Political Action, Guanxi & Vegan Social Networks

hi this is a bit of a philosophical
follow up to my most recent video in response to some comments I just got from Tobias himself you do not need to now click back to that earlier video to understand opposed to talk about because it's a very general theoretical and fundamental nature the question 7 Tobias made me once again pause to think about the extent to which my own discussions of politics even though they may be very pragmatic and tone even though they may largely revolve around personal anecdotes my thoughts do nevertheless have underpinnings really in greco-roman philosophy in assumptions about what political action is and how it works that in modern political science come out of the reading of Aristotle Plato lucidity use etc and applying those ancient Greek frameworks to the practical reality of how you bring a complaint to City Hall in the modern world how you might give a deposition to provincial Parliament's how you might lobby your state government depending on where you are and the different types of risks and rewards the people expose themselves to including financial risk legal risk the risk of being thrown in prison that activism and not merely activism activism lobbying political engagement of any kind entails so there's a whole framework there that I'm not mentioning and not explaining when I record a pretty casual video that obviously includes examples of me socializing with people on the internet but to me it is not just socializing that I'm talking about I was surprised when an initial responses to bias he said you know fairly enough you simple look I'm talking about having an economic and ecological impact on the meat industry and you're just talking about socializing and that's very surprising me to hear because from my perspective I'm not just talking about socializing in my earlier video I used examples of people trying to organize a small magazine or a small website or take political action get involved activism or start a business or repeatedly referred to that and I refer to the Chinese concept of guanxi and Guan XI is important for political organization and this kind of economic organization getting some kind of business rolling now it's interesting to me that oil again partly I have to pause and reflect these things seem obvious to me because of my background in political philosophy and indeed in practical real world politics I do know what it's like to give a deposition at City Hall and the type of organization that surrounds that I have the deep assumption here that a prerequisite for effective political action is having a group of close-knit individuals you can say friends in my earlier video i just use words like friendship you know of adults after they finish high school trying to make friends trying to find common ground with other people that they can work with but again it was not just socialization was document i was talking about getting work done and that capacity to form a unit of people who can work together i think is critically important whether you call that guan xi and chinese or whether you appeal to a ancient greek nomenclature okay at this moment i'm going to go off on a tangent that you're going to see soon is not really a tangent at all i received an email a couple of weeks ago from a guy who was offering to publish on paper one of my old essays that has floated around the internet for years i wrote an essay on the philosophy or thur Schopenhauer when I was still an undergraduate student and it's actually been read and referred to a quite a number of people I've gotten fan mail from it and I've seen it referred to in some odd context the internet that showed that some number of people cared about and responded to that video so this guy wrote to me asking if he could publish this on paper in some kind of small magazine he had so naturally the first step for me was to google him the glows publication look into it and in my reply I said to him you know because I was looking at his publication obviously he managed to get together a group of maybe five friends and to start publishing you know on obscure magazine uh not a magazine that's going to change the world perhaps but he had that guanxi he had that level of organization to put together a publication that's a very humble form of self-expression whether it's artistic expression political expression or whether you think of that magazine as a business almost nobody these days is trying to make money through publications but getting a group of people together and cooperate together can trust each other who trust each other enough to devote financial resources as well as time and effort to making a magazine that's a very basic unit of organization anyway I actually said response to this guy which is which is really true I said look you know I'm at a university every day of the week if I had found just two or three other people two or three other intellectuals hard-working intellectuals who I can cooperate with I would have started a small magazine of this same kind within the last year shall we say um but I haven't at the University I go to you although I socialize a lot with the professors frankly in many ways I am alone I'm on the internet talking to this camera I'm communicating with few hundred people in these videos but do I know five people who could cooperate with me just to produce a small magazine no I don't do I know five people who I could cooperate with closely enough to register a legal charity in Canada now registering a charity doing the paperwork to have a charity can be the beginning of many things it can be the beginning of publications it can be the beginning of political activism again at city hall at the provincial level at the federal level you name it but having five people who can sign legal documents jointly who trust each other enough to put money into a bank account together whose trust each other enough that they're going to expose themselves to the risk ultimately of going to prison because all political action involves legal risk believe me lobbying the government in a communist dictatorship like Laos or China or even Hong Kong now I mean you know you want to get involved in political activism in Hong Kong you need to really trust the people who are signing documents with you who are making public political statements with you but any form of collaboration again even if you're artistic collaboration but collaboration for publications public engagement with issues ecological advocacy vegan advocacy this does have to start with what I would just normally call friendship I really think the Chinese concept of guanxi is so useful because it provides us with a concept that we don't have in English guanxi and Chinese maybe this person is not your friend but you can work with them you can trust them there's some exchange of responsibilities involved maybe you can delegate a responsibility to them and they can delegate a responsibility you there may be exchange of gifts involved in establishing that type of practical trust and cooperation and so on there are even more pretentious ideas that come out of Latin and Greek that I'm not going to use this video and I don't use my day-to-day life and any rate this discussion I've just had with Tobias maybe highlights a generational difference a difference between myself someone whose values are perhaps 2,000 years at a date and people who because of the internet conceptualize political action and engagement as being something that isolated individuals do I'm sorry to say in the real world political action is precisely something that isolated individuals don't they don't do I'm having the confidence to go to City Hall and give a deposition normally does require that you have two or three people minimum cooperating on a project and those people may only have some things come with you and not others you may have a group of two or three people who all really care about saving the whales saving the Dolphins saving a particular Harbor saving trying to get the city to change the time the ferry departs oh it can be a very practical issue could be a very lofty issue it could be something like veganism that in some ways is a practice we can undertake ourselves and our own kitchens and our own diets but it may be something like wanting to scrutinize the use of vivisection on a university that then involves very complex legal jurisdiction engagement with any issue of these kinds I mean if you just want to put together the money to organize a conference an academic conference to organize a publication let's say an academic publication those things can really have a very long shadow they can have a big impact on the world but it's going to start with maybe five friends who again trust each other enough to put the money together to devote the time and effort and energy to making something happen and thus yeah there's a very strange asymmetry between what I felt I was saying in that video i posted just yesterday and what tobias thinks he's looking at because he thinks i'm just talking about socializing and know what I'm talking about friendship when I'm talking about social networking if you like I'm talking about the necessary first step towards political action of any kind and yes in your business life in your economic life I think it really is the necessary first step towards some almost anything that's really worth doing beyond just walking around with your hat in your hand in your resume trying to let someone else be your boss and someone else determine your financial future if you wanted to open a vegan bakery I think you need to start with at least a group of five friends and those five friends might ultimately have to sign together to try to get a loan from a bank so on and so forth