Passion vs. Organization: Henya vs. Durianrider.

can those two people work together you
know like everyone takes for granted that someone like me and someone like durianrider can't work together right and one of the reasons is and again I sympathize durianrider doesn't want to he doesn't even want to work with Kenya Kenya I'm working on my pronunciation people okay I'm working he doesn't want to bridge the gap he wants a narrow category of like-minded people to come to a festival and while I sympathize I would point out already that that is really the opposite of activism that is the opposite of political organization because real political organization is all about reaching out to people who are fundamentally different from you so that we can overcome this kind of isolation this disorganized individual activism and at least start by asking the question of what can we do together so one of the deep broad issues we have in political philosophy is called the fallacy of composition I say that and I laugh because actually the meaning associated with that phrase has really changed just since 2008 the idea the phrase has been around since forever and actually there are a few different technical phrases used talk about this in economics what's arguably the very first book in the history of macroeconomics a book called the fable of the bees sounds like a children's storybook but it's not it's a it's a treatise on economics from hundreds of years ago the fable of the bees by Bernard Mandeville already introduced this fundamental paradox paradox in the old-fashioned sense of the word of the difference between individual decisions that are rational and social decisions on a larger scale what the implications are and what the effects are people can make selfish decisions decisions that are rational in their own interest that have very negative consequences when they're scaled up when millions of people are doing instead of just one person doing it and can also make rational decisions that I actually have a very beneficial and positive social effect even though they don't realize it that's not why they're making the decision that's not the outcome they're pursuing they're not doing something charitably they maybe do sing completely selfishly but that really does have positive outcomes now since 2008 this specific phrase the fallacy of composition this is kind of made a comeback in western economic theory guy named Richard ku has a KU spelled K oh oh by the way I'm not cou P um Richard ku has actually kind of reinvigorated the discourse around this concept and applied it to the history of the Great Depression 2008 crisis Japanese economics and politics a number of other things um so this is kind of really or relative obscurity with new debates surrounding the the concept now in veganism or in any other form of political action so ecology or anything else you want to talk about it's very tempting to just say hey you follow your passion hey that's that can be terrible advice anyone watching this even if you are 16 years old you probably have enough experience in life to know there are some situations where telling somebody just follow your passion is terrible advice depends on who the person is depends on what their passion is and then when you scale it up you're talking about a whole lot of people following their passions maybe this is gonna lead to terrible consequences but I do sympathise with on a subjective and human and personal level you look at a guy like for instance a vegan nut he's a he's a vegan activist who's making fun of himself by calling his channel vegan nut he's a guy in Toronto he's obviously very unhappy about you know meat eating fur being the animals being killed to produce fur on codes especially and he does a totally idiosyncratic form of activism he goes out and confronts people what the and so on and it's really tempting to look at that say hey look this guy is highly motivated this is his personal passion that's his project he obviously finds this satisfying so okay this is the activism he should do um now both when you scale this up in terms the number of people and when you expand the focus chronologically over time so instead of looking at one guy in one year you're looking at a few hundred people or a few thousand people over ten years that's when it really gets tricky that's when you have to say now and this may be different for whatever city you're living in like if you were living in Paris in the early 1990s you'd be in a situation where were virtually the only form of animal rights activism and you know anti meat activism vegan activism like that scene was dominated by anti-fur activism and it really became like a joke in the mainstream media it was like you know what well these people seem to only care about the fur industry and you know there's all these antics of showing up at fashion shows and throwing red paint at people this became a high-profile cause well in many ways the other components of having a meaningful social movement just we're not there now still I sympathize like you know there are people where you know like this one guy that's the thing that motivates them that's that what they find rewarding and maybe also that's the tension in their lives living in that city like maybe living in downtown Toronto that's the one thing that really leaps out to him that he feels he needs to speak to her needs to react to is people wearing fur but again scale it up and broaden it in time is he still gonna be motivated and rewarded by doing that let's say if he continues working alone because most of document it's just him at a camera doing this one on one is he gonna do that for five years is he gonna do that for ten years maybe most people will not most people will start questioning the same things that have been discussed so much on this channel what is effective activism how can I make a real difference how can I get organized other people how can I do something more meaningful with more long-term impact with my time even if for one year they find that really rewarding no obvious I'm just using him as an example and this is just one example you could be living in a place where you know when you scale it up everyone locally is obsessed with just fur and you gotta say well wait why is nobody tackling milk you could be living in a place where everyone's obsessed with vivisection and nobody's addressing the other issues you could be living in a place where it's Tigers or elephants or whales here where I live people seem to care a lot about whales and maybe maybe nothing else they don't care about cows or pigs you know obviously you as a human being individually you can't do everything maybe you can do nothing I mean really some people you have a full-time job and you have kids and you have a heart condition you know you have health problems and your your grandparents are in and out of the retirement home and they need you to come help them you know real life is where it is you may be very very limited what you can do mentally emotionally in terms of time commitments I can relate to all that mmm but if nobody is making these decisions strategically if there is no organization if you just have a thousand people with a thousand YouTube channels and a thousand individual websites or individual blogs and each of them is just going out and pursuing their own passion which may be as I say like this guy in Toronto maybe just walking up to a stranger on the street saying hey why are you wearing a fur coat you know I'm not hating on the guy he finds it really rewarding his passion justifies that form of activism for him at this time you know for him I'm sure there's no other justification even if there were no other outcomes or what have you but you scale that up and you get into this economic concept the fallacy of composition like okay so each of you people individually is making a decision that's rational for you it makes sense for you today but when we look at a thousand people over 10 years then we look back and say man this was not even ten percent as effective as it could have been if there have been any kind of strategy if there have been any kind of organization I don't care what city you live in okay if you're in a democracy whether it's Germany or the United States if you actually have a thousand people organized you can take on City Hall you can I took on City Hall with one other guy we think this huge impact was Diggle was a two-man team and the other guy was not reliable I didn't want to talk about that in a video but a man at one point he just disappeared for three months and you know I didn't even ask I assumed like he had a serious problem with his girlfriend or something like sometimes people disappear you know enough about their life to just not ask and then when he really ma'am what happened to you I've been working so hard on this project at City Hall was ecological activism and like he had just gotten stoned you just been using drugs and like right there was like well man my faith in you my ability to cooperate with you my ability to commit my time and effort to this project has just been cut in half because you've just they made to me you're the kind of person who's gonna flake out and disappear at any time for no good reason like you know because you're a marijuana smoker so like right there in many ways from that moment my professional relationship with him like in terms of politics or what-have-you friendship and everything else there was a there was a limit put on it and you know looking back I was right to do that it's like well this isn't somebody I can rely on this isn't somebody I can really work with yeah you know what I've taken on universities the small numbers of people at a project U of T there were like two other people involved so like a team of three people we got funding backing us there were different kind of things in our favor but the big turn key event with that remember was an article I wrote and that article really it was a criticism of what was going wrong in one academic department and that really got taken up and discussed by the people in charged that department and there was fundraising and the campaign to influence the political decisions going outside the university and universities in Canada are 0% Democratic there's no democracy there's no transparency but still even in that environment that was actually really effective activism and we really made a difference that had tremendous long-term implications and yeah really it was me and two other people say look I mentioned these this is like compared to what people talk about on YouTube these are very unconventional examples of political actors but really this is quite conventional really this is pen and paper political organization going to City Hall going to the dean's office whatever and making making some kind of a difference but what I'm pointing to here is the contrast between organization and passion and it's a wonderful thing to be able to say to people just follow your passion if you're passionate about fur just do fur but the contrast is to say look you're following your passion but we need to get organized and if we don't do that we won't even know what potential were squandering we won't know what we're missing out on do we have a hundred people do we have a thousand people do we have just five people let's let's figure that out you know maybe you are continuing with your passion project whether that's fur or save the whales or a local forest conservation boy I mean for some huge issue that apparently I'm the only person in veganism to care about there's so much talk about you know bikinis and bicycles and so rare to see people talking before Stephan anyway I digress um okay that's what you're working on but can we at least take an inventory who are the other five or ten people living in this city who are vegan or who share some core ecologic lenders and can we do something together can we start to plan what's possible and again you're explaining the number of people and it's also the amount of time are we talking about five years we're talking about ten years because if all we do is work in a totally isolated way one man with one camera on the sidewalk harassing people who wear fur what does that get you five years from now what does that accomplish five years down the road and they look I mean the two funny examples from my own life I just mentioned one at City Hall once at the University uh one of them did effectively challenge went to the mayor's office and so on he did effectively challenge a fossil fuel burning power plant and it at least delayed that project for many years we had an impact on the planning of a number of you know ecologically sensitive projects with no budget with no lawyers two guys and both of us were busy though I was still a university student and so on and as I mentioned that that lobbying within university Anto that ended up creating a new a new department I was gonna say technically a new program a new academic program and with a budget and hiring a new professor and so on so mmm and it also got the university to wake up and recognize its shortcomings in in a department that already existed but they said wow you know we're listing courses that don't exist which is fraud legally speaking they could have I could have taken them to court in theory but that would have cost money so what I did actually ended up addressing that problem without without a lawsuit quite possibly they were motivated to change because of the the indirect threat or possibility of a lawsuit look the other big issue here so I've talked about organization versus passion fallacy of composition on this channel I say explicitly veganism is for everyone and organizing at this kind whether it's just with five people or 50 people is going to involve brain together people of really contrasting characters of really contrasting political values it's going to involve people who vote for Donald Trump working together with people who voted for Obama or whatever example people who are right wing and left wing people who are Christian and people who are atheist even though we all have our limits I've talked about that at some length there's an earlier video I made that I still really holds up I'm gonna provide a link below and I'll guess I'll put in a link floating above my head here - it's a video that has anti-capitalism in the name so you may not realize it's relevant when it's out here but just it's a long video but just in the first five minutes of that video you'll see that what I say there is very much relevant to what I'm saying here and now in this video I am NOT durianrider somebody like durianrider and this is to his credit is open about the fact that he wants to spend time with like-minded people he set up a festival in Thailand not to operate like petaa people with Ethical Treatment animals not to operate like the Green Party and not to operate like what I described in that earlier video that link to not to be for everyone he said openly he doesn't want to spend time with flaky people he only wants to spend time with like-minded athletes and that's why he's redefined that festival to be a cycling festival to exclude people who are not athletes and he wants to exclude everyone who disagrees with him even about dietary choices he wants a narrow focus he wants to just meet up and have a kind of party or celebration with like-minded people now I could member complaining in the past - this is IIIi really sympathize he said that he didn't want people coming to that festival who were drug users you know I assume you know marijuana and other soft drugs be very very common in Chiangmai tourists to go to Thailand generally the rate of drug use is very very high for all drugs including the Chiang Mai that part of Thailand that's the great homeland of opium it's like one of the world capitals for opium tours and heroin tourism people go there from all around the world to use hard drugs also not just soft drugs so I assume at some point he got upset about that - the people were coming to his festival who were not his type of guys in all these different ways and I can sympathize of that that's his mandate so the latest controversy came out of that is that he's banned Kenya Hania from Israel very prominent vegan activist no given that that's whose stated objective I can sympathize but my stated concerns objectives are at the opposite extreme where I'm saying to people again and again as in that earlier video I'm linking to if veganism is for everyone then the challenge is to work together with people whom you are profoundly alienated from where it's not a trivial difference of you like to ride a bicycle and I like to ride a motorcycle where you know it's not the difference between one who's more athletic and less athletic where it really is a difference between someone who is a conservative Catholic let's say a right-wing Catholic but who is vegan and let's say they care a lot about forest habitats and wild animals and at the opposite extreme someone who is a hippie atheist vegan whose whole idea of veganism really centers around pet ownership they don't care about the forest let's say because this is quite common today you meet many vegans let's say what they really care about is the mistreatment of house pets you know at local controversies where somebody is not taking care of their dog properly and you know going to the authorities and reporting someone for leaving their dog in the yard there are vegans to do this who are watching in their neighborhood you know the conditions of people's dogs and whether or not they're chained up properly this kind of thing can those two people work together you know like everyone takes for granted that someone like me and someone like durianrider can't work together right one of the reasons is and again I sympathize durianrider doesn't want to he doesn't even want to work with Kenya Kenya I'm working on my pronunciation people okay I'm working um he doesn't want to bridge the gap he wants a narrow category of like-minded people to come to a festival and while I sympathize I would point out already that that is really the opposite of activist that is the opposite of political organization because real political organization is all about reaching out to people who are fundamentally different from you so that we can overcome this kind of isolation this disorganized individual activism and at least start by asking the question of what can we do together and that's not to invalidate what you can do yes you may be going out in the street and confronting people who are wearing fur and that may be very rewarding for you but okay now that we just have five people or ten people together and now that we're looking ahead to the next ten years like look folks we're all gonna grow old all this stuff is gonna get boring after you've done that scene protest five times it doesn't feel the same anymore even protests that I really sympathize with you want to protest in front of a restaurant about foie gras you want to go to the the Toronto Pig save you want to protest at the slaughterhouse and witness the pigs in the truck going to be executed I'm sure it's very meaningful and very moving the first time how do you feel about it the tenth time okay you're if you're watching this and you're sixteen years old ten years from now you're gonna be 26 if you're watching this you're thirty five ten years making me forty five you want to do that again and again in a dead-end way or you want to get organized you want to what can we do and what are we looking at in the next ten years I don't have hate in my heart towards durianrider and freely as characters I really don't people who talk to me personally know that and I've had conversations people where I talk a lot about the positive side of what they're doing somebody asked me once like what I thought they were planning for the future like what their what their scheme was for like where they were going to take the tie for a festival and I said honestly you know what part of what makes them charming is that I don't think they have a plan at all I I said at that time as couple months ago I said I don't think they've even reserved like a musical group like a band to play at the next time forward vessel I don't think they even booked like a restaurant like I think they show up at the last minute and they just do their thing and hang out and those are the kind of people they are and there's a certain kind of charm to that and I'm sure a lot of people are drawn to the genuineness and warmth and relax and formality of that but that does not look anything like an animal rights conference that does not look anything like even a meeting of the Green Party and believe me the Green Party is not an inspiring example no that is nothing like a political organization getting mobilized for the future and look I'm not going to talk about in this video but the other thing to remember is when you're looking at current or recent past history you do not want to be imitating organizations that are a failure Steve best who is much more radical than I am um people think I'm radical because I want to do more than just you know promote bikinis and bicycles and lifestyle activism I want real meaningful political engagement Steve best is always comparing himself to extreme communist groups you know like the Zapatistas in Mexico well communism was a failure this is 2016 it's face up to it folks the zapatistas specifically were a failure rebel group that began with a slogan of death to the landlord's not joking can look it up that was their political slogan and now you in the 21st century you want to take that as the model for your activism it began with violence and stupidity ended in failure and didn't accomplish anything impressive in between that's what you're taking is your model for vegan activism to me that's like your shame on you it's pathetic ah I keep using these boring examples by contrast of saying like look how did people make nicotine into what it is to how do we transform the anti-smoking movement we did partly because even though the comparison is imperfect of course it is all comparisons are odious it's not exactly the same thing people don't generally quit smoking for ethical reasons some do but most don't I mean you know most is just health concerns or what-have-you but you know that transformation of tobacco one of the reasons to look at it is simply because it has been successful it is being successful and that in itself is worth thinking about it's certainly not easy for me like in Canada right now to point to any example like the Green Party or Greenpeace and say we can we can imitate that success I can't point to petaa People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and say let's imitate that success but look in this video I was just trying to raise this one relatively simple point though there's so much to say about it but the difference between making decisions as an isolated individual increasing the scale increasing the scope and time and starting to think about what we can accomplish and that does ultimately take a certain degree of self-discipline detachment and selflessness we are not just thinking about yourself you're not just thinking about the next video we're gonna raise on YouTube you're not just thinking about what you're gonna put in your blog or how you're gonna get more followers you're thinking about how am I gonna lead a meaningful life how am I can have an impact on this society how am I gonna be a meaningful part of the city I'm living in and some of you guys are watching this from Thailand if you live in Chiang Mai do you know the name of the mayor do you know the name of the governor if you're watching this in New York you probably do if you're a New Yorker but you know being cut off from local political reality this is a further form of isolation that I'm asking you to challenge in yourself not everybody comes out of a political science background one of the reasons why I do what I do here on YouTube is that I know I have something different to offer from other people not everybody has read Aristotle not everybody has read Karl Marx not everybody can come on camera and give sarcastic opinions about these things all right I can but in this critique the critique itself the purpose is not negative the purpose is to positively motivate you to make that difference