Veganism is not a revolutionary cause: it's principled but moderate.

one of my patreon supporters wrote to me
saying quote I remember going to California's Channel Islands on a field trip and hearing all these rationalizations for the slaughter of wild pigs on the islands a depressing and alienating experience murder in the name of wildlife management or eco friendliness is still murder veganism if it's at all about the animals and always be partly about animals should work to end the practices of hunting and culling as much as animal farming and then he gives a source discussing this further now see what I do here in my reply so this is a supporter of my channel but someone who disagrees with my fundamental political position what I call wildlife management paradigm my approach to to veganism animal rights etc quote I disagree I'm not a utopian philosopher I'm an historical nihilist thus for example I do not believe we are working towards a future world in which vegans never kill rats or in which Park Rangers never kill large mammals nor a world in which war is obsolete I believe we live in a world in which humans will continue killing rats forever even if 5% of the population becomes vegan even if a hundred percent of the world becomes vegan and so on for park rangers or etc now if you read academic and theoretical tracts within the vegan political demi-monde you will actually see many vegans making the precisely the opposite claim so what I've said here there are vegans who claim that if just 10% of the population becomes vegan famously direct action everywhere claims it's just 3.5% they have a specific three and a half percent of people become vegan there will be all these wonderful changes as a result some people claim that war will cease to exist some people claim that racism and bigotry will cease to exist that the end of speciesism brought about by the vegan Awakening is gonna have all these wonderful knock-on consequences and I don't believe that at all moreover fundamentally I do not believe that if people become vegan they will be able to stop killing rats right and this is a sticking point it's interesting me when I talk to vegans you've really never thought it through no in order to farm wheat in order to have urban populations actually killing rats is going to continue to and the example that kicked all this off yes killing wild animals often in the name of ecology often in order to maintain that ecosystem to maintain that forest or what have you that kind of violence against animals is going to continue forever because I'm not a utopian philosopher I'm not an extremist I'm not an animal rights extreme pest I'm not a vegan extremist I'm a moderate but I'm a principled moderate people seem to associate being a moderate politically with compromise but if you're in a position of perpetual compromise even if you're a moderate at the beginning of the political process you won't be a moderate by the end within the Western world in many ways my views and values are moderate but they're actually based on very inflexible principles that make me I think despised by people standing to the left of me people saying to the right of me it makes you very easy to despise all around even though your position may indeed be moderate and well intended and so on within veganism I think that really is the sort of narrow difficult precipice I have to stand on at all times politically I'm misperceived from all angles I think people who are more conservative than me probably perceive me as being left-wing when I'm not and I think probably people who are left-wing and perceiving it's being conservative when I'm not and it seems like the world makes no place for me certainly Canada makes no place to me let's not generalize but the whole world Canadian politics and politics the United States there is no place for me in the political spectrum to take a seat neither on the left nor the right nor on the center and why is that it's because although my views are moderate they are really very principled and inflexible right um give you a couple of really simple examples that might surprise some of you there are all kinds of things I feel we should tolerate as a society I just genuinely do not see why currently it's fashionable for so many governments to tolerate and really encourage gambling now I'm not a conventional Christian I'm not Christian at all sorry I'm a nihilistic atheist it's not that I oppose you know gambling for hokey old-fashioned reasons of that kind but as it on the level of public policy there are many vices that I understand why the government wants to tolerate them or even encourage them and tax them but to have the government running casinos on a for-profit basis seems to me fundamentally very immoral to see the government running prisons on a for-profit base that private corporations signing contracts with the government to run prisons at a profit seems to me so fundamentally and self-evidently immoral and this one again may surprise some of you in some ways I mean again terms like left and right start to come meaningless I still do not understand why nobody else is alarmed by the fundamental assumption in countries like the United States and Canada that hospitals run at a profit that you have for-profit corporations in the medical sector and not all countries do this I note that Japan is one example of a modern westernized country that has hospitals that are very similar aesthetically to what you'd expect in a European hospital or a Canadian Hospital American hospital but all of the hospitals have to be incorporated on a non-profit basis it's not the case that surgeons are living in poverty in Japan it's not the case that there's some radical utopia but where you know the government looked at this and said is it really morally consistent and is it really uh it doesn't make sense to have something operating as a for-profit entity in what clearly has to kind of charitable endeavor in the in the public interest so there are many many of these issues and for me I mean being Canadian living in Canada one that comes up again and again of course as First Nations people are native people indigenous people decree the agility etcetera and you know what any of our political parties say and what they really mean when they state their policy positions on First Nations First Nations languages and and their future and so on there's really no where I can sit down on the political spectrum left right or center and be comfortable so that's the situation I live with and yeah I've many times said that when I go to vegan meetups I meet other vegans face-to-face it's a process of meeting people and then finding out how little you have in common which can be alienating and disappointing and and frustrating you meet other vegans you look for common ground on which you can engage in some kind of cooperative activism and instead what you find again and again you find out what principles or even just what aesthetic assumptions may be separate you and make it impossible for you to get along and collaborate you know not too many days ago I was talking to a vegan activist who a featured on this channel I've quoted him and he's his work has turned up on this channel several times seven some context a guy named Harrison Nathan I was citing him over Skype and right at the beginning of the conversation he said a number of things that were really insulting to me really deeply insulting to me but he said to me just kicking it off that he didn't believe that I supported the abolition of the slaughterhouse industry at all that I wasn't pursuing that he thought might the goals I was pursuing were not revolutionary enough or were fundamentally not abolitionist enough now that conversation with it was hilarious to me in many ways it really convinced me this is somebody I never wanted to work with and someone I never wanted to hear from again I'm like okay well I talked to him for three hours it's like guess what buddy that's the lot you're not getting another three minutes out of me I never want to talk to you get you some what I get worried at all it was it was hilarious and peculiar because at the end of the conversation he he complained that he found my use of coarse language upsetting or insulting during the conversation which wasn't directed at him I was using a coarse language in a very global way very despairing despairing about the nature of life on earth sort of way but that's me seemed really hilarious it's like you know buddy you seem to be at a really low level of self-awareness in terms of just how insulting and not insulting in a shallow way how deeply insulting well you've been saying to me this last little while is you know what you've said again and again including opening by telling me that you don't even believe I'm pursuing the goals of veganism well this what you see in the in the text on screen here this is an example of the kind of thing that separates us right because what he really means is he thinks I'm not revolutionary enough because I'm not willing to pretend that in the future we're all gonna love rats and latts in return are gonna love and take care of us right like the Vedic rate this utopia where humankind and rats are living together in harmony and no I'm not willing to pretend that I'm not willing to lie about that I don't want to be part of a social and political movement that's that's based on a lie and I don't want to live a lie myself again I'm a moderate but I'm principled moderate that's the position that I take and then someone like him someone like this other activist he does do a lot of street activism he then perceives me as if I'm not a real vegan no no I'm a real vegan I'm as I'm the realest vegan of all I'm the vegan who's willing to admit that even if you're vegan you still have problems with rat infestations you still have problems with managing wildlife populations and it still leads to animals getting killed right so veganism is not a perfect solution vegans may ask all the right questions but we don't have all the answers you know we have answers to some really obvious and fundamental stuff like slaughterhouses if everyone stops eating meat we don't need so many slaughterhouses in fact we need zero you know this is a simple one then when you press into you okay how do you actually farm wheat without killing Gophers though killing rats guess what we got questions and we ain't got the answers so you know do you want to call yourself a revolutionary we our revolution is based on self delusion deception and lies or do you want to be like me do you want to be a moderate and you want to be principled in precisely the sense that you're unwilling to trade in convenient half-truths you're unwilling to sell a lie [Music] [Music] evolution