Advice Nobody Wants to Hear [Ep. 001]

got an interesting question by email
from a viewer who was asking my advice about his own changes in career and education and the questions are to some extent pragmatic but to some extent also they are philosophical so I'm gonna leave out the personal details of this guy his name is Christopher hi Chris and toward the end of his message he reflects that in considering these different disciplines of study these different career paths in front of him quote I had it in my mind that I should achieve something to try to help people but I feel like this may be more motivated by conceit by the desire to feel like I'm influential and important and that I matter rather than by real goodwill towards other beings and by real goodness so close quote a very interesting set of considerations generally I want to say with absolutely no cynicism that when I talk to other vegans the question of how you're gonna earn a living in this world the question are you gonna earn money he's really interesting to me I think it's a really interesting type of conversation when I was writing email recently to another vegan who I know on YouTube I had a sort of disclaimer saying look I know everyone asks you what do you do for a living it's sort of it's some old chat it's a banal type of conversation it's so common but I'm asking this really not in a banal way I'm really interested and I think it's they're really interesting ethical questions surrounding employment surrounding career paths for vegans that other people don't think about or maybe are too sensitive to you know I am a vegan but before I became vegan I had already quit jobs over a point of moral principle because that's the kind of guy I was I was also strictly vegetarian I'm saying before I was vegan but I already refused to wear a leather thing so it's pretty close to being back then but in general I mean it's hard to generalize about vegans were a diverse bunch of people with with very different issues and values but certainly the core ethical concerns of veganism lend themselves to some philosophizing about how a person is going to make money and in this case also what does it mean to try to help people what is humanitarian engagement of motivation and in this case how is that different from this kind of conceit now I'm an overt nihilist I may be a highly ethical nihilist but my own values I describe as historical nihilism what I think is valuable in this world and what can make a pause the difference is not based on belief but on very pragmatic down-to-earth concerns and that guided my engagement with ecology with politics now with veganism and so on also he asks here without quoting him directly how does this kind of conceit differ from really caring about helping people I think one of the first things you have to realize the philosopher max Stirner wrote about this at length but unfortunately you have to read sterner and German because the English translation is terrible one of the challenges in life is moving past the sort of popular delusion of talking about the people in German it's that's Foulke and to really think about people not in the abstract but in the concrete so this question of motivation if we're talking about Laos starting with doing humanitarian work in Laos I can tell you how I feel about Lao culture about Lao people in general about particular Lao people I've known about the Lao language and then about ethnic minorities within Laos because a lot of the humanitarian work is to help smaller ethnic groups that are even more poverty-stricken even more disadvantaged than regular Lao people within that country and I can reflect on the extent to which my humanitarian engagement we're talking about the future here not the past may or may not reflect real feelings of goodwill toward the Lao people now why is that look I drink zero alcohol laos has one of the hardest drinking cultures in the world this is just one example of how i'm dramatically different from Lao culture I've lived in Scotland and I've lived in Laos they drink more whiskey in Laos it's my honest opinion it is a hard-drinking called and they drink Scottish whiskey too actually it's good to allow wedding one of the most common gifts is bottles of scotch whiskey there are many many obvious ways in which my values are incompatible with Lao culture and just with the reality of daily life in Laos getting a good night's sleep is very important to me despite the fact that I look incredibly exhausted now I'm jet-lagged I woke up at 5:30 a.m. I have all kinds of complaints with that in Laos you're in a country we are surrounded by barking dogs and roosters crowing at all hours animal husbandry different kinds getting a decent night's sleep is incredibly tough anywhere in the country unless you live in a solid concrete box with no windows and even then barking dogs can get through concrete there are many ways in which I might be able to say I have contempt for Laos or I dislike Lao culture and does this contradict the humanitarian impulse well for me I see the Lao people and the past tense I saw the Lao people as in many ways victims of circumstances that other countries created for them and incredibly violent history you know they're on the list of countries that have had the most bombs dropped on them of any country in the world definitely the United States dropped more bombs on Laos then ever were dropped on Germany during World War two an enormous tonnage of bombardment dropped in the country terrible suffering for reasons beyond their control and they're struggling with backwardness just lack of access to education lack of literacy all kinds of things that make me feel that I'm in a position to help them and also make me feel that many of the problems with that culture are not their own fault now maybe that is a kind of humanitarian delusion I use the word feel a whole bunch of times there I didn't use the word no um to feel something is very different from to know something and I met people in Laos and even more in Cambodia who had first gone to those countries with this type of humanitarian impulse they learned the language they stay there for a few years and they started off these people need my help these people deserve my help because their problems are not of their own creation and they need assistance and after some number of years they turn a corner in terms of their own cynicism and they feel like [ __ ] these people they're the creators of their own problems I hate these people it's their problem they created the mess they should get themselves at and they may still be employed six days a week in humanitarian work and as as Chris is asking here and they may not be motivated by real goodwill towards these people they may have lost their goodwill the goodwill they had before may have evaporated in the face of various facts if in the face of how they how they feel about the culture I mean definitely Cambodia the rough and tumble of that culture I met many people I may be an example myself by the end of my time in Cambodia I never wanted to go back to Cambodia there are many many things I really dislike about Cambodian culture and if you're talking about sacrificing your own time effort and money to help people you know again the crucial thing is to think about who are the people not as an abstraction but to think about real people if you did humanitarian work helping drug addicts here in Canada do you have it in you to care about them to respect them to really help them you need to be engaged with the all-too-human reality of who these people are whether there are alcoholics or drug addicts or or just ignorant farmers I mean cut in Laos I mean you had problems with people literally drinking paint thinner because they felt it made they made certain types of juice taste better you know total ignorance you had problems in Cambodia with people poisoning themselves in others using using pesticides improperly but the labels on the pesticides would only be written in English and Chinese they can't read them whether or not they're actually literate in any language literate and Cambodian or anything else anyway is another question you know ignorant sit self ignorance is destructive and dangerous and ugly and can you still have goodwill towards people people who may put you in harm's way people who may put your life in danger and may whatever destroy things you care about out of their ignorance uh I mean I almost feel like I can say humanitarian work or humanitarian path in life if it's based on goodwill towards people maybe doomed to failure most of this discourse I'm in the last hundred years it's been dominated by Christianity most of the charities that helped drug addicts help the homeless or what have you more Christian charities and most of these conversations and philosophical reflections took place within a totally Christian idiom of trying to love and care for the poor in these things and you know this is instead obviously in this generation more and more people are asking these questions in a secular way in my case in a in a totally atheistic nihilistic way and although as bad as Christianity is a dislike many things but Christianity obviously it created a cultural framework that massively simplified these questions when people engaged in them you know the same way that nationalism simplified questions by just saying your motivation is to do this for king and country religion often has the effect of massively simplifying what you're doing and why you're doing it by simply saying it's it's for God it's not even for the greater good it's not even to benefit particular people now the other problem is here so the first big issue I raised was how we think of the people and then this question of of real goodness of real goodwill towards people we need to re-evaluate in terms of how you actually feel about actual people or actual groups of people it's other concern is of whether or not his engagement it's not really clear to me exactly what type of work he's thinking about doing whether it's pure charity work work involving languages but his his ideas of helping humanity one way or another through one discipline or career another he's concerned that is really motivated by conceit by a desire to feel important um I am very critical of various flaws in my character but that is not one of them and I've got to say I had a lot of experience discussing these issues with my girlfriends in life girlfriends who have come and gone because I think some of them couldn't really understand what motivated me I remember one girlfriend I had she was also Canadian she felt that the reason for this was that people had always treated me as important anyway that was her interpretation of my character they're just kind of when I walk into a room people would listen to me people would treat me with a certain kind of respect just because of my self-confidence and manner of speaking that was her interpretation and I understand her reasons for thinking that she had her experience with me being my girlfriend and whatever obviously she's a biased a biased observer of of who I am what my life is like but I can remember long periods my life where I was I was not treated with respect and how I felt about it and where people regarded me as a person of no account and no significance in different contexts and so on and I've got to say for me that was never the motivating factor I was really interested in poverty as poverty you know we have the saying in English about you know art art for art's sake I was really interested in poverty for the sake of poverty when I first enrolled in university it's a much younger and more naive man the subject I enrolled in was actually economics so year one week one of my first VA diploma I thought I would study economics because I wanted to study the philosophy of poverty I wanted to be engaged with poverty and how we cope with poverty not just charities government policy everything else and I was dis pointed it was a crushing disappointment to me that I was in a department that was only about making money it was only about getting ranch and all the students were there for that reason and what was being taught God at that time you know day trading was a big deal people making money through day trading managing hedge funds these were the aspirations of the students and these were the things the program was supposed to train you at least these types of careers there was absolutely nothing about poverty was that my idea of economics what not my idea of what economics is but why I cared about economics that was not going to be covered in that university program at all and in many ways for the next four years that was a disappointment I never recovered from I went from one department to another and one discipline to another looking for what I couldn't find in the department of economics and I ended up at the very very end of studying Buddhism in a lot of ways you can say that when I was studying Buddhism I was trying to get back to my reasons for being in university in the first place because what excited me so much about Buddhism was exactly this is tarah battable ism was WOW Sri Lanka was then in civil war it's now post war Cambodia long civil war then just recently post war all of these were countries emerging from post war extreme poverty and being engaged with Buddhism and the languages of Southeast Asia gave me a way to meaningfully connect to these cultures and contexts and so on in that period of history so I wanted to have the experience in Laos that I did have of living in a hut made out of bamboo on the side of the Mekong River and waking up in the morning and chopping firewood and then you light the firewood on fire and you have to boil the drinking water you're gonna drink and I would eat white rice and yellow lentils and vitamin pill and being engaged with the reality of Agriculture and poverty and the that kind of that kind of hands-on suffering I don't know what to say I mean an interest in poverty also guided my engagement with Buddhism you know in a massive way and I can't even say in a profound way it's it's shallow you know I grew up in Toronto Canada for the most part mmm I was always interested in poverty within Canada particularly First Nations poverty when I came back to Canada I want to be engaged in that but none of that for me subjectively none of that was me wanting to feel important now if you know anything about what goes on in academic Buddhism already this made me profoundly alien to pretty much the whole scene there's a lot of escapism there are a lot of white people living in luxury in California and making money through meditation retreats who want to keep on living in luxury in California and have absolutely no interest in poverty or the emergence of poverty and in Cambodia in Southeast Asia how do we choose what we study in university the real answer for me was that I was running away from one lousy department after another I was trying to take the least terrible option I wasn't doing what I wanted to do and that is still true today I'm still coping with lousy courses lousy departments lousy options and not at all being able to do what I want to do neither in terms of immediate research nor in terms of long term career so the disappointment I had with the Department of Economics at one University I've had a much worse disappointment here with the department teaching Chinese really crushing and I had to take that complaint to the Dean and there was a whole controversy over the fact that basically the teaching of Chinese at UVic is garbage and now that's gonna have tremendously long-term consequences for me in my life and my career options I came here to study Chinese and now I'm not studying Chinese so the question really of what you can study sadly is going to be based on a completely pragmatic evaluation of what's taught your University what you can succeed at and what departments happen to be well organized happen to have competent professors and even how those professors feel about you because you know look I mean I have a certain interest in poverty as already described but if I go to apartment if I go to a department in a university where everyone's a Marxist or a communist then right away I've got a conflict with them and they may all despise me and if you think that's only a hypothetical example it's not there were a lot of people in academia who are on the far left and I have myself had contact with many different departments that were predominantly communist or far left-wing again Buddhism was a way to avoid that Buddhism was a non socialist non-communist philosophy that for me was engaged with politics and poverty and all these other things so that boils to probably absolutely zero practical advice for Christopher here but a set of reflections in response to his his message he asked also specifically about the study of languages maybe I should make separate videos talking about that