrets, by a common immersion in those abysses of abomination, into which ordinary people either do not dare or simply do not want to look.
In this respect, one can recall the death of millionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who maintained a state of underage girls for the upper strata of the American political elite. He was about to testify against his clients, but was found hanged in his cell.
However, with the general loosening of the taboo, perversions are no longer playing the role of something gloomy and elitist - as happened in due time with homosexuality. Now any commoner can do that, not only outstanding figures of art and politics. We have to increase the level of prohibition, to find more and more extreme vices that could play the same role as a marker of being chosen, belonging to “ours”.
And in this respect, cannibalism perfectly plays the role of that "elite vice" that allows you to separate the modern, advanced, belonging to the future elitists from the common people, cotton wool and cattle adhering to the "conservative taboo".
A subtle hint of the corresponding culinary predilections is a claim to elitism, to belonging to the "chosen one" who face misunderstanding and hostility from the dark masses.
There is also a third, ideological aspect - there is a powerful cultural movement that considers the Christian heritage of European civilization as something that hinders "progress", hated and subject to destruction. There is nothing new for such purposes - we have already seen them among the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. However, today this movement is rather cultural in nature and seeks not to seize the mail and telegraph with weapons in hand, but to seize the instruments of cultural influence - the media, educational institutions, the entertainment industry. And I must say that in the West this seizure took place very successfully.
The obsessive propaganda of everything that a generation ago would have been considered disgusting and unhealthy serves the same purpose - a break with the Christian heritage. Until now, this has been done through the persistent pushing of ever more bizarre perversions - which should have destroyed the Christian view of marriage and the identity of a person, as a man or a woman.
Cannibalism is what was to be expected in the next stage, because it fits well with the logic of the Cultural Revolution. Why can't you eat people, while you can eat animals? Because all people are at the level of intuition, and Christians also at the level of doctrine know that a person is fundamentally and qualitatively different from animals. The ban on cannibalism is due to the fact that man is created in the image of God, he is unique among other living beings.
For people who fundamentally reject the Christian heritage, man is just one of the animals, perhaps the most intelligent and developed, but not exclusive. The idea of the uniqueness of man as a species, on the contrary, is condemned as "human exclusivity" or "spisism", that is, the discriminatory belief that humans have values and rights that other animals cannot.
Eating human flesh will be a natural - and quite expected - manifestation of this worldview, a way to show oneself as its strong adherent.
Therefore, although the speeches of Soderlund or Dawkins may seem insane to us, there is a certain logic, consistency, even inevitability in their insanity. In their picture of the world, substantiate the thesis that it is possible to eat rams, but it is impossible to eat people, it is really impossible. For them, this is truly a meaningless taboo. And the destruction of senseless taboos is a matter of honor, valor and heroism - even if there is no practical sense in it.
Of course, in the West, for example, there are also sound, conservative forces that, as they can, resist the revolutionaries - and a sharp struggle is taking place between them. The only trouble is that our Westerners are guided (as they did before) on the Western Jacobins, enthusiastically picking up all the ugliest, sick and destructive that can only be found in the West, becoming diligent students to the most evil people and the most destructive ideological currents.
Demonstrative contempt for "scrapie", for tradition, for religion, mocking giggling at any "no", fear of not being progressive enough - all this makes our Westerners easy prey for the wildest ideas, if only they come from the "civilized world."
And here some legibility and independence - not all Western ideas are equally good, let's think with our own head - would be very appropriate. You can't eat people. Even if some Swedish professors and British scientists think it is possible.
Sergey Khudiev
