Life's Pleasures Quote by Abbie Hoffman

Compulsory cannibalism is a deliberately grotesque dare, not a policy proposal. Abbie Hoffman reaches for the most taboo image he can find to expose a moral loophole modern warfare depends on: the distance between an action and its consequences. His logic is cartoonishly strict - if you kill, you should have to consume - because the real target is the way institutions launder killing into something abstract: operations, strikes, collateral damage, body counts.

Hoffman, a Yippie prankster-activist forged in the Vietnam era, understood that respectable language is often the enemy. He uses shock as a kind of truth serum. Cannibalism collapses the chain of responsibility into a single, nauseating transaction; it forces the killer to confront the dead as more than an enemy silhouette. The line is also a jab at political leaders and defense bureaucracies who order violence while remaining physically untouched by it. Make them eat it, and the euphemisms evaporate.

The subtext is accusatory: wars persist because the people who decide them rarely pay the cost, and the people who pay the cost are trained to dissociate. Hoffman’s provocation turns that dissociation inside out. It’s not primarily about individual soldiers; it’s about a culture willing to outsource brutality while keeping its hands clean.

As rhetoric, it works because it’s impossible to domesticate. You can’t “both-sides” cannibalism. You either recoil - and start asking why you don’t recoil as hard from sanctioned killing - or you admit the whole moral arrangement is built on selective squeamishness.