Compassion is a culturally inculcated lie. #Nihilism

[Music] compassion the perception of compassion as opposed to compassion in your mind in your heart do you think of these as two separate things do you imagine that there is such a thing as objectively real compassion something that exists something that can be measured separate from our subjective perception of it our experience of it as it's linked not just to our own culture but also to our feelings about particular people very memorable experience i once had where i reached out and got in touch with somebody on the internet just because i had it in me to help and she seemed like she needed to help this person was vegan i didn't know a whole lot else about her and it was irrelevant to me that she was good-looking but it becomes relevant to this story soon enough she was a good-looking female and she had made just a few very vague statements on the internet that she was upset that a series of tragic things that happened in her life and that she was worried that she was going to lapse into outright drug addiction and as you can imagine she was vague about exactly what drug it was but from her wording you could tell it was some kind of really hard drug i got in touch there i forget now if we spoke by the telephone or via skype or some other form of voice chat but i had a conversation with her this way and she remarked at the time i remember her sending me some kind of text message after i forget if they were facebook messages or email or what but i remember her praising me and saying that i had been really compassionate she perceived what i'd done and what i'd said in this intervention as compassionate in just a moment i'll come back and describe for you what it was i had to say to her but in that conversation you know she revealed that the drug in question was meth i don't think anyone should push their luck with any recreational drugs i'm i'm really opposed even to smoking marijuana but of all the drugs to roll the dice with you know if you just spend one long weekend with methamphetamines in your life of course i mean it could be the end of your life and it could change your life forever i mean this and this was a young woman who had already had the experience of developing addiction and quitting and getting clean she'd already kind of been through that at least once so for her it wasn't her first experience it was a a kind of a relapse now i think you can imagine there are many different reasons why it had not even occurred to me that this woman would be a sexual partner for me that i didn't think of her in a romantic way or a sexual way at all one of the most obvious is i'm not interested in sleeping with a methamphetamine addict and you know that is part of the story here she was a good looking woman and it matters because probably on some level she assumed or she took it for granted that my motives my motivation and speaking to her and showing some care or concern am i trying to be helpful for that that indicated that i was interested in her sexually and i wasn't now really brief digression about language emotion and like what i call the kind of the the telepathy we all have for reading a great deal into just a single word a single glance single turn of phrase when you're talking to someone who grew up in exactly the same culture you grew up in who speaks exactly the same first language you speak um you can accurately read a great deal into just a few words but just to look in the eyes you know you can make a mistake you can but as i recall like i don't even think i said anything that really rejected her or shut her down but a couple weeks after i had this conversation with her she started hitting on me and i remember my reaction was just like what and if it's your first language if you're both members of exactly the same culture and so on i really do understand how a woman or her position can get the whole message out of just the way you said what like your sense of astonishment and that you're mildly offended or even revolted there are advances like like sometimes it's enough to just say what um i had another example with another woman i was telling melissa about the other way where all i said to this woman was yeah [Laughter] she's a woman who's flirted with me several times over a space of a year or something and you know she she just yeah she got it she really got the message you know and you know what i mean like i'm not playing hard to get i'm actually hard to get and i'm not interested in you and i never was so like you know where all that comes across with like one word or a very very short interaction anyway to end that part of the story um this young woman i was talking to who was you know you know in danger slipping away into into drug addiction um she had been thanking me for being so compassionate just a few days before or a few weeks before and you know obviously i can't recreate the exact word she didn't use academic and philosophical terms but you know she had been thanking me for having the compassion and having the positive motivation to reach out to her and help her and you know and now here she was as soon as she felt rejected by me as soon as it was clear that my interest in her was not sexual at all that i i wasn't trying to seduce her i didn't have any i didn't think of her that way and i didn't think of the conversation we had that way she started cussing me out and attacking me and i mean she was probably good looking enough that her whole life uh i'm not saying she could get any man she ever wanted i'm not saying she could have a relationship with anybody with that that's that's hard to do but probably any man she wanted to flirt with would respond positively to those first stages of flirtation or going out for coffee or something she's probably good looking out that she took that for granted so i think she reacted to that rejection very very negatively and i i have a lot of experience those kinds of situations with with women now what did i actually say to her was it compassionate she perceived it as compassionate you think that had nothing to do with the fact that she wanted to sleep with me you think i had nothing to do with the fact she was turned on by the conversation i wasn't that's not how i saw it and that's why she was so angry right like suddenly she feels like she's just this pathetic junkie like she's just this street urchin i'm taking pity on suddenly it clicks for her that from my perspective right i look down on her she's someone i'm trying to help not someone i'm trying to [ __ ] all of a sudden she feels like oh from this guy's perspective we're on two different levels right she's she's just some drug addict who needs a morality lecture and now she hates me for it now she resents me for it right before like to some extent she had a crush on me or she had some level of interest in me i i can totally see like probably it was like in the days after she had that conversation you know her mind starts going wild and she starts clicking on my instagram photos or whatever you know she starts looking hmm you know i had when you look at him from the right angle you know maybe you know maybe she's having dreams about me or whatever you know this is melissa is laughing her ass off right now by the way you know you can have that kind of conversation and maybe you know maybe she was a little bit interested before she had the conversation while the conversation's going on you're getting more interested and then you then you're really interested a few days later when you're looking back on it or something right what i had to say to her in that conversation could 100 percent be interpreted as cruel vicious disapproving demanding as a condemnation right i some of you this is the first video you've ever seen on my channel okay but i am not one of these left-wing people who thinks that you know you do you that everyone should just do whatever drugs make them feel good and it's all it's all groovy you know i i was telling this young woman like you know the next 10 years of your life or something you know what you are risking here you know and and for what you know you're not in a battlefield trying to win a war you know you're not uh you're not going to cambodia to do humanitarian work you're not handing out sacks of rice to starving people that lost you're not doing something good you're not risking your life you're not risking getting malaria so that you can be in the jungle and do this humanitarian worker through this race like no this is something you know 100 selfish 100 short-term self-indulgence you know what give me yeah i was just reminded of an example i read a story from a woman online who started getting into using meth because she was raising kids and she felt like she needed to stay awake taking care of her kids so anyway i know there are many reasons well i i just say unfortunately that story is probably a lie it's probably an excuse because there are a lot of there are a lot of meth heads who make up sympathetic sounding stories so that has to be that is to keep in mind one of the most common being uh people who claim they started taking meth because they were just so tired from working their factory job working on some well well there were 200 other people doing exactly the same job in exactly the same factory and i i noticed only you so good story cool story bro okay but look um obviously i am not saying that what i told her was the opposite of compassion i am pointing out that when we talk about compassion one there's an assumption that we're talking about something that really exists at all two there's an assumption that it is a morally good thing for you to believe that it exists so much of what we deal with in both religion and politics falls into this category of things you supposedly ought to believe in and the whole discourse is about all the benefits all the good things that are going to come into your life and the benefits they're going to make society a better place if if you will just believe in this abstract concept that you can't smell and you can't taste and you can't touch and you can't empirically test or verify we'll get into that part of it a little bit later on um the soul does the immortal soul exist almost nobody wants to talk about that way what they want to talk about is how you ought to believe in your soul how you ought to be concerned about your soul and how you will be a better person or we will have a better society if everyone were beholden to this belief in the soul so you are describing to me a miniature version of myself that exists within my body and that will escape as my body dies in the same sense that a lifeboat escapes from the hulk of a sinking ship is that real does that exist when you read the bible cover to cover is there a single argument advanced for the soul with that definition that very simple definition that the body contains an immortal soul no there isn't i mean quite apart from whether or not there will be proof or evidence there isn't even a philosophical argument for that in the christian bible or the jewish bible or or putting them together in fact when you read the bible and you look at all the appearances of the word or concept soul there are parts of the bible where it is presumed that the only way god can punish you after you die is to curse your children and grandchildren to seven generations there are actually many different views of the afterlife and of the soul and of the body and what it means to be a human being within the bible because the bible was written by a whole bunch of different people and and they weren't even really organized into one religion called judaism in one place at one time uh when when the bible was rinsed there are a variety of views here and for some reason nobody writing the bible wanted to put down a rational account of how it was we got this idea that we have a soul and that it escapes the body and survives death in the first place why that would be a rational or reasonable conclusion there is a gruesome description in the buddhist canon so this is the pali tipitaka this is the foundational set of texts from which all forms of buddhism are devolved um mayana buddhists japanese buddhists they often want to deny or minimize that but it's the truth this is the equivalent of the old testament for for buddhism and for all forms of buddhism not just therapeutic ones there is a description there of a king who was in a position to torture and execute people and who tested the hypothesis that the soul exists in various ways including by killing men inside a sort of pressure cooker there's a big pot and the lid is clamped down and airtight and you you boil them to death basically some of that you know and after they have expired inside this air tight container let the lid off to see if you can observe the escaping of the soul as it goes to the to the afterlife um [Music] perhaps this is fanciful but it's it's quite plausible that any number of people in ancient india tested the basically what we would now call the hindu view of the soul but the views of the soul's existence in ancient india all right there was a time when people engaged in weighing the human body before and after death and trying to prove that there was some slight difference in the weight of the body that could be attributed to the soul that you know there was this actually existing entity that escaped at the time of your death um that again we should all be beholden to so on and so forth there's very little interest in this question of does it exist is it real with any cultural concept very quickly what the proponents of these beliefs want to do is to switch into the separate but profoundly related question of why you ought to believe in this um and this includes marxists communists like different kinds of atheist ideologies that frankly resemble religion in terms of the extent to which they try to enjoin certain kinds of binding beliefs upon you um so we switch very quickly from the question of is this real how do we know that this exists epistemology how how would we know that this exists if it were real how why is it that our knowledge of this thing relies entirely on mythology and literature isn't that peculiar you know we don't question how would the world be different if this were not real if it didn't exist like why is this a necessary part of your description of how reality works so you guys may not know about this very very briefly i have mentioned it before there is a scientific hypothesis that there is an extra planet in our solar system there is a so-called dark planet that there's a planet revolving around our sun but it's too distant to be seen easily by telescopes it's not reflecting light and so on now why would anyone create the support like obviously be honest you could say well theoretically there could be another 10 planets well you know we'll keep going we'll stop at one extra planet we can we can invent all cosmos well the theory the strength of the theory is that when you really look at the calculations in precise detail for the orbits of the various planets around the sun and other pieces of data asteroids comets and this kind of thing apparently without positing the existence of another planet without the hypothesis this is a true hypothesis scientific unproven it's unfounded empirically if you don't posit an extra planet then when you do the math it doesn't quite work out right that the actual movements of the plants don't quite make sense they're not quite mathematically perfect now there are other explanations for that right like the what if the other explanations are that some of the other assumptions built into our mathematical models are false like what if there is another law of physics we haven't discovered yet that just slightly changes the motion of the planet so you can come up with various other theses to say oh well if the equations are are not quite right obviously maybe there's just something wrong with our equations but apparently you can make all the numbers fit that all the clockwork turns perfectly if you hypothesize that there is yet another planet and it's very distant and very dark and that its gravitational pull is slightly in a nuanced way uh influencing the positions and movements of the other planets so there you have a hypothesis where it's very clear if we remove this if we presume it doesn't exist now we can see how different reality would be we can see what what a difference this would make how would the world be different if the soul didn't exist how would the world be different if the soul were just a literary concept a mythological concept an allegory a trope that it was something no more real than other ideas that had emerged from poetry in various cultures things that can never really be real um and then we can turn it around and ask if this were real if this really existed how would it be possible for us to have such a tremendous diversity of opinions about it that are in constant conflict with one another why would we be so incapable of coming coming up with a coherent description of it or a coherent response to it culturally politically religiously so on and so forth now again this applies to the soul it applies to the afterlife it applies to the communist notion of utopia being produced by dialectical materialism this line of questioning should be applied to everything and the ultimate result is nihilism it should already be evident from the first anecdote i've told in this video being a nihilist doesn't mean you're malicious it doesn't even mean that you disbelieve things all right it means that you work with the understanding that there is nothing to be believed in all right it's not that i go around denying that there is a soul i live my life and i think about and i understand reality where the soul is not any more real than something shakespeare came up with in a sonnet it has that kind of quality and by the way as a nihilist i don't want to burn the books of shakespeare i just don't want them to have power over me politically we've never had a situation where there was a tyranny built on the poetry of shakespeare come up with a science fiction experiment you can imagine a parallel universe you know i have been to weddings where people read quotations from shakespeare i have been to funerals where people read quotations of shakespeare you could completely create a religion from the the cherry picking the selective reading of the most meaningful most evocative most beautiful you know lines of shakespeare of his poetry and his his his dramas and so on and you can kind of imagine a parallel universe where that became the canon of a coercive state religion but you know it's not that i have no appreciation for the poetry of shakespeare the poetry of buddhism the poetry of christianity there might be something there that i can enjoy but i regard it as fiction only there is nothing to be believed in in the drama of william shakespeare okay i as a nihilist i have no reason to debunk hamlet why would i barge into a theater it doesn't matter if it's a movie theater or it's a live play let's perform let's imagine a live performance of hamlet what a madman somebody rushes in and jumps on stage and yells at the audience and berates the actors don't you realize that this man hamlet doesn't even exist that historically he never existed it's all a figment of your imagination there never was a real hamlet there never was a real prince of denmark named hamlet from which this like you're acting out a scene from history with a war and a battle over the succession and who's going to inherit the throne and one king murdered another and don't you realize it's all a lie you've been lied to you know this actor he's not the real hamlet take off his wig you know let's hold that don't you realize okay so there's more than one level of deception and self-deception here like to be debunked and my point is as a nihilist i'm not a debunker of these things right i can go into the theater and i can watch a performance of shakespeare's hamline but for me there is nothing to be believed in and as long as this doesn't have any kind of coercive influence over people right there's really no cause for struggle there now unfortunately the power of christianity has over people's lives it's much greater than the power shakespeare has life the power islam has over people's lives the power judaism has over people's lives there's a real reason to get up on stage and say look jesus christ never was an historical figure it's not just that this actor wearing a wig and a beard or something it's not just that he is portraying jesus in an historically inaccurate way that actually this is mythology that people are misperceiving and misunderstanding as something historically real and then they are packaging that they are producing something that is incredibly politically influential and incredibly damaging to people's lives that is you know the war of the nihilus against the believers that's where our struggle begins but also that's where our struggle ends you know there's no reason for nihilists to ever burn the books of buddhist philosophy you know the point is to actually end the belief in these things to have people start living their lives the way i do which is not attacking and debunking beliefs but really perceiving reality in a way where you appreciate there is nothing here to be believed in guys i will see your comments as they come in um i mean i'm sitting here with melissa one of the only people on planet earth for whom this philosophy is not disturbing and horrifying and i think you know it can be said i don't know if there are some people in the audience who'll admit this right now i think that probably many of you heard me present a nihilistic critique of circumcision you're all on board yeah this is terrible this is [ __ ] nobody should believe in circumcision you've heard me present a nihilistic critique of christmas santa claus nativity of jesus and you're still on board you know you've heard me criticize batman from nihilistic perspective some of you turn against me at them oh you've heard me criticize drug addiction and skiing and alcohol and antidepressants you've seen so much of this nihilistic critique but i think for a lot of you it was shocking when you logged into patreon or you opened up your email your patreon support of mine and you click and you see whoa this guy doesn't even believe in compassion this guy's going after this guy's taking on compassion as yet another false god yet another false belief that's exactly what we're doing in this video that is exactly what i do in chapter three of future of an illusion you can you can start with chapter three obviously i think it's more meaningful if you read chapter one chapter two first but you can't you can jump right in and start reading chapter three and i'll read you guys a short uh a short passage from it in just a few minutes hmm so i'm reading your questions now melissa if you do want to bump in but i just say you know i think it is somewhat interesting uh even if melissa is my only subject here what i i do have others i just we're not on a face-to-face basis i had someone writing to me today who has watched my youtube channel from the age of 16 to 22. and she said yeah this has been a huge influence on her life but i think for people like that whether it was from 16 to 22 or from 26 to 32. you know i've had viewers who've watched me listen for years i think a lot of those people will have had multiple breaking points where they thought okay i'm cool with this guy's philosophy and then they hit some kind of limit it was like whoa i'm not sure i'm comfortable with this i'm not sure i'm comfortable with questioning and challenging and rejecting these beliefs even though they're comfortable with the critique of of belief in general a brief um a brief example from the first year of this youtube channel there was a guy he was really a guy and his wife together uh he had been a passionate fan of my channel and he started a discussion forum for fans of the channel and he wrote to me about that at one stage and so he was supporting the channel and he was so enthusiastic about the channel and then the moment i started criticizing pet ownership the moment i started talking about it being really evil to castrate cats and dogs to carry remove you know perform a hysterectomy on on female cats and dogs to physically modify these animals to break their spirit to train them to turn them into human play things and so on as soon as my nihilistic critique of so much that's wrong in our culture touched on this area that he and his wife were deeply personally committed to they were people who were spending time every day cleaning up cat hair and cat piss and cat kitty litter shall we say you know they were spending all this time uh dealing with domesticated cats and it was so crucial to their sense of their own moral superiority over others that what they were doing was compassionate you have to believe you have to believe and you know they hated me intensely you guys started a new youtube channel i assume it's disappeared now i i don't know i haven't seen it or found from many many years um i assume at some point he got embarrassed by it and just deleted it i never asked him i never asked him but um he started a youtube channel just denouncing me and he was denouncing me so passionately after having been a fan of the supporter of mine because you know he had to defend his sense of his own moral superiority over others that for him uh it was unthinkable that what he justified as compassion could be from another person's perspective cruelty so yeah we got it we got an admission from the audience here thanks for writing in james james said quote been watching you for six years it was surprising that you don't believe in compassion but still respectable so he was a little bit surprised well yes um the context for the critique of compassion in chapter three is veganism the future of the vegan movement and a large part of what i have to say is look catholics think that they're compassionate people catholics think that they're being compassionate when they are carrying out massacres of unbelievers when they're forcing people to convert at the sword um you know they're these terrible unspeakable forms of cruelty that they perceive amongst themselves as compassionate the things that a true believing catholic considers compassionate and that they within their community signal to one another as compassion to them that seems real it seems like something that exists it seems something that nobody has to prove the existence of and then oh how quickly we slip into this mentality where all that we're discussing is how you ought to believe in it you ought to believe it's real because then you'll be a better person and we'll have a better community and the world will be a better place if only you can believe to believe in compassion very similar to believing in the soul believing in the afterlife believing in divine punishment or divine retribution many many people will make the argument nakedly that they can't prove that evil deeds will be punished after you die and of course there are so many problems built into that statement whose definition of evil from whose perspective is it good or evil you know exactly with these these kinds of questions um but nevertheless you should believe in it for the greater good because think of what a better society would have if everyone lived with this fear of of punishment the iphone oh well you're dodging the question of whether or not this really exists whether or not it's true someone's already bring up the concept of falsifiability you know you know but even setting aside these scientific hypotheses um would the world be a better place if we forced all school children to respect william shakespeare's hamlet this this masterpiece we could force every school child to memorize a significant part of that play we could have it on the exams at the end of high school and so on we could we could create a culture where it's coercive everyone must appreciate william shakespeare this is part of being a civilized person or this is part of being a canadian citizen or a british citizen or an australian citizen where we make this a definitive coercive aspect of our culture in order to be a good person in order to be taken seriously and that you should be able to quote shakespeare or from memory and so okay so i'm choosing this intentionally would the world be a better place if we did that a lot of you would say yes i mean i know the context of this conversation it might seem crazy but it's very it's very easy in the context of some other conversation we're talking about improving education you say look kids these days they grow up with no appreciation for literature and high culture they just watch this garbage on tv let's let's try to elevate the discourse by by really increasing the importance of shakespeare in the curriculum you see my point this type of argument the world would be a better place if everyone believed blank it's always an ineluctably evil even when the belief we're talking about is the most anodyne thing imaginable like shakespeare like the literary value of shakespeare it's not not even supernatural right and and the problem is belief you know the the problem is the way in which belief videos everything a belief in compassion is evil even if compassion as such is is good um sorry do you want to say yeah when you were talking about this example of catholic missionaries massacring populations for the greater good yes for compassionate reasons a prime example of this complete dichotomy is the nuclear testing that was done on a bikini at all what they told what army officials military officials what the president said about this testing was that this was going to ring this was this was god's will you know really speaking completely positively about something that it's completely evil so yeah i just was thinking about that uh how many examples in history where people are totally blinded by belief into doing horrible things i was just typing out enough terms if people want to google it and learn more they'll know what example you're you're talking about yes and this is i mean this is one type of false compassion but i'm making the argument here that all compassion is false compassion there is no true compassion there's more than one model more than one notion of compassion is false so one model is this kind of compassion premised on what would be for the greater good what would be for the greater whole for the future of the world like oh well the u.s military may be dropping nuclear bombs on your homeland and literally on your home uh but there is this greater good so and so forth you have a whole discourse of compassion and making the world build life ah but this is not the only one one that i draw attention to again and again is for example this is compassionate because it's for the good of your soul this isn't for the good of the person you actually are right it's for the good of the person i think you ought to be and this model comes even closer to the delusions that vegans live with right so you know the the delusion is i am going to force you to be vegan and you are going to recognize me as compassionate because i'm doing this not to help you the actual person you are i'm helping the person you ought to be i'm imagining a perfectly rational person that's it's my subjective idea of rationality also of course if you were rational if you were willing to listen if you were if you would only believe if you would only believe all the things i believe which is what i really mean by being rational right like we talk about rational but most of the time it's totally rationality that we mean the same way a catholic is going to destroy an indigenous culture right on the premise that oh if only they knew if only they were rational if only these indigenous people believe the same things we believe then they would agree with us eradicating their culture eradicating their language or even eradicating them you know engaging in this incredibly oppressive series of steps is calling us the point being the delusion is we know better what we know what we feel what we believe is objectively true right and therefore we are being compassionate when in fact we are being cruel right now vegans they fall into both categories in terms of the mentality sure partly it is you know like you're you're torturing someone but it's for the benefit of their immortal soul you know you're hurting someone you're punishing someone or what have you and it's not to benefit them as the person they are it's not to help them achieve the things they actually desire they actually want right instead you're helping a theoretical person that they ought to be a hyper that an imaginary person whether that's their soul or it's again it's a more rational person it's someone who has more in common with yourself you know and by the way a lot of diet advice works this way too not just even non-vegan diet advice this is the diet and exercise you should have if you were the same kind of person i am if you wanted to be the same kind of person well people may not have those things in common with you so you know yes part of this is vegans going out and you know reproaching people and uh indeed of course veganism extends to and includes acts of outright terrorism acts of violence which have so far been on a small scale but in future may not be and thus i'm constantly warning against and criticizing the tendency towards organized violence and veganism organized or disorganized something i'm constantly standing the alarm bell i guess but that violence that coercion that imposition sometimes is justified by helping the person you want to be your true self truly rational person your true soul and sometimes it's for instead that greater good way of thinking because the world would be a better place if everyone believed what i believe if everyone hacked the way i act uh so guys again it's a good time to comment if you want me to respond to uh what you have to say it's a good time to hit the thumbs up button if you have a second too because you've tolerated this incredibly offensive lecture for 40 minutes already so if you think this is thought provoking if you think other people should discover this video um by all means you know hit the hit the thumbs up button um i want to come back to the example i had at the beginning so there's this beautiful younger woman just younger than me not not really objectively young i'm old says this beautiful younger woman and she thinks that what i'm saying is so compassionate and so wonderful when i'm telling her look crackhead you're gonna [ __ ] up your life you better get your act together you know you better get disciplined you better get squared away now you know she sympathized that perspective she liked she appreciated she thought i was doing something caring she thought something helpful i was duper and we can sit here and say that she is right my point is somebody else wouldn't perceive it that way right and quite likely the fact that she did perceive it that way had everything to do with her sense of attraction towards me physical attraction sexual attraction just aesthetic attraction she just found me an appealing person in some very vague sense it probably had to do with her sense of admiration for me she regarded me as an intelligent person an admiral person a a good person right people can help you in your life they can do things that really help you and you don't perceive them as compassionate because you're not attracted to them because you don't like them because you think they're ugly or you think they're scary or you know they're you may maybe you're a little bit xenophobic they're they speak another language they speak they speak english with a really thick accent they're from another culture they're like they're kind of scary to you in those ways but they actually helped you right and for whatever reason whatever combination of resentments and perceptions and misperceptions you didn't perceive them as being compassionate now my point here is like you're talking about this kind of talk this is like a drug talk this is a getting sober talk right with someone which in many ways is judgmental and reproachful and and cruel many of my videos are many of my videos have a certain measure of cruelty a certain measure of sang fra which from my perspective is intended to help people in the audience some people can appreciate that and some people can't and it doesn't have anything to do with an objectively real notion of compassion you can never prove that i'm right and they're wrong because i have compassion and they don't right the most recent video uploaded to my channel before this one is me criticizing mexi okay so mexi is a youtuber if you don't know who it is don't don't look it up all right from my perspective i'm saying look your beliefs your political beliefs are bad and evil and wrong and i'm trying to help you like from my person i'm trying to help you and more likely i'm trying to help other people like you in the audience because there will be other people with similar misconceptions similar political confessions so on and so forth i'm i'm trying to help you but what am i actually doing i'm pointing the finger and saying you are bad and evil and wrong you are stupid and ignorant you have made this childishly simple mistake and why did she make it this specific video but it's true of many many videos why that video ends by my saying yeah the error you made right it's not like a math error it's not a quantitative error you made this mistake because you're selfish you're self-pitying and you're delusional in like self-serving self-aggrandizing egotistical ways that's really insulting and you know so again this one point you think there's a difference between the perception of compassion and and compassion as such a lot of the people who watch that video and think wow you know this guy about lucielle hasn't he's doing something really good he's doing something really positive in reaching out to this young woman younger than me you know and in reaching out to anyone in the audience who has similar problems and is thinking somewhere wow he's doing this what if i were ugly right and what if i were just a member of a culture or a religion that you despise what if you didn't sympathize with me you know what i mean like you you know i'm sorry i know it's it's it's difficult to imagine we have to get into some some very specific hypothetical example to to flesh that out but okay what if i had become a buddhist monk what if i were what if i was still me like you know but what if i were wearing a buddhist monk and i were i'm sorry i was wearing the robes of a buddhist monk and these same videos the same message was being delivered in the harsh morally castigating term of someone who's preaching to you that you ought to convert to to buddhism you know what i mean the same message would be so much less uh you you would be so much less sympathetic you wouldn't perceive it as compassion and we go beyond it what if it was a muslim preacher right what if it was a muslim preacher from africa like what if it was someone you didn't sympathize with it's someone in this very broad sense you didn't find attractive i'm not saying everyone in my audience has a crush on me but you know a huge percentage of people who are willing to watch that video and listen to what i have to say and give me the benefit of the doubt and regard what i'm doing as compassionate and well-intentioned instead of just fastening on to the fact that you said she was bad and evil and wrong you insulted her just clinging to that and responding to that defensively or negatively yeah in a really vague sense a lot of those people do have a crush on me and the opposite mentality the people who say how dare you the people who are so offended they are the people of a crush on her and i've encountered that again and again i can't believe how stupid the defenders of a natural vegan are the defenders of mexi are male or female straight or gay like in terms of people who've actually talked to me without exception they have a crush on her and all they can see all they can perceive is that this person they have a crush on right that they're a good and wonderful person they sympathize with them they perceive them as compassionate and they see what i'm doing as insulting and denigrating right now even with this first example i opened the video with where i talk to this young woman again by phone or by skype something like that you know it's both what i had to say to her like in a sense it's caring it's helpful and in a sense it's denigrating and it's insulting right it's both because it's saying if you don't get clean and sober if you don't make this your top priority you're going to ruin your life forever i don't have to fill in all the details you know it's it's both like perceived compassion is all there is there is no objectively real compassion there never was there never has been there never will be to say the word compassion is used a lot in drug abuse and sobriety uh taking a compassionate approach to influencing people to embrace sobriety or i've heard recently even just whatever drug is causing them the problem you know not complete sobriety but just being sober from this one drug so in this case this woman should stay away from death but marijuana is okay that's the compassionate approach i guess these days uh rather than enforcing sobriety on somebody i just think it's it's strange to see now that now that i've uh come to live this way where i i've lived a sober life for over five years uh to me it seems strange to say that it's not compassionate to advise somebody to be sober why would it be more helpful to them to put them on some other kind of drug or something else because that is typically the standard yes um and we see this all the time with people who are struggling with mental health problems instead of if somebody is really going to hurt themselves or others instead of putting them in some kind of harness you know getting them to stop doing whatever it is um giving them drugs is somehow seen as more compassionate um you know it just just any sense so i want i want to give them a specific example to make it easier to visualize yeah okay i am working with the assumption that some people are dyslexic that's something that really exists in the world okay i may be wrong it may be that the progress of medical science in the future proves that dyslexia isn't real i have known several dyslexic people there are three different ones i'm remembering at this moment i've probably known more than three i have known adult men who were dyslexic and they they displayed very strange behaviors that you know again i attribute it to this thing we call dyslexia that we believe exists in the real world if you have a test that you apply to children for dyslexia do you think there are zero children who fake the test do you think there are zero children who are lazy and deceitful and don't like doing their school work and they understand that if they do badly on this test they're going to get they don't have to write you know exams in school anymore they're going to get special help they're going to put in a special class that everything's going to be made easier for them are you saying that's never happened on planet earth because i've known people who did that kind of thing i've known people you know who faked illiteracy and stuff you know what i mean i've faked their way through different things so right children can be very dishonest and deceitful okay so already we've got two categories here we have people who are actually dyslexic and we have people who are lazy and dishonest and you know they may be so lazy that their ability to read and write is is really poor but they're not dyslexic they don't have this real thing that exists that we assume scientifically is falsifiable that it really exists in the same way cancer exists that there's some kind of palpable reality apart from our motivations our feelings etc etc in any particular case if you have a brother who's dyslexic how confident are you that he's not just lazy how how certain are you that this is the real thing of dyslexia okay so let's let's let's talk about compassion real quick here two two extremes all right what if you have a parent and his attitude is um as a completely abstract uh de joure assumption as an a priori assertion to get canty in about it you have a parent you have a father of this allegedly dyslexic child and his position is no dyslexia never exists it's always an excuse for laziness and therefore he is a father is going to take all of his time and all of his effort and sit with this kid and motivate him and guide him and force him to learn to read and write again and again again for however many hours it takes and he won't accept the excuse and he's going to say to his son no you're not going into a special class at school you're not going through us as a second-rate kid you are going to work as hard as you can to be a first-rate kid in the first-rate class you're going to do english literature at the highest level you're not going to be in the special class for people who can't read good it's a reference to a movie sorry kids who can't read good is a medium i'm aware that's grammatically correct the special class for kids who can't read good um no you have a father who on the basis of something that we might call a delusion is passionate about helping his kid achieve the highest standard of excellence possum right and maybe even this guy maybe that's his attitude towards all kids maybe he opens a [ __ ] school and he starts taking it because other parents notice this and say wow this is great and you get a whole bunch of kids i don't know he starts teaching five or 10 kids or something with this same methodology oh you see how slippery this is so his philosophy is not true and yet the world would be a better place if we all lived as if it were true right and yet it benefits his son or it benefits these children he's teaching right yeah if only if only they could be rational if only they could be reasonable if only they could believe the same things he believes and then work hard and say to them no you have to work 10 times as hard as the other students but you'll do it you'll overcome your laziness you'll see how slippery this is ah okay is this compassionate is this cruel is it both what if this guy you're probably imagining him as me okay like you're probably just imagining isil mazar doing this if i wasn't as hard as a has a dyslexic kid okay what if he's ugly what if he's ugly and foreign and speaks in an accent and he stinks and you don't like him and he's belligerent and bellicose what like if you actually flesh out the details you know what if this guy is a you know so he's an immigrant from a foreign culture and he has these attitudes maybe you regard him you regard him as a bumpkin you're regarded as someone very uneducated unsophisticated well this guy doesn't understand dyslexia is a real disease this guy is just a horrible bully he's this ex-military demented domineering guy you know and he's ugly and you just like i'm sort of emphasizing this because your sense of sympathy for him and and your sense that what he's doing to help his own son is compassionate as opposed to cruel as opposed to counter-productive as opposed to ridiculous it's going to have everything to do with who he is aesthetically to you right because that's how shallow this perception of compassion is that's how shallow and stupid it is this is why it's always wrong you should never believe in it you should never reify it you should never hypothesize you should never think this is something that that really exists okay so that's one model of compassion and it's compassion based on a kind of ontological denial that dyslexia exists okay what about the opposite extreme we have someone who's a parent or a school principal maybe they are both a parent and a school principal and they have the view that you know some children are just born special and if you're born with dyslexia if you write this test that proves quote-unquote proves whether or not you have dyslexia then as soon as we know you're dyslexic we should take you into this special class and we should go easy on you and we should be kind and encouraging we should have lower standards and lower expectations for you and yeah we should put you on these drugs we should put you on drugs that cause permanent irreversible brain damage and actually cause developmental damage to your whole body as you're going through compassion this is not hypothetical what's going on right now and that teacher that principal that parent all the people who follow the camp they will think they're helping their child putting their child on a form of prescription methamphetamine right they'll be like oh well you know i know it screws up your sleep cycle i know it has these other negative side effects but you know it's it's so important because you have this medically real condition owen oh and don't worry reading shakespeare is hard you shouldn't you shouldn't have to work hard okay honey you've come home from school and you've taken your drugs just sit and play video games just try to relax because it's hard for you because you're just like is that compassion all right well hypothetically either model could ruin this kid's life it could ruin the lives of thousands of children either one could ruin their life and you probably can also find some examples of individuals you know worked out positively right but like you think compassion is something that's objectively real which parent would you have compassion for which school principal which teacher with which set of attitudes and where would your own compassion come from i think a lot of the time it really it really is as shallow as sexual attraction it has a lot to do with sex reduction overlaps with sexual attraction to a shocking extent if you guys can remember your own childhood engineering you may not remember this detail and you may not want to most children have the experience of having a crush on a teacher so you know there are little boys who have a crush on a school teacher a female school teacher and they're little girls who have a crush on a on a male school teacher uh when i was growing up this is just totally different from city to city culture culture you know most of the teachers the full-time teachers they were old frankly they were elderly but we would get these short-term temporary teachers uh and i think they were people who had just finished college to become a teacher they were still doing some kind of internship some kind of temporary replacement and they were in the prime of their life so i don't know if they were 25 or 20 like but they were you know they were young and attractive people and i had contempt for the other students in the classroom because you could see it you could see how different it was when these kids sexualized a teacher male or female you know and occasionally this was true about um supply teachers temporary teachers too because i think they were they were people who had finished teachers college but they hadn't been able to find a position so again this is just totally different in different parts well obviously you could have a teacher who was your situation could have been the opposite um that you had all young and attractive teachers there but in this aspect of human behavior all right if you feel you can trust a teacher if you feel that you like a teacher and a teacher likes you back that they are kind to you and you're kind to them maybe because you have a crush on them or maybe something else just as shallow and aesthetic right any little thing that teacher does to help you will be perceived as compassionate all right and there may be another school teacher you had in your own life growing up and they were very fat and they were very ugly or they were very scary i mean fear being afraid of your teachers another factor in in youth my father described to me one teacher he had who was a world war one veteran and he was scarified by world war one and his voice was terrifying his demeanor was terrifying he was a mean old man who had the scars of war on his body and i think it was from inhaling the gas in war or something like that you know he spoke with this terrifying you know um and his laughter was terrible here you're a little kid and you're really scared of this of this teacher you know um so you know fear as well as revulsion you know revulsion being opposed to attraction all these factors go into it there may have been a school teacher who really helped you or who tried to help you much more but you weren't attracted to them so you perceive their compassion as cruelty you know or you just pursue you perceive it as creepy or you perceive it as unwanted attention like this teacher is really trying to help you and you just think ooh gross why is this old fat guy trying to type why is this scary old woman trying to talk i just want to be left alone you know there are a lot at every age like this institutional education has a lot of problems i mean psychologically average again we can add religion to it what if you were a catholic and we're talking about nuns talking about women who beat you with a ruler and are wearing a uniform like you know there are different elements what if you just went to a mixed school like i did a quote-unquote secular school but some of your teachers are muslim and some of them are you know uh jehovah's witness and other religions like this well you might not perceive an arabic muslim teacher taking you aside and saying look kid you got to think about your future they're doing something from their perspective that's compassionate and you don't perceive its compassion because it's him because it's her right like this is way beyond the point of diminishing subjectivity like this is way beyond beauty is in the eye of the beholder right this is you know like a distorted mirror image of something that was in the eye at the boulder i hurts down several uh several stages of this kind of um this kind of distortion you know do you want to see something i'm just gonna just read a question well it's not responding directly to the point that you ended on but something that you were talking about about the example of a dyslexic student who is put into a remedial remedial class in the book that i've been reading about antidepressants and all other psychiatric medications uh anatomy of an epidemic there's an example of a family that took in a lot of different foster children over the years and throughout their time of taking foster children something like 90 children that they've had come in and out of their house so they've had this objectively real uh they've noticed this objectively real change and how how many kids are prescribed adhd medication how many children are prescribed antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications um so this is this is that i'm just you know saying this to [ __ ] you you know why you already sympathize we're going it's for the audience you're saying this yeah this is really happening and i think a lot of people would take the approach that this is compassionate toward these children who don't have a proper home life you know they weren't they're being raised by their parents for whatever reason and uh because they struggle in school it's is the same attitude like well the competition approach is to not push them yes your life is hard your life is harder than other children so let's let's give you some kind of medication to you know help make it easier for you when really it's settling them with all kinds of problems later on in life and they themselves are confused as to you know why why i feel this way when i'm struggling with williams health problems still so yeah i mean it's it's a real problem and uh you know i know this doesn't relate to exactly what you're saying about you know whether you interpret something that's compassionate but i do think even if you just hear that same argument from somebody that uh you don't sympathize with um then it starts to become more clear and i know that that is shallow but like when you hear somebody um who is not attractive who's who's not young like explaining why they're giving children ritalin you know maybe it's not as yes easy to sympathize with somebody who's attractive yeah maybe you can think about it with more uh detachment and so on now i just want to draw attention to something um built into the approach taken in this video in the first hour of this video talked about the soul and then we talked about dyslexia as an innate characteristic something very similar to the soul either you have it or you don't it's something you are right but you know reading is a skill writing is a skill it's not something you're born with it's not something you are hmm why do we think about compassion as an innate physically real characteristic why don't we think of it as something like a skill i said many years ago on the channel any video game that was actually educational any video game you would actually benefit from playing would not be a game at all this is a a game educational software it's every bit as boring as a math textbook but you can set it up and do daily math exercises daily tests and i bought it because i have thought about trying to improve my ability to do math in my own head off the top of my head what do you want to say all right i've had different times in my life in which i was good at math all right it's not worth describing like one job in particular i remember i was doing mathematical equations mathematical calculations every day it's not innate i was i wasn't born being bad at math but now for many many years math has not been a part of my life at all and i have to think about do i want to set aside some time to improve my skill in math now you know if you sit down today and have me write even just a high school level math exam i can't do it maybe you're gonna diagnose me as having you know some condition equivalent to dyslexia what dyslexia is for reading you're going to say oh you have a kind of innate innumeracy and inability to do numbers and i don't it's a skill i have not practiced for many years maybe when you deal with the upper echelons of that skill set you know maybe some people are you know more talented than others of being extremely good at math i think that you'd even see the equation i had on screen there that's not what we're talking about here you know the ability to really rapidly do calculations whether it's multiplication division or what have you to have that stuff you know we say english at your fingertips but here we we don't mean interviews to be able to cope with numbers and calculations off the top of your head that's a skill it's not a trait okay what if these behaviors we perceive as compassion right what if it's nothing like dyslexia at all what if it's nothing nothing like believing in the soul at all or any of these things what if it's actually just a skill you can develop and maybe maybe you develop it for a couple of years you know and then you move into a different line of work and you neglect that skill you neglect that side of your character and you stop being a compassionate person you know oh isn't that kind of threatening in a subtle and insidious way to this you know whole ideology we have of compassion vegans are not alone in this but vegans have built this horrible political movement on the false assertion that we alone are compassionate that we are the compassionate ones that everyone else is a kind of psychopath because they eat meat and we're wrong because i am vegan and i'm a dogmatic vegan and i'm a coercive vegan you know in some ways i'm the most extreme kind of vegan but i'm willing to say we are wrong this is a false belief and this is a false model of compassion and it's false in precisely the same way that the catholic notion of compassion is false which is that it only seems true when you're within your little enclave when you're within your cult when you're within your cultural in-group other catholics will perceive what you're doing as compassionate you will signal to them in a way they can appreciate your compassion and vice versa you know you're gonna recognize one another um in this sense you know the the vegan notion of compassion the conception we have of ourselves as the elect as the only compassionate people all right it is wrong root and branch and it's not just wrong in the sense that you know the questioning does this really exist is this really real it's also wrong in the the assertion if everyone believed this it would the world would be a better place that you ought to believe this you know the separate question of it does this exist in order to be believed in and then the moralizing sense of that you that you should believe in it okay now again within veganism we already had an example this come up at great length i do not think it is compassionate to castrate a cat and force it to sleep on your couch and watch tv with you i don't think it's compassionate to take a cat or a lion or a penguin or an ostrich like any wild animal wild or feral to take it and physically modify it and hold it in captivity right the vast majority of vegans consider pet ownership caring for pets and even caring for injured wild animals in these kinds of conditions they consider that the very definition of compassion they consider that the characteristic that separates them from the psychopaths whom they perceive as the vast majority of human beings in our society that they are they alone are the ones who will volunteer at an animal shelter to care for pigs chickens cats dogs horses whatever and what they consider caring i consider cruelty right same thing the the face face-off between catholics and indigenous people who are being conquered and colonized by catholics okay what one side considers civilized the other side considers barbaric all right circumcision is circumcision civilized or is it barbarism for the people who believe in it it's the definition of civilization of refinement and for an outsider who doesn't believe these things it's totally barbaric and each side the people on each side they consider themselves right they consider themselves rational and they think the world would be a better place if everyone else would just believe in the way that that they do um do you want to speak babe yes so some people might interpret your recent video towards maxie as cruel yes and i think you've encountered a lot of criticism on your channel for in response to videos that you've uploaded uh where you are criticizing specifically young women and i do think this is a problem in our society that we right people saw this also just just about very briefly yeah the the quit video games videos which are 99 about young men it's the same pattern exactly where some people see it as compassionate hey that you're really trying to help people but some people see it as cruelty so no it's true some of it's women but plenty of it there are plenty of examples of the young men too or displaying with old man also but yeah yeah only just an old gender's no i i agree with what you're saying oh yeah sure go on a lot of ways i i appreciate that you're brave enough to you know make that make that statement that she's delusional this is her politics are evil bad and wrong and somebody needs to say this or nobody is you know going to challenge her on it not even anybody in her personal life or private life she talks in a video about her her current partner just gives her 100 praise and that she would be lost if he wasn't giving her 100 praise all the time that to me i feel it's really messed up and um a problem this relationship is not based on 100 practice [Laughter] because you know we really do grow as people when we encounter criticism and you know another thing that you comment on is that i'm one of the few people that don't find your nihilistic uh philosophy on life disturbing but you know of course i've i've grown a lot in the these last five years and i've had to discard beliefs i used to have and i feel overall i'm i'm better for it now now that i'm able to be rational about a lot of things but not not gonna you know get too much into uh to my personal life but you know just this uh aspect that i see a lot is that whether it's because people have a crush on mexi or not uh just that the more compassionate approach to take toward people is indulging their stupidity and making excuses for it because you know otherwise it's cruel to point out what's logical or rational about their assumptions about their life and you know when it could really help them when it could really uh address some of the problems that they're having you know yeah this is a question from the i agree with all the stuff you're saying so that's why i don't have a lot to say about it um michael says in the audience uh quote i have no quarrel with the notion that vegans are crazy to think of themselves as the only ones with compassion so um you know i think there's a pragmatic question of can you or should you build a political movement on the basis of the conceit that you're morally superior to other people and then beyond that what if that moral superiority is built on a lie when something that's not true it's so it's not it's not real something that can never be made real that can never be substantiated objectively you know in the eyes of uh of an outside and detached observer now all of this is only worth saying because it's so unquestioned that compassion is a redeeming character trade like that's that's why i have to articulate this at all if it were based on being tall or being attractive like i had two years ago in the channel i said look why are you building a political movement on the idea that vegans are the only people who are thin and beautiful and have a like that that's just and people could immediately see the point of this christmas it's still a problem it was more of a problem five years ago but where i really had to press this argument and say look we can't have uh you know we can't have a movement that's built on quote-unquote lifestyle activism weight loss activism fitness activism diet activism this profoundly is incoherent this doesn't make sense it's kind of morally flawed in this in this deep way okay when you come to compassion it's so much harder to challenge the preconception right because nobody everyone's willing to assume that compassion is a positive exclusively positive character or even it is the definitively positive characteristic that all other virtues result from compassion stem from flow from you know uh compassion so you know the same way people will say greed is the root of all evil people do say in different idioms and different that compassion is the root of all virtue root of all goodness of all kindness um in chapter 3 i discussed this parable at great length but if you were to have 5 000 athletes and you give them a test to try to establish who is the most compassionate and who is the least compassionate let's say you give them a score between zero and 100 it's a percentile test so some people are 10 compassionate some people are 20 compassionate 30 40 you know but it's precise so this is obviously a very hypothetical test i'm proposing obviously from my perspective compassion isn't something that objectively exists in the real world that could ever be established through a test but nevertheless innumerable people with phds in psychology and psychiatry would claim that they can test for and establish and quantify how compassionate people are okay so you have 5 000 people we test them to see who is the most compassionate who is the least compassionate and then we separate them into five different groups so all these people are athletes they're all competitive athletes let's say they're all in track and field you know so that we have five separate training camps of athletes one thousand one thousand one thousand one thousand you have the one thousand most compassionate athletes training together you have the one thousand least compassionate athletes straight together they have several in between for different levels of compassion do you think that the most compassionate athletes would be the best athletes do you think they'd be the most competitive do you think they'd be the most successful do you think they'd be the smartest what if we continue tracking these people for many years they're like decades after they go to compete in the olympic games do you think the most compassionate people will be less likely to become drug addicts alcoholics cigarette smokers you know any anything you want to add here anything we can track do you think do you think the most compassionate people will be more successful in in finding employment if we're imagining this objectively real compassion what if instead we have 5 000 athletes and we separate them into five groups on the basis of their ability in math you know there are many positive character traits that are related to you having the self-discipline and focus necessary to study and cultivate and maintain a high level of ability in math incredibly few athletes do that in our culture again maybe it's different in japan maybe it's different in hong kong maybe it's different in beijing there are some other cultures where being good at math has a different quality if you talk to athletes the main thing they tell you is oh the minute i got on the football team i checked out of math class as soon as i knew i could be a successful athlete as soon as i knew i could go to the olympics as soon as soon as i knew i could get into university on the basis of a sports scholarship that was it for me math was done math was over i put they put the minimum this is in our culture this is very common it's incredibly rare to meet an athlete who has the self-discipline and just priority for their own intellectual development to be good at math um i think i've mentioned this before but i i once saw an interview um this is just related to the sports team in toronto and they were talking about how the intellectual caliber of the athletes from different cultures is very different and there was an old white man from the american south this is a white guy who grew up in a small town in the south of the united states of america and he was part of the old school of baseball coaches he was an old man now he had been a professional athlete when he was younger and he walked up to a cuban athlete and he picked up the book that this cuban athlete had taken out of his locker and put on the bench while they're changing clothes in the in the locker room and this old this old white guy from the south said i've been coaching baseball i've been training players for 50 years this the first time in a locker room i've ever seen a book that didn't have no pictures of naked women you know and and you know this article was discussing the extent to which athletes were people like because they have the luxury of not reading books like they can they can read books they don't okay if you separated those 5 000 athletes if you tested them and separated them on the basis of how good they were about if you tested them and separated them on the basis of how many non-fiction books have you read in your spare time in the last 10 years that can be established as a fact how many non-fiction books have you read that nobody was forcing you to read he wasn't required by a course or something any of you in the audience think about that some of you are going to feel humiliated oh geez in the last 10 years it's not a perfect test you could be a brilliant person who doesn't read books it's theoretically possible but we're talking about 5 000 people 5 000 athletes if you separate them in this sense on the basis of literacy the level of non-fiction reading it's not really literacy active research as i like to say how much active research you're doing if you have the basis of math you know you will have a powerful predictor for success in so many things in their life but including athletic performance because the people who have that kind of mental self-discipline and focus it's not just going to be math it's not just going to be doing research or reading about history or politics right that level of self-discipline is also going to make them extraordinary amongst athletes they're going to be able to apply that acumen and that focus to what they do on the sports field whatever sport it is they're competing and of course it's going to be an advantage over the other players who are more intellectually lazy or who are alcoholics or drug addicts or other things that indirectly correspond to how well they perform on a test that relates to math how much non-fiction they've read so on and so forth but if you're really being honest with yourself you know that compassion does not correspond to any of these other virtues any of these other abilities all right so someone else asked uh quote why is it a problem if compassion is a learned skill i think it's deeply unsettling because we live in a society where we think some people are born compassionate and some people have no compassion and they deserve to rot in a prison cell until the day they die for vegans the whole world belongs in a prison cell vegans are people who regard their own parents that way and their own school teachers that way and their priests and their vegans are people who go through their lives and regard 99 of the rest of humanity as being born defective as being born as quote unquote psychopaths and that they can't change and they're never going to change and then that mentality carries on within the movement in case you didn't know 99 of vegans think i'm an immoral person they think i'm evil and they're applying this same frankly catholic mentality this same witch-hunting mentality to me and i've been through it now for more than eight years that's that's been my burden to bear you know sometimes i joke around about it i mean my famous line is who has suffered less you know but of course there is a certain amount of suffering it sucks it sucks to be i mean it's miserable for me it's horrible for me to be the object of contempt and derision and hatred not just meat eaters regarding me that way but 99 of vegans regard me that way and sorry not to be you know uh needlessly offensive but why do meat eaters hate me so much it's because on some level they know that i'm right absolutely i mean you sit down most of you have had this experience where you sit there i've had me say that to me have them say that in those terms i've had meteors sit there with me and say you know what really pisses me off about your world view is i know that you're right sorry but it's not extraordinary it's the same with alcohol and gambling i've melissa has seen this i've had conversations be where i challenge them i won't say who this was i said look do you actually think i would be a better person if i gambled like you you know if you think if i were more like you i'd be a better person and the answer was no this guy agreed and said look you know you're right you know it's it's good i mean he said it's a good thing that you refused to gamble and he had to concede he would be a better person if he quit gambling he's not going to quit gambling he to some extent hates and resents the fact that i'm right you know you talk to someone who's really uh drinks alcohol five days a week or something whatever the situation someone is a regular drinker and you ask them okay so do you actually think it's a bad thing for me to be sober do you actually think i would be a better person if i drank alcohol now admittedly there's more than one answer that some people will actually claim you know you'd be a better person if you were a drunk you know but often enough you talk to people and they will say openly that the reason why they hate you so much the reason why they hate having this conversation with you is that they know that you're right and they feel that pressure on them they feel that awareness that there's a better person they could be or a better person they could have been if they would quit drinking if they would quit gambling um so on and so forth so yeah a lot of the friction within sorry a lot of the friction in my life as a vegan yes i have to deal with these kinds of confrontations with meat eaters who don't even think i'm wrong but they hate me for being right and then i deal with exactly the same thing on a higher level of intensity in dealing with my own fellow vegans because from their perspective the things that i might consider compassionate they consider cruel and vice versa they are actively engaged in things including castrating cats and dogs they are engaged in things that they think are definitively compassionate that i despise as cruelty i'm going to read just a couple paragraphs in the start of chapter 3 of my new book veganism the future of an illusion buy it on amazon i'll give a link soon enough chapter 3 begins all evils imagined and unimaginable have been justified by this word compassion vegans dump red paint on the diners at a random restaurant and cannot understand why the public fails to see this as an act of compassion for the victims in the same way that anti-abortion protesters dump red paint on doctors and nurses quote unquote giving voice to the voiceless in much the same idiom that vegans use when speaking of themselves with sincere incomprehension as to why the general public does not appreciate them as compassionate rather than dangerous [Music] so the comparison between veganism and the anti-abortion movement runs really deep here sorry i've stopped reading the text you can't tell um people who are pro-life and anti-abortion see what they are doing as compassionate and as the very definition of compassion i've had some of those people send me email and so on and they are saying why can't you have compassion for the victims why can't you stand up and be compassion for the victims and the people who are pro-abortion on the other side they are saying why can't you have compassion for this pregnant mother so here's this woman she got pregnant accidentally she doesn't want to have and raise this baby they're asking the question why can't you have compassion for her and this is part of their worldview and this is definitively compassionate compatible each side regards the other as perfectly irrational each side is willing to use coercion and violence right in order to quote unquote benefit [Laughter] others benefit everyone they think the world would be a better place if everyone was rational in the way that they were rational meaning if everyone believed the same things they believe okay this is the same kind of total mutual comprehension that exists not just in separating vegans or mediators but from my perspective in separating fake vegans from real vegans because remember the vast majority of vegans hate me continue reading from chapter three here the genocide of whole nations cultures and languages has been carried out in the name of this compassion not for people as they truly were but to benefit them as they ought to be not for the evanescent reality of mere women and men but for the sake of their immortal souls the pattern is much the same outside of the explicitly religious sphere it is not to help people in achieving the things they actually want that we practice our self-styled compassion but instead it is to help an idealized person achieve what we what we believe they ought to desire indeed we may be interrupting them in the midst of their pursuit of selfish short-sighted irrational things when our compassion causes us to assist them contrary to their self-interest but consistent with our own massacres are made invisible to the people who commit them by compassion acts of terrorism and cruelty are made to seem kind by means of this same compassion putting a drug addict in prison may be the compassionate thing to do according to one person and yet shutting the prison down and liberating all the drug addicts may be more compassionate according to another imprisonment exile and execution can all be justified by compassion it is a dangerous concept clothed in anodyne distractions like a sword wrapped up in shelving paper you're all the more likely to cut yourself because you can neither see its true shape nor which end you're laying your hands upon what the referendum is to the average dictatorship compassion is to the activist it is a corrupt plebiscite with just one voter