What We Have Lost

We were taught to believe that domination made us stronger, wiser, more advanced. But domination was never progress—it was the lie that hollowed us out.

For decades, journalists and activists have exposed the horrors of our relationships with other animals—through hidden-camera footage, documentaries, exposés, books, and more. People can no longer claim ignorance; they know where their chicken nuggets come from. You can watch a cow’s throat being slit on YouTube. For a time, the animal agriculture industry and its allies in government panicked, passing “ag-gag” laws to criminalize filming inside factory farms and slaughterhouses. But in the end, they needn’t have bothered. People saw the horrors—and went on eating as if nothing had changed. The result was not less harm but more: today, more animals are exploited and killed than at any other point in human history (Ritchie and Roser 2023).

We live in a civilization that congratulates itself on its so-called “progress.” We build microchips and skyscrapers, but beneath the steel and circuitry lies a hollowing out of what once made us human animals in any meaningful sense. For millennia, we have cultivated an anthropocentric worldview—placing ourselves at the center of existence and reducing every other being, and even the earth itself, to mere resources for extraction and consumption (Plumwood 1993). In doing so, we have stripped away immeasurable things: traits, relationships, and sensibilities that once tethered us to the living world and nourished what might have been our truest selves.

Of course, not all cultures experienced this loss in the same way, nor did they contribute equally to its spread. But I write from the United States, from within a dominant culture profoundly shaped by Western imperialism, Christianity, and philosophical traditions that sanctified human supremacy (Shiva 1993; Merchant 1980). It is this legacy that has defined the trajectory of “progress” we now inhabit—a trajectory paved, as I see it, in loss rather than advancement.

Attention and Connection

Consider the modern person’s ability to witness horror and simply scroll on. Factory farm footage, hidden-camera investigations, even a drive past an industrial chicken shed—all present evidence of suffering on a staggering scale. Billions of sentient beings endure lives of deprivation and pain each year. People know this. They nod, sigh, shake their heads—and then carry on as though the knowledge had already evaporated. This is not ignorance. It is a trained capacity to look away.

Peter Singer (1972) famously offered the example of a drowning child: if you saw a child struggling in a shallow pond, you would wade in immediately to save them, even if it meant muddy shoes or being late to work. The moral obligation would be undeniable. And yet, when mealtime arrives, the children we could save so easily—those whose suffering is hidden in cages, crates, and slaughterhouses—fall one by one down our throats.

What we have lost is attention—and with it, the connection that emerges when attention is truly given. In one national survey, 70 percent of Americans reported discomfort with the way animals are used in the food industry, yet very few altered the very behaviors causing both their unease and the suffering of billions of other animals (Sentience Institute and Ipsos 2017). This is not just a failure of concentration. It is the collapse of the deeper attentiveness that once bound us to the world beyond ourselves. Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (Weil 1951). By that measure, we do not live in an age of generosity, but one of unprecedented selfishness.

Critical Thought and Community

If attention has been hollowed out, critical thought has been eroded with it. The very structures of our society—capitalism, organized religions that sanctify human supremacy, undemocratic governments, and the culture industries that distract rather than inform—reward passivity over inquiry (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002; Shiva 1993). In a media environment saturated with noise, even the most basic questions—why are we destroying the conditions of life on Earth? Why do we tolerate mass incarceration and state violence?—are buried beneath distraction. Hannah Arendt warned of the “banality of evil” in her reflections on the Holocaust (Arendt 1963). Today, we see it everywhere: coworkers, neighbors, and friends vanishing into prisons, deportation centers, detention facilities—and under the Trump administration, forced disappearances to places like El Salvador, carried out without notice, recourse, or transparency (Human Rights First 2025; American Immigration Council 2025).

The same logic governs our treatment of other animals. Their confinement in factory farms, laboratories, and slaughterhouses has been normalized to the point of invisibility. We know they suffer, yet we treat their suffering as background noise, unworthy of sustained thought or moral reckoning (Joy 2010). Just as the state disappears human beings into cages, our consumption habits and economic order disappear billions of other animals into a machinery of violence so routine it barely registers in our moral imagination (Ritchie and Roser 2023).

This silence is not accidental. We have lost the expectation that ordinary people should engage in collective reasoning and resistance. This loss is mirrored in the shrinking landscape of individual civic action. Political apathy is at historic highs: participation in unions, local associations, and neighborhood groups has collapsed (Putnam 2000); trust in government is at a seventy-year low (Pew Research Center 2022); and surveys show people are less likely than in past decades to discuss politics, contact representatives, or engage in community problem-solving (Norris 2011). Resistance has not disappeared, but the expectation that everyone bears responsibility for it has.

In its place, we have normalized apathy—toward our own species and toward all the others whose lives are entangled with ours. This estrangement from the suffering of others has primed us for today’s epidemic of disconnection and loneliness (Putnam 2000). Neoliberal ideologies, with their relentless emphasis on individualism, have severed our ties to one another and made genuine community nearly impossible (Harvey 2005). Yet this shift was only possible in a world that had already accepted its disconnection from the natural world and the more-than-human beings who comprise it (Plumwood 1993). We forgot they were here with us, not for us, and in that forgetting we accepted relationships of transaction over reciprocity, of harm over community.

But it need not have been this way. Imagine a world shaped by ancestors who chose coexistence with the natural world over domination. Imagine the peace that could have flowed outward from such a foundation—into our communities, our relationships, even our daily gestures—where care, not harm, was the measure of progress.

Empathy and Earth

Compassion itself has withered. In a society built on human supremacy, empathy is permitted only within narrow channels—our families, our pets, those who “deserve” it. Beyond those limits, suffering is abstract, irrelevant, or justified. Studies show that industrial animal agriculture is not only an environmental catastrophe but a moral one, dependent on mass social denial (Joy 2010; Foer 2009). We tell children stories about kindness, yet fail to teach them that they are responsible for the conditions of the world they inherit.

There is compelling evidence that empathy itself has declined over time. A landmark study found that by 2009, American college students were scoring about 40 percent lower on measures of perspective-taking and empathic concern than their counterparts in the late 1970s (Konrath et al. 2011). Although more recent research shows some rebound since 2008, the long-term decline remains significant (Konrath et al. 2025). Public perception mirrors these findings: in a 2025 survey, 61 percent of Americans said they believe compassion has decreased in just the past four years (Philanthropy News Digest 2025).

It is harder to pinpoint where, when, or how we lost compassion for other animals, since this area remains understudied. Yet the evidence is etched into violence on a massive scale: billions of beings confined, mutilated, and killed each year without necessity. The conclusion is unavoidable—what has withered is not only our compassion for other animals, but also our capacity to extend empathy to one another. These losses are inseparable. Compassion was never meant to be partitioned.

If we zoom out, the ultimate loss is planetary. The destruction of biodiversity is accelerating at a rate that scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction (Ceballos et al. 2015). Climate breakdown, fueled by fossil capitalism and the devastation of ecosystems, is not only threatening human futures but annihilating entire worlds of more-than-human life (IPCC 2022).

We have lost rainforests and coral reefs, songbirds and amphibians, fertile soil, clean rivers, and even clean air. But more than that, we have lost our sense of belonging in a living world. We behave as though we are separate, as though our survival is not bound up with the survival of everyone else. In truth, if one suffers, we all suffer. This insight is at the heart of the Buddhist tradition I admire. Thich Nhat Hanh expressed it with unmatched clarity: “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness” (Thich Nhat Hanh 1988). The question is whether we will awaken at all. The evidence suggests we won’t, at least not soon enough.

Writers like David Nibert, James C. Scott, Vandana Shiva, Val Plumwood, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, among others, have all addressed aspects of this loss, but there is still more to explore here. I will never be able to list—or even fully know—all that has been stripped away through our myopic behavior.

Perhaps all that remains is the recognition of loss itself: to face honestly what has been stripped away—attention, critical thought, empathy, biodiversity, planetary stability—and to admit that we are not only failing but actively unmaking the very conditions for life. There is no comfort here, no easy redemption. Only the bitter truth that, for all our technologies, abstractions, and self-importance, we have become something smaller, hollower, less than what we once were—before we severed ourselves from the living world and imagined ourselves above it.

References

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