Veganism: Compassion, Contempt and Loathing.

I think the fundamental virtue that
forms the basis for all other virtues is honesty and I really mean intellectual honesty being honest with yourself being honest with others being honest about what you know what you don't know being honest about what motivates you what you feel being honest about why you're saying something above and beyond being honest in the particulars of what you're saying um just washing some videos from Zahira as a hero to 69 another vegan youtuber here and somebody who I I don't think I have a whole lot in common with aside from the fact that we're both vegan and you know I had an emotional reaction to some of this stuff she's saying she's being really honest about some of the things that I'm I'm reluctant to talk about honestly in veganism there's uh there's a pose that a lot of us slip into of pretending that veganism is something based entirely on compassion and that we experience veganism in terms of compassion when really this is a kind of political mandate and a lot of what we experience is negative is horror is revulsion is anger is hatred and it's hard to talk about that stuff it's hard to talk about this stuff because you know political discourse in the Western world is based on keeping up a pretense that what you're doing is detached and merely in the public interest when I go into a small vegan restaurant in Victoria this happened to me recently and there's somebody with a fur coat or a leather coat draped over their chair next to their little table I've got to sit down at my table and eat my vegan noodles looking at dismembered corpse of an animal at the desk next to me what I feel is not compassion and it's not coming from compassion it's not based on compassion and I could sit here on YouTube and I could be dishonest with you and try to relate what veganism is in my life entirely in terms of an ideology of compassion and I am very familiar with that kind of thumb doublespeak that kind of propaganda from Buddhism from the politics of Asia you can justify anything in terms of compassion you justify war in terms of compassion people do it all the time it's not nice to admit what you feel and I've got to say that feeling it's because that one vegan restaurant that's the one place where I don't want to deal with that where I don't want to see a leather jacket or a fur coat even though the restaurant in principle is open to everyone when I go to the library if I see a fur coat or a leather coat at the library I don't even think about it because the library really is for everyone but when I go to that one place there was the sense of isn't this the one place in the city that's identified as vegan you know if you are a non vegan you're gonna come in here couldn't you leave your fur coat at home I was in a small town in in China things change so fast in China I don't even know if it's a small town anymore I mean you know it could have become a big city and also its population could have collapsed things changed fast in ten years in China that town might not be recognized one more that was in a small town in China that had one vegetarian restaurant I lived there for a while at that time I was basically a refugee from Laos death threats from the Lao government I left with nothing but my backpack and I knew the whole story of this family running this one vegetarian restaurant it was it was basically vegan because they were very old-fashioned traditional Buddhist vegetarians they didn't have eggs they didn't have I don't think they had any milk and you know it was a struggle for them to run that restaurant obviously they're making less money than they would if they were selling meat obviously there's a religious component and an ethical component to it the woman who ran the place had a really hard time because she wanted to employ waitresses who were themselves vegetarian she couldn't find any she ended up hiring these young women who were willing to be vegetarian for a certain taste with all these struggles and all of it took place under the shadow of fear of repression from the Chinese government the local representatives of the communist dictatorship were very concerned about this restaurant they were concerned about controlling any form of religious symbol any form of Buddhism in that region and they had been censored they had to put up sort of a sign describing it as a vegetable restaurant because most of the symbols indicating vegetarianism in Chinese traditional words for vegetarian are associated with Buddhism and the government refused to let them have any kind of Buddhist iconography whatsoever no matter how bland and there was this Portuguese tourists who came into that restaurant every day while he was there visiting that town and he forced them to let him eat meat in their restaurant and at first I think they did it because they thought he'd only be there for like a day or two days or something and then the owner of the restaurant said to him formally I'm sorry this isn't acceptable because we can't allow you to eat meat on our plates on the same plates that we serve vegan food arm and the guy respond to this by going out and buying a set of plates and forks and knives and coming back to that restaurant and continuing to eat fried chicken their french fries it wasn't he wasn't even eating Chinese food let alone vegetarian food I was really tempted to to knock that guy's teeth him I had a long conversation with him in that restaurant and you know he was just completely oblivious to the harm he was doing and I don't even mean the harm to the animals in this case but the really grievous offense he was causing to everyone in that restaurant people who who ran up people who work there and to customers like me amaura obviously he spoke English for the heavy Portuguese accent baram's st. contemptuously oh I had to buy my own plates because you know for some superstitious reason they won't let me eat that plate in that whole city every other restaurant served meat anywhere else you could have eaten pork fried chicken whatever that was the one place in the whole city set aside for vegetarians and vegans and the people running it were making sacrifices to do that they were making less money or struggling to make any money at all and so on and you've got to come into that place and and make a mockery of it a large part of what we do and what we feel and what we go through as vegans has nothing to do with compassion and it is dark and it is hateful and it's politically inconvenient and I appreciate seeing someone likes a hero talk about this sorry so I'm probably mispronouncing your name but anyway I appreciate seeing her talking about this stuff as honestly as she does you know the flip side of that is this guy Tobias who have been interacting with online and a couple my videos recently if responding him and he asked these sort of theoretical questions of you know well are we are we indulging and fetishizing veganism are we making veganism into a fetish where we appreciate people only because they're vegan were we're making veganism the primary criterion or only criterion of who we socialize with who we work with who is those who I and my answer is no I really disagree with Tobias on this this aspect of his thinking because when I meet someone else who really is vegan not someone who's reduce that Aryan or flexitarian not someone who is merely [Music] doing their part to try to eat less meat not someone like Al Gore or Bill Clinton who's kind of sort of vegan now and then when it's convenient when you meet someone who knows what it's like to go hungry for just 24 hours because they were on a bus trip that were in whatever difficult circumstance and there was no vegan food so they ate nothing that little bit of suffering that's very different from somebody who will be on the same bus trip and say oh there are no vegan options okay I'll just buy this chocolate bar I'll just I'll just eat this hotdog they'll make whatever compromise for their own convenience on on a shallow level as well as on a deep level I relate to and I want to relate to the people who have been through that suffering of eating nothing rather than making the compromise I can remember being at formal academic conferences one that was about Musial adji comes to mind another one that was about Buddhism where there was nothing vegetarian everything had me so I either ate nothing or I sat there with just a bowl of white rice well everyone around me was eating whatever pork dead cows whatever there's nothing it's nothing like compassion it's radically unrelated to compassion man I'm the guy sitting there at that conference with just a bowl of white rice and a glass of water and I'm happy to do that and all you other hypocrites are sitting at the table eating your dead animals veganism is a very effective solution to a long list of problems but I've said on this channel repeatedly in many ways it reflects an ugly side of my character and it draws on and involves ugly confrontational aspects of human nature that's why it's got a future if veganism were just built on compassion I think it would come and go quick the same way for just a few years everyone seemed to care about you know starvation in Haiti there was an earthquake in Haiti for five minutes the whole world cares about Haiti then it's over that's compassion doesn't last when I was a kid the whole world cared about Ethiopia for how long a few months was it even one year was it even two years and then it's gone there were ugly aspects to veganism aspects that involve militancy intolerance outrage sure even if it's a meaningless symbolic sense of outrage like when I'm in that restaurant I don't want to see your leather coat I don't want to see your fur coat there's a struggle to determine what the culture of the twenty-first century is going to be and veganism is one ideology in that struggle