Anti-Communism, Atheism and Charity: My Origins as a Vegan Activist.

i'm gonna read and reply to a comment
sent to me on patreon from theo theo is not just a fan or a supporter he's really a super fan sometimes i quote myself and i can't find the quote and he knows what video i'm quoting like where's the video where i said this about this topic or something so theo knows my material really well one of the reasons for that is that he has been doing some kind of archive work i'd say he's been looking around a lot at what's been going on in the vegan movement and he's been kind of piecing together links to different articles by different vegans and different websites and different videos and so on my best girl melissa is sitting here just off camera next to me she can chime at any time anyway so theo writes quote i don't know the timeline of your journey into vegan activism too well i know you've had an affinity for charity ever since you felt betrayed by parents indoctrinating you into communist ideology uh sometime around when you were studying buddhism doing humanitarian aid et cetera so i'll read the rest of this paragraph this is an interesting point so he's he's saying that i've had an affinity for charity charity work and this is somehow linked to growing up with parents who were communists and my own rejection of communism um so i had a longtime friend and friend of me called phillip who you know some stories about babe and philip grew up with uh christian parents and he felt that he was indoctrinated into a form of christianity they despised and they were not and i don't know if anyone could be called a normal christian but they were not quite normal christians it has to be said they liked going to nigeria not just to do charity work but because they liked the really hard-line extreme form of angle kind of process in christianity they got out there they didn't find christianity harsh enough or biblical enough or whatever you want to say and i think probably homophobia and so on played a role in that so that was where they felt comfortable it was as being white missionaries in uh in that part of africa anyway um but i said to philip before when he was complaining with his own parents i said you know possibly if we had switched families at birth you know if he had been raised in my family and i wouldn't raise his family ironically it's quite possible i would have accepted my parents ideology just because the charity aspect meant so much to me i think that was really almost an instinctive thing you know from childhood forward for me you know like i can't say that was something i ever thought about he asked me why does charity matter to me so much i i think for many people it is i don't know if that's for 10 of the population or 50 of the population but i mean the basic concept of doing the best you can trying to help others let me give you an example how did you feel babe when you were a kid and you saw someone who was mentally [ __ ] saw someone or interacted with saw someone on the street like not in the news you know what i mean when i was a child i felt very strongly when i met interact with mentally [ __ ] people including people like born with down syndrome severe forms of retardation not not some minor thing i really wish that could help them i felt this terrible yearning to want to try to help them and the powerlessness of knowing i couldn't and also knowing that you know in terms of your parents and teachers you you're told by your parents and teachers to keep your distance and not without reason you know you as a little kid it is probably dangerous for you to interact with or play with mentally disabled people so you know that for me i think i had that out the gate had to when i came out the box it came that [ __ ] from from day one you know i don't think that was something taught to me no the other so look i mean other kids also if they had parents who were communists would have responded to and questioned other aspects of the ideology not just the the charity aspect but from my perspective as a child very clearly the validity of communism really stood or fell with the same claims to validity the catholic church often uses so remember there was a really crappy mainstream movie the da vinci code okay so i saw like five minutes of that movie while washing dishes and change the channel honestly honestly i'll tell you the truth if i watched that movie i had no shame but i remember that was on tv and some circumstance like that and in at least the movie version the main character confronts this representation sorry this representative of the catholic church and he sort of says you know your church is built on lies and the representative of the catholic church he's a cardinal or a deacon or something he's some reasonably ranky person he says back that his church washes the feet of the poor and feeds and houses the homeless and this is their claim to legitimacy now i remember i just laughed at that at the time it was just ridiculous when you donate money to the catholic church do you want to know what percentage of it goes to feeding the poor and what percentage of it goes to housing you know clerical scholars and priests and nuns in some kind of luxury and you know i'm not hating you just can't kid yourself what do you what are you paying for you paying for the the pope to live in luxury or you're paying for the poor to live in poverty if you wanted a charity it was the vote of the poor it wouldn't look anything like the catholic church right and it's designed or folk should have you but that was always striking to me and then only when i was a i don't know a teenager but late in my teenage years when i was in university i read that book by carl popper so the particular book by carl popper has a tough title the the title is the poverty of historicism a bunch of his other books have catchy titles just not that one and there for the first time i saw someone openly talking about the extent to which catholicism and communism really had things in common you know in terms of their appeal and that that resonated with me too i could see you know this is this is this is a really meaningful critique of both frankly anyway something that i as i've said to you recently was kind of a family secret also was the extent to which my father was drawn to christianity and for maybe 10 years of his life really believed in christianity i always thought that was very telling that the same people were seduced by communist extremism not moderate communism or seduced by christianity and um i don't think i've ever told you this story but i met one professor in china and she didn't admit it to me she admitted to my ex-wife and then i heard from her that she actually had a period where she had lost faith in communism and she briefly went over to what she considered formally converting to but she started going to church she was being seduced by basically american style christianity and she said directly because it made the same kind of promises it had the same kind of appeal for her you know so she wasn't sleepwalking that it wasn't like somebody else's analysis so there is an interesting kind of parallel there but again i started this by saying i'll do humility that kind of charitable instinct i think was so important to me that it's quite possible if i'd been raised by christian parents even crazy christian parents even specifically my friend phillips crazy christian parents that i would have found so much value in the charity side of what they were doing that i i don't know i don't know what i would have done with it you know i don't know what direction i would take that in but you know the claims to charity and the part of communism are are pretty paper-thin um i've never heard anyone really try to justify for example the american war in vietnam as charity like to really justify like why are you bombing vietnam as charity i've never heard someone really try to justify the american war in afghanistan this charity was another parallel thing and the communists had the same problem the communists also invaded afghanistan they invaded conquered afghanistan people now forget they had their own history so that they overlap in that specific example but that's only one example but to look at any of those episodes in the history of communism in russia or in china um it's very hard to give a charitable reading to them so that really is like a pun or a play on words but uh you know hey i'm not uh i'm not joking around for no reason here so there's an interesting point um theo is opening with here so again coming back to theo's letter to me he says quote i know you've had an affinity for charity ever since you felt betrayed by your parents and doctoring you into a communist ideology and i kind of see that the other way around because the charitable stink was so strong in me there was this tendency to judge communism against charity it's the social function of charity are you trying to help other people or not and keep it all the way real remember my father had real kind of rage and sorrow my mom that whole generation from the vietnam war specifically the vietnam war showed it to tana mongeau tandem joe's father also totally ruined by the vietnam war i mean a lot of people were in that generation and you know for my parents and for a lot of people their age their response to the vietnam war had nothing to do with charity it was real hatred and rage and so it was a real sense they wanted to destroy the united states they wanted an angry fist you know and i didn't see the world i mean i think they were wrong to see it that way also i mean i think they're both incorrect and morally wrong to see it that way but you have to realize a lot of those people got involved with left-wing politics and they didn't have any charitable motives and it wasn't at all like the way i felt as a child seeing images of poor and starving people on television i mean as a child that never saw that in real life but in real life you'd see maybe homeless people on the street see people living in poverty in different situations but you see when i was a kid babe this may be true for you too there were a lot of images especially of ethiopia you know ethiopia was the kind of sterling example of poverty maybe for your generation into haiti so you would have been pretty young with the earthquake and haiti happened or something you know this kind of thing i'm just giving you this yeah when i was in high school uh my choir did a tribute concert like raise money yeah but anyway the image of poverty and starvation and then the question of what do we do from here and i mean i guess we can get into this in a separate video but for all of us i mean that's ultimately what it comes down to is the number of hours in a day and how you can make any of these aspirations you know to save the world compatible with the challenge of keeping a roof over your head or providing a decent standard of living to your own kids if you have kids or any of these other things i remember um so there's a saying in buddhism this is in mahayana buddhism but they say uh it is in some moderately ancient texts but not the real not the most ancient text and buddhism where it says you know uh practice the dharma as if your hat is on fire you know as if you're wearing a hat that's on fire you know a lot of religions have that spirit of like the world is gonna end so work really hard and devote yourself to this or whatever i mean veganism it's weird i don't feel that the world is going to end i feel that the world is bad and is getting worse but i mean it's a horrible i mean it's an absolutely horrible cosmology we live with it's vegans ethically and ecologically and um you know i do still ask myself that question every day you know how would you live your life if you were trying to save the world i have a daughter my daughter's four years old i do prioritize spending time with my daughter i do burn the jet fuel to fly from canada to france and spend my 15 days with my daughter you know and all these things um but sure when we're looking at these options it would be it would be a wonderful delusion if i thought that getting a phd in ecology could make any difference in the world even on this youtube channel i don't think if i got a phd in ecology would even help this youtube channel in any way i don't think would help the vegan world anyway if i got a phd in ecology if i got a phd in ecology i don't think there's anything i could do that gary francione hasn't already done or even the gary yourofsky hasn't already done without having a phd in ecology so both of us are people now we're looking at more higher education we were looking at we had a video on it recently looking at whether or not we should become lawyers go to law school but then you look at that and you contrast it to you know going to get a degree in culinary arts getting a degree in baking getting a degree in pastries working in a kitchen rolling out bread and ask yourself what can really be a platform for making that difference in the world anyway it's heavy so we were laughing and joking around a lot before we we came on camera but i mean that it really is the the burden i mean you know gotta say it's the burden that i've lived with all my life i really do feel that way but veganism gave me a coherent framework and a lens to understand it and express it much better than before because melissa was exactly like me in this before i was vegan i cared way more about never owning a car and by the way i still never have owned a car i still never have driven a car all right and then after i was vegan you see that kind of thing in this much much more meaningful quantitative framework you know and i remember like some of my ex-girlfriends when i first got with them they were really hyper about never using a plastic bag and i could i said to them do you want me to show you the stats do you want me to show you what percentage of the human waste stream that's what people call it the human waste stream is reusable plastic bags do you want me to show that in the difference between using a reusable and disposable do you want me to show that i can get you that now and in some studies you know the reusable plastic bags cause more garbage than this it's a really near thing it's like okay and now do you want to look at the difference between you know meat versus tofu this kind of thing i'm not saying veganism is the only you know ecological or ethical cause but veganism was both the ineluctable conclusion of those questions and those misgivings and it was also something where once i switched into veganism all those other questions you know made more sense it it precisely in the strictest sense the word perspective it put all the other problems in perspective you could see what was big and what was in fact small but close to you you know in contrast to things that really were huge but perhaps you know more remote [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes