The Day the Animals Stopped Talking

Utilitarianism comes from waiting, like you wait in line at the TSA

Author

Ray Doraisamy
November 26, 2025

This one’s going to take over six minutes, instead of three.

Once, I was a Utilitarian, just as, before that, I was Christian.

Utilitarianism, unlike Christianity, has yet to reach its peak.

It was dominant in many intellectual circles, but it grows more and more common among people everyday, as one of the fundamental assumptions about the world.

So how do people become utilitarian? What if it's more than just a philosophical meme? More than something you get in books, and like something that just happens in certain situations? If so, what are those situations?

Examine the history of any belief system, and you will find animism at its oldest known roots.

The belief that everything is an everyone.

In the memetic formation of gods, many can be traced to ancestor worship. At some point, an ancestor gets more powerful in the eye of the worshippers. And so ascends, to become more than an ancestor. More abstract.

In 'Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion' (2016), 33 different forager societies were looked at to figure out what comes first in religion.

It goes Animism > Afterlife > Shamanism > Ancestor Worship > High Gods, from most universal to least universal.

Though High Gods appear to show up at a certain level of societal complexity & size, regardless of the presence of Ancestor Worship, Afterlife, or Shamanism.

So how does animism go away? And what takes its place?

Let's look at the Nayaka, a tribe that were in transition out of foraging in the 2000s.

There were two elephants, they were a pair. The Forest Department called some of us to catch one of them. But no one went to help. How would you feel if your spouse were taken from you? Like this feeling only – this is the feeling of this elephant. These two elephants sometimes separated at night, going in different ways, one goes this way the other goes that way; but they would always come together again in the morning. That day, the other elephant saw the first elephant fall down. If two are always together and then one is shot down how would the other feel? ... This remaining elephant is the one that killed my young brother – this elephant is still with so much anger – wandering around this forest.

With animism, the way they treated animals was different.

The same approach is demonstrated by the case of Maren (a man in his mid-twenties), who did not notice a snake’s hole when he was working in his small tea-plot, and got bitten by it. (This was, fortunately, a non-poisonous snake.) He did not instinctively beat back the snake, nor did he try later to chase it away, even though the snake remained in that hole. Maren continued to observe the snake’s behaviour, especially at dusk, when it was coming out of the hole. He explained that when the snake bit him, it had been ‘afraid and had no other option’.‘ Like us’, Maren added,‘this snake also lives here’.

But then they got drawn into a bigger society:

“This chick is for selling. I can sell this one for 70 Rs.”

“These chickens are for eggs. I keep these chickens here.”

“If I don’t have money to buy rice I will sell them to kaka [Muslim neighbours].”

“This dog is good for nothing, no use ... The dogs I had a few years before, those that were taken by that panther, they were very good for hunting.”

“Goats are like poison, they destroy everything around.”

“Cows give us milk and if there is much milk we can sell it. They also give us dung – which we use in the fields and also sell. Cows also give us calves that we can sell. I don’t need these male cows, they go too far into the forest, they give me problems to bring them back here. This is why I don’t want to have these two [pointing to two young males], one is enough.”

In the 1982, anthropologist James Woodburn asserted a difference in behavior between Immediate Return and Delayed Return societies.

That is, when reciprocity is immediate, you behave differently from when reciprocity is delayed. The longer over time a society coordinates, the more delayed the return tends to be. Which you see in ours, which has increasingly complex credit systems.

For the formerly forest-dwelling Nayaka people, the change from an Immediate Return to a Delayed Return happened in a relatively short time.

And with this change, came the introduction of Things. That is, animals that were first and foremost considered in utilitarian terms, as things, instead of as other agents.

Utilitarianism, then, can be thought of as a belief that occurs when reciprocity happens over longer timeframes.