On the Morality of Joe Rogan.

we have this assumption at least in the
21st century at least in western english-speaking culture that to be good is to be compromising that compromise is the sort of fundamental virtue that opens the gate to all the other social graces one should always be compromising and that to be uncompromising to be inflexible and principled there is instead a gateway to madness listen to this podcast listen to the whole podcast over several days going to the gym Charlamagne tha God and Andrew Schultz talking to Joe Rogan I had never before listen to this guy's act at any length like this listen for several hours this kinda within one and the same podcast within the same three-hour period he puts forward the idea that he came to a moral crisis in his life came to an ethical fork in the road and when he came to this Joe Rogan decided that either he had to become vegetarian or he had to take up hunting so he had a feeling he had a feeling there was something deeply immoral about factory farming and he was either going to challenge this by rejecting factory farming by rejecting animal agriculture as the existing amount of world and becoming a vegetarian or vegan or he was going to take up the practice of hunting and killing animals himself and resolve the ethical tension in his life in that way now as you probably already know he went ahead and did that the curious thing is that within one in the same podcast it happens to come up in conversation between the participants the subject of what do they require in there or in their writer so the writer this is a slang term for a contract especially an entertainers contract where they sign a contract with the venue and the venue they're performing it has to provide them with some set of services so a lot of people like to joke around about this one of the people in the conversation said that he just requires they provide him with bottled water but some people specify particular food or have particular outlandish things that want to be provided to them before they go on stage so that they'll feel comfortable and what does Joe Rogan say meet and his justification for he wants me to provided was for the sake of his health so that he doesn't eat junk food as he put it he wants you know beef he wants dead animals produced by factory farms the same factory farms he challenged as an ethical that I've heard him say many times he rejects as immoral the same factory farms that provided the rationale for him taking up this hobby of hunting and he has sometimes suggested that he only or exclusively eats the meat that he kills with his own hands on these hunting expeditions as opposed to the factory farms that he admits to be immoral now evidently what really happened here was he was looking for an excuse any excuse to rationalize his participation he had the socially sanctioned system of economic exploitation of animals and he found that strangely enough in going hunting himself in taking on I guess the burden of debt more directly he then felt less haunted by his indirect participation in these unseen evils of you know raising animals in captivity killing them cutting up their bodies and consuming them itself I wish I could say it was bizarre but I guess the truth his perspective is dismal and depressingly normal I was in an internet forum a couple days ago I think everybody else in the room is way more left-wing than I am I'm a kind of pragmatic nihilistic moderate person one of the people in this internet discussion forum was just saying you know he was talking about a socialist manifesto a particular book that you know he feels is it great he said he was saying oh if only more people would read this book if only more people would read this book than they they'd understand and they'd support his particular political movement and I said to him rather than debating the merits of this particular book could you just concede the point that any political movement any social cause that requires the American people to read a book to appreciate it is doomed from the health senate if people got to read a book to understand what it is you're trying to accomplish and to sympathizer that it's supported us cause your cause is going nowhere I wasn't joking it was funny but it wasn't joking veganism is so simple the rationale for it ethically and ecologically it's so simple that a child can apprehend it easily and I think that grown-ups people like people like Joe Rogan they struggle against it not despite its simplicity but because of it they feel it pulling them in like a force of gravity it's very much what he described that you know he felt this ethical pole he felt this you know pressure on to either accept the logic of vegetarianism as he put it and reject animal agriculture or to challenge it and he decided this challenge yet by challenging himself to go out and to go out and hunt go to kill animals with his own hands what I find strange and saddening about human nature is that most people have an excuse making habit of mind whereby an excuse for something is an excuse for anything an excuse for everything so what do I mean here this is like the person who is on a diet and trying to lose weight and then they they eat one chocolate bar and rather than just having a detach as you say okay well okay I shouldn't have eaten that Java bar but now I can compensate I can you know discipline myself more and keep my diet or instead eating the chocolate bar becomes a pretext to just give up on the diet entirely and eat a whole bunch of stuff eat a whole bunch of unhealthy food that's contrary to the diet they're trying to maintain you know as long as there's one one imperfection to provide a rationale for total self indulgence they just revert to total self-indulgence as their default mode of behavior as if it takes this incredible ideological edifice it has to be perfect and seamless and this is one a hole poked in that edifice then what comes flooding through the hole is their intrinsic nature to be a completely self intelligence come back just because with you I never have met anyone who took seriously the kinds of excuses I hear I mean I hear and I debate with people who took seriously the excuse that they put forward that well you know okay maybe some animals have these higher levels of cognition and higher levels of sensitivity and feeling but you know that they argue against me but what about the lowly sea cucumber what about what about animals in the ocean that don't even have a brain what about jellyfish they're translucent you can see right through them you know they have some complex behaviors that can tell the difference between light and darkness you know they can avoid predators and hunt prey but nevertheless they had these kinds of doubts there they drum up some kind of phony skepticism here I have never once met or spoken to or even heard of a person who followed through on that logically consistently to then say okay they'll maintain a vegan diet but they'll remain open to the possibility that they might one day eat a jellyfish on the grounds that jellyfish don't have brains they they have in their mind some kind of dotted line some kind of distinction where some animals count and they put some animals in the same category as vegetables because they think a sea cucumber is more like a real cucumber than it is like a slug or maybe they'd be willing to eat a slug too I don't know where they with a trailer I have never once seen someone who reasons that way instead they're like the person clinging you to the fad diet and then once they get that candy bar that breaks the diet then then the flood comes through then then all of their resolve and self-discipline all of the the even the moral characteristics they espouse themselves just disappear just washed away like it's nothing I mean the Joe Rogan's mentality is not that hunting free-range wild animals can and should replace the factory farming he says that but it's not what he really means what he really means is because he's had this experience of hunting wild animals he it frees him it liberates him to live a life of totally aimless self-indulgence and that is exactly what he's doing Joe Rogan does eat cheese he does eat dead animals that come from factory farms he's dead animals that come from us supermarket and a restaurant like McDonald's and all the rest of it he does I'm sorry based on hearing that one that one podcast it's completely established that he is a liar and a hypocrite but we live in an epoch when it has just been normalized it's just become the predominant mode of human behavior to live a life of reckless wanton short-term self-indulgence and were the primary purpose of human reason of the higher faculties of the mind the primary purpose your brain is put to he is precisely making excuses for that life of self-indulgence so that you feel like a good person or even so that you feel heroic and when Joe Rogan is out there with his bow and arrow and with his dagger killing and cutting up an animal corpse in the wilderness he feels like a hero and that in some strange sense is psychological compensation for the feeling that started him on this journey in the first place which was that he found out the brutal disgusting exploitative ecological irresponsible reality of animal agriculture of factory farming and he felt implicated as the villain