How we choose the slaughterhouse
You think you think for yourself. You don’t. You follow, repeat, defend, and never notice the fence.
I used to say it half-jokingly: people are cattle.
It was a crude way to describe something I kept seeing everywhere. Crowds moving together in the same direction, repeating the same phrases, sharing the same articles they never bothered to read. We echo headlines as if we investigated them ourselves. We cheer for policies we couldn’t explain if someone pressed us for details. Most of the time we’re less interested in understanding something than we are in staying aligned with the group around us.
Belonging feels good. Being the odd one out feels like stepping into cold water. So we follow the flow, nod at the right moments, repeat the approved lines, and convince ourselves we’re thinking independently while doing exactly what everyone else is doing.
People are cattle.
For a long time it was easy to imagine the herd as other people. The idiots. The lazy thinkers. The ones glued to their phones repeating whatever the algorithm spoon-fed them that day. But the more closely you watch human behavior, the harder it becomes to pretend you’re standing outside it. The same impulses live in all of us. We absorb the same signals and narratives, the same quiet instructions about who deserves respect and who deserves suspicion. Culture, media, institutions, friends, coworkers, social pressure. All of it pushes in the same direction, shaping the invisible fence around what we think is normal.
One night I was watching a superhero movie.
Nothing memorable, just the usual glossy nonsense meant to fill two hours while your brain idles. Bright explosions, predictable dialogue, characters written with the emotional depth of cardboard. I barely cared what was happening on the screen until the villain appeared. I recognized who she was meant to be. The character wasn’t just fictional. She was obviously modeled after a real person. Someone who, outside of movies, speaks openly, questions authority, and refuses to play the polite public relations game most public figures eventually learn to follow. Someone who has spent years getting smeared in headlines, painted as reckless or dangerous simply for refusing to shut up.
On the screen she had been turned into a caricature. Cold, calculating, power-hungry. The kind of villain the audience is trained to hate without thinking about it. Every line of dialogue, every facial expression, every scene reinforced the same message: this is someone you should fear. It was wrapped in the harmless packaging of entertainment, but the signal underneath it was unmistakable. Millions of people watching the same story, absorbing the same message about who deserves trust and who deserves suspicion.
And suddenly the thought returned to me with a little more weight behind it.
People are cattle.
Not because we follow. Following is human. We’re wired for it. Groups kept our ancestors alive for thousands of years, so our brains reward conformity and punish isolation. Shared beliefs hold societies together. Without some level of agreement about reality, the whole structure collapses.
The real problem isn’t that we follow each other. The real problem is that we stay inside the fence even when the gate is wide open and we could walk straight out.
We keep grazing the same patch of ground long after it’s been stripped bare. We chew on the same tired ideas because they’re familiar, not because they still make sense. When something new appears, something that contradicts the story we’ve been repeating to ourselves for years, most of us don’t run toward it. We pause for a moment. We glance at it like an animal noticing a hole in the fence. Then we shrug and go back to the same dirt we’ve been standing on the whole time.
Because crossing that gate is expensive.
Walking through it means admitting that the pasture we trusted might never have been safe in the first place. The people we believed were guiding us might have been wrong, corrupt, or completely full of shit. The institutions we defended might have shaped our beliefs in ways that served their interests more than ours. Once that thought enters your head it spreads like rot through everything that came before it. If we’re wrong now, then maybe we were wrong yesterday too. Maybe we were wrong five years ago. Maybe we’ve been wrong for decades.
Every argument where we defended the lie. Every conversation where we dismissed someone who questioned it. Every time we rolled our eyes and called someone crazy for seeing something we didn’t want to see. Every decision we made because we trusted the narrative handed to us.
Some of those decisions may have hurt people. Some may have helped sustain systems that destroyed lives while we congratulated ourselves for being informed and responsible citizens.
At worst, people died. That’s something we can never accept.
Accepting the truth means accepting responsibility for the damage done while we believed the lie. It means realizing that our confidence and moral certainty may have helped keep the machine running. Nobody likes looking at themselves that way. It’s a hell of a lot easier to protect the belief than to dismantle the identity built around it.
So we look away—like the cattle we are.
We call the contradiction misinformation. We call it conspiracy. If that doesn’t work we smear the person raising the question. Label them dangerous, unstable, selfish, evil, morally repugnant, whatever it takes to make sure we don’t have to actually examine what they’re saying. The herd closes ranks, the narrative survives, and we all get to keep feeling comfortable. We convince ourselves it means we get to survive.
So we stay in the pasture even when it’s obvious something is wrong.
The grass is gone. The dirt is churned into mud. The air smells strange, thick and metallic, like something rotting just out of sight. But the herd is still moving toward the gates, held open by what we are told is authority and truth, and as long as everyone else keeps walking it feels easier to keep walking too.
We see the narrow path ahead, slick with what’s left of the others. We hear the low, hollow clanging of the gates. The closer we get, the heavier the air becomes, thick with the copper sting of blood.
And still we walk.
Not because we’re forced. Not because we’re tricked. But because we believe so completely, so blindly, that nothing will turn us from drifting forward.
The stench of iron thick in the air, its shadow stretching over us, until we arrive—content, unresisting—at the slaughterhouse.