A number of vegetarians justify their lifestyle because they don’t want to be responsible for the death of another living creature. When this is offered, there will sometimes be the reply that being vegetarian isn’t enough. Vegetables are most often and most economically harvested via mechanization. These machines often kill small rodents. The piece of tofu you eat has the blood of mice on it is the claim.
Eating is a collective act. Even the farmer himself eats the harvest of someone else. Food does in some cases go straight to the harvester’s mouth. My garden for example will provide about a tenth of a percent of my caloric needs. One might through a diligent search find a person providing for all their caloric needs by their two hands. Having done this though, one hasn’t found an alternative to the collective eating system. One has merely found an anomaly. The presence of anomalies is not a proof that the collective system can be abandoned or that remaining in the collective system is an illicit choice.
This can be very difficult. The person who is prudent in seeking material possessions and generous in charity is acting holy. One who has taken a vow of poverty being in witness of that person does not change that. Both are holy acts, even if different in kind. The temptation is to create a strict dichotomy: one act is supporting the oppression of the poor and the other is not. Of course the problem with this dichotomy is that widespread adoption of poverty does not make the impoverished less impoverished. The reason people take vows of poverty is to have solidarity with the poor; they aren’t engaging by that act in a scheme to relieve the poor of their burdens. The ultimate path to more humane treatment is mediation through the collective, something those who take vows of poverty tend to understand.
With little to no proof or foundation, demagogues will take anomalies to be alternatives. They will forcefully argue that the only real alternative is isolation and disengagement with the collective. They will insist mediation is a compromise with evil. To follow their logic would require one to eschew all community so as not to be corrupted. Of course in practice this doesn’t occur. By virtue of being really troubled by the sin and being vociferous about the sin, the demagogue self-grants an exemption from being a part of the collective sin, or at least does not share the degree of sin of the person who engages the collective. Rube Goldberg-type schemes are envisioned for how the person engaging the collective is personally accountable for the sin. This will be done at the same time as honors and adulation is given to people who actually did personally engage in the sin in question but have had later ideological conversion, a conversion that more often than not costs nothing.
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