We live in a hyper-moralized society that threatens ostracism when moral imperfection shows. Moral perfection is unattainable, yet we maintain a fiction of perfection… barely… until a devastating argument like veganism appears. That, I suspect, is a major reason for the strong aversion toward vegans. Veganism threatens one of our most essential fictions for social survival.
There is—at least in many urban, digital, and professional environments within Western culture—constant pressure to project moral perfection. People are expected not only to behave decently but also to appear consistently and unequivocally “good.” A useful metaphor is “red grass”: in everyday interactions, we act as if moral perfection were the norm, not an ideal to strive for. It’s not that people literally believe they are flawless; rather, the social cost of acknowledging moral failings (or even moral ambivalence) can be high: loss of status, strained relationships, suspicion at work, and diminished trust. The illusion of moral perfection becomes a necessary performance to remain socially safe.
That performance has a real upside. When a community enforces demanding standards, many people try harder: they restrain harmful impulses, mind their manners, and avoid avoidable harm. The shared fiction—“we are better than we are”—can pull actual behavior toward a more cooperative, less abusive equilibrium. It also supports coordination: if you assume others are trying to do the right thing, friction drops and predictability rises. The moral mask doesn’t only conceal; it can also educate.
The trouble starts when the fiction stops functioning as a regulative ideal and starts presenting itself as a description of reality: “good people here are simply good.” That produces an epistemic distortion: it becomes risky to speak openly about one’s moral limitations, even in a reflective, responsible way. And because everyone privately knows moral perfection is impossible, a chronic tension sets in—the gap between what is lived and what can be admitted. The more hyper-moralized the climate, the more taboo it becomes to acknowledge limits, incentives, contradictions, and gray zones.
In that context, an attraction may arise for the person who finally says, “the grass is green”: someone who breaks the code and releases the pressure of a cynical social environment. The relief doesn’t come precisely from that person being morally admirable, but from their refusal to participate in the demand for spotless virtue. This reduces the threatening feeling of constant moral surveillance. The risk, of course, is that “telling the truth” about imperfection gets confused with licensing unethical behavior: people may rally behind a transgressor not because the transgression is good, but because it feels psychologically liberating. A figure like Donald Trump can be interpreted—on this hypothesis—as symbolizing “permission to stop pretending,” more than modeling virtue.
With veganism, the mechanism becomes particularly acute for a specific reason: it is not merely another moral norm, but one that many people experience as comparative and accusing even when it isn’t stated that way. If one of a society’s moral fault lines concerns animals—especially the inconsistency between compassionate values and everyday practices—then veganism doesn’t just criticize a behavior; it threatens a socially useful fiction: “I’m a good person, without qualifying footnotes.” It confronts people with a domain where the moral critique can look unusually clean and difficult to circumvent.
Herein lies the key point: in a culture that needs the appearance of moral perfection to maintain a smooth social life, veganism is a distinct threat because it offers—at least on the surface—a relatively clear path to a credible moral superiority in a sensitive area. As already mentioned, admitting one’s own moral imperfection is socially dangerous. This combination can generate, in addition to attraction to those who break the taboo (by saying “grass is green”), hostility toward those who seem capable of winning the moral theater with a powerful, hard-to-match argument. It’s bad enough that we are all immoral and have to pretend otherwise, but it’s far worse to discover that some are candidates for not being so, and that our deeply ingrained eating habits are far from being admitted to that select club.
Veganism is a potentially dangerous enemy of self-image. And yet, it remains a manageable enemy because it presents a vulnerable point: its justification is expressed in rational terms—even if the motives may be emotional—and the everyday court of morality rarely functions like a philosophy seminar. In that court, the decisive factor is not refuting, but maintaining one’s own status, if necessary by lowering that of others. To the extent that veganism offers a relatively clear path to credible moral superiority, then the vegan will occupy the place of the “nerd” in a schoolyard: it is not enough to disagree; it is necessary to make them a laughingstock so that their advantage ceases to matter. When the majority perceives itself as incapable of reaching them—or simply does not want to pay the price—a tacit, cross-cutting alliance can form to “bring them down to earth”: stereotypes, jokes, caricatures, and socially tolerated fallacies serve as a corrective. They do not defeat the argument; they defeat its power to confer status, and thereby deactivate the threat.
So the conflict is not only “meat versus vegetables,” but a struggle over social-psychological equilibrium between (i) a functional fiction that stabilizes everyday interaction and (ii) the human need to acknowledge imperfection without being expelled from the group. On this view, veganism acts as a catalyst: it forces a choice between defending the fiction (often by attacking the messenger) and renegotiating the boundary between ideal and reality (accepting imperfection without identity collapse). Both vegans and non-vegans seem to favor the first option.
For non-vegans, veganism can be uniquely unsettling, because it looks like a suspiciously clean solution to a problem we’ve learned to consider unsolvable: moral self-justification. If this is indeed an area where moral improvement, with the potential for perfection, is unusually attainable, then the entire social landscape shifts. You either reject it and even attack it as a threat to the fiction that keeps us all safe, or you embrace it and risk turning it into a badge, an intoxicating license to feel morally almost perfect, and this time for real. The rare option is to adopt it as a method for reducing suffering, for doing good—or at least, for not doing evil—without making it a status symbol, but that requires resisting both social praise and the very incentives of the culture of moral competition.
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