As a small child, I was once sent to an (obese) NHS dietician nurse, due to being overweight. She didn’t like hearing about my diet of ice-cream pies and sugar on toast when I told her about it, and wanted to know why I didn’t eat any meat. The real answer was because I didn’t like the taste. But this wasn’t good enough for her. So, I thought of a much better excuse: I had heard animal rights people on the TV complaining about meat-eating being an all-time human evil, so I just lied and said I thought eating animals was cruel and pulled a fake little weepy sad-face. Even though I was only about six, and as such wholly unqualified to make genuinely reasoned moral judgements about anything much at all, the nurse immediately shut up and said something like, “That’s your ethical privilege, and I must not judge you”, and I was free to return to eating sweets and crisps all day long, as it appeared she did.

Here I learned two valuable lessons. One: representatives of the state are my eternal, life-long enemy. Two: the true social utility of vegetarianism for many of its adherents is not genuinely to lessen animal suffering, improve their health, nor save the planet and their consciences simultaneously, but to function as a convenient method of moral blackmail to emotionally and politically manipulate other people into doing whatever you want them to, in this case the admittedly righteous cause of getting the NHS to stop peering into the contents of my own private lunchbox.

I thought about this lesson again when writing on the Daily Sceptic recently about those two professors from America who wanted to deliberately infect people with infectious tick bites, in order to make them allergic to meat and dairy products and turn them all vegan by force. This led me to wonder whether any studies had been performed into the psychology of veggies and vegans to see what it was that truly made them tick: altruistic motives, or selfish personal ones? It turned out such a study has in fact just been performed, and its findings were conclusive – that many committed carrot-chewers are actually no more than a bunch of complete sociopaths.

What’s Their Beef?

The investigation, ‘Rethinking Vegetarianism: Differences Between Vegetarians and Non-Vegetarians in the Endorsement of Basic Human Values’ by Professor John Nezlek, of SWPS University in Warsaw, appeared in the journal PLOSOne in May, and you can read it in full here (shorter summaries also appear here and here).

The piece was based upon analysis of questionnaires used to gauge the attitudes of 3,800 adults in Nezlek’s native Poland and the US. Participants were asked to answer, on a scale of one to six, how much they approved of values like being successful in the eyes of others, or of becoming rich. They were also asked to identify whether they were vegetarians, vegans or carnivores. Analysis of subsequent replies appeared to demonstrate that, contrary to the stereotype of lovey-dovey hippies like lentil-loving Neil from The Young Ones, the average vegetarian in fact showed a greater desire to try and wield power over their fellow men than the average eater of meat. They were also deemed more likely to value social status, and less likely to value kindness (as opposed to showy displays of #BeKindness).

Meat-eaters were found by Nezlek’s estimation to be more concerned with caring for family and friends, not upsetting the feelings of others unnecessarily, and upholding social stability, safety and traditional norms of behaviour – in other words, being mentally and morally normal. Vegetarians, however, were deemed to be more manipulative and ambitious, seeking to gain higher status positions in society from which to impose their wider niche political viewpoints (which centred more upon promoting novelty, stimulus and innovation) upon others.

So, whilst on a surface level the elevation of environmental causes by the vegetarian-minded might appear to be all about saving the planet, in reality it may well be more motivated by a subliminal desire for control over others and making them act how vegetarians say they should be acting – by surreptitiously injecting them with tick-borne diseases to make them vomit every time they so much as pass by a deli counter, for example.

Whilst expert opinion appears divided over whether or not Adolf Hitler was truly a vegetarian, as persistent rumours suggest, even if this turns out to have been just a myth, it nonetheless may still function as a myth which tells a social truth: namely, that vegetarians are more likely to possess authoritarian personalities, albeit not always to the extent of militarily invading the Polish Professor’s home country.

The Carrot and the Stick

In this reading, being a political authoritarian, like the tick-abusing Lefty environmentalists of today, makes you more likely to become attracted to espousing abstaining from eating meat not for genuinely moral reasons, but simply as another handy method to manipulate your peers. By presenting your own personal subjective dietary choices as being the ‘high status’ option, both socially and ethically, you give yourself spurious political sanction to march around telling everyone else what to do yet again, like a kind of meatless mini-Führer.

Naturally, Professor Nezlek does not try and claim all sausage-shunners are ‘literally Hitler’ or anything stupid like that. Many, like Morrissey, are perfectly sincere in their distaste for the animal suffering which things like battery-farming and slaughterhouses entail; others, like myself, just avoid consuming flesh because they can’t stand the taste, and enjoy annoying fat NHS nurses.

Furthermore, Nezlek admits, the psychological difference between the average vegetarian and average carnivore is, individually, actually quite slight. It is more the aggregate effect of such minor variances which is significant, he says: “These are small differences, but small effects can have large outcomes over time and accumulatively.”

Nezlek’s paper is very interesting, but the one thing it lacks is an emblematic individual case-study of the sort of mad veggie control-freak with an aberrant personality his research indicates could stand in as a worst-case scenario of his findings as a whole. So, let’s provide him with one here now: Greta Bloody Thunberg.

Political Bunfight

Famously, Greta is a vegan. Equally famously, she is, as Donald Trump has recently pointed out, “a strange person” who really “has to go to anger management class” before she gets so furious that she ends up finally killing someone just for eating some crab-sticks. But why is Greta a vegan? One could be forgiven for thinking that, rather than saving the planet, she really just wants to control the lives of everyone living on it.

Greta has openly admitted one of her chief aims in life during her early period of environmental activism was to emotionally manipulate her parents into going vegan too by “making them feel guilty”. In her own words:

I kept telling them that they were stealing our future and they cannot stand up for human rights while living that lifestyle. So then they decided to make those changes. My dad is vegan, my mom, she tries – she’s 90% vegan.

Idi Amin was 90% non-cannibal too, but it’s the 10 percent that counts there. How could Greta best try to ensure 100% compliance?

In a 2019 interview, Greta’s dad, Svante, admitted that, if they didn’t start completely upending their entire way of life and doing precisely what she told them to, then Greta would essentially kill herself by advancing towards the next dietary step beyond even veganism: not eating anything at all. Parents being parents, Svante and his wife did not wish their daughter to die, even if she happened to be Greta Thunberg, so, as Svante explained, his wife went vegan and stopped flying (something which “changed her whole career” as an international opera singer, i.e., by completely ending it) for the following reason: “To be honest, she didn’t do it to save the climate. She did it to save her child.”

In a 2020 memoir extract, Greta’s manipulated mum, Malena, explained how, during 2014, Greta virtually went on hunger-strike, initially due to generic reasons of emotional disturbance, letting out “an abysmal howl that lasts for over 40 minutes” when asked to eat a bun one day.

Instead of any more despair-inducing buns, the misguided adults around her soon decided to hand Greta a cause on a plate instead, in shape of environmentalism. One day, she was shown a documentary about ecological collapse in school, at the end of which her teacher had announced she would soon be flying across the Atlantic to attend a wedding in America. Greta spotted the hypocrisy immediately, finally giving the child a new sustaining obsession to latch onto.

The Greta Dictator

Gaining a purpose in life, Greta began eating again, causing relieved adults like her mother to begin encouraging her recovery by sycophantically lauding her as a little child-saint with quasi-mystical powers of moral perception:       

She saw what the rest of us did not want to see. It was as if she could see our CO₂ emissions with her naked eye. The invisible, colourless, scentless, soundless abyss that our generation has chosen to ignore. … She was the child, we were the emperor. And we were all naked.

Increasingly, Greta began to realise that, by posing as an ethical sage and threatening self-starvation, she could get alleged authority-figures around her to immediately fall into line:

A few months later we walked home from the airport shuttle having met Svante and [her sister] Beata off a flight from Rome. “You just released 2.7 tonnes of CO₂,” Greta says to Svante. “And that corresponds to the annual emissions of five people in Senegal.” “I hear what you’re saying,” Svante says, nodding. “I’ll try to stay on the ground from now on, too.”

Once Greta became famous, the displays of obeisance towards her divine will became even worse. According to her proud mum: “Several times a day people come up [to Greta] and say that they have stopped flying, parked the car or become vegans thanks to her. To be able to influence so many people in such a short time is bewildering in a good way.”

Or, perhaps, corrupting in a bad way. Bowed down to by a minority of susceptible individuals, this eventually becomes no longer enough, and Greta starts trying to impose her marginal will upon all others, giving speeches demanding parliamentary democracy right across her homeland of Sweden and the wider West be bypassed until she gets exactly what she personally wants on everything:

My name is Greta Thunberg and I am 15 years old. … Every Friday, as from now, we will sit outside the Swedish Parliament until Sweden is in line with the Paris agreement [on reducing CO₂ emissions]. I urge all of you to do the same. Sit outside your parliament or local government, wherever you are, until your country is on a safe pathway to a below-two-degree warming target. Time is much shorter than we think. Failure means disaster. … The changes required are enormous and we must all contribute in every part of our everyday life. Especially us in the rich countries, where no nation is doing nearly enough.

Just look at those words: “we must all contribute in every part of our everyday life.” What a complete and utter vegan. We must do this or what, Greta? You’ll start screaming at your buns again?

It would appear Professor Nezlek’s broad analysis of the very worst character traits of vegans and vegetarians is correct, then, at least in Miss Thunberg’s own individual case. The wider problem here, however, is not merely the dictatorial mindset of Greta, but the similar one of the eco-politicians who immediately kowtow to her every last whim. Not being (literally) temper-tantrum little girls themselves, they can’t go on hunger-strike to force us to go green or vegan personally, but they can certainly exploit Greta’s own emotionally manipulative example as a convenient ruse to try and impose their own authoritarian tendencies upon the rest of us in their own turn.

Which does make me wonder: is Ed Miliband a secret vegetarian too, perhaps? It would help explain why he couldn’t eat that bacon sandwich a few years back.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.