Megan Phelps-Roper is Wrong About Everything.

we're living through an interesting period of history in which nobody really studies how to deal with conflict nobody really studies how to win in political conflicts what people study what people are taught to respect is avoidance of conflict is de-escalation of conflict you've probably heard these terms you know uh all your life i met a man who had been for many years a buddhist monk he was a white european and he had gone to thailand and he was a formal taravata buddhist monk in the full saffron colored robe you know he became fluent in the thai language he preached to thai people he really did live in immersion he wasn't just hanging out with a bunch of white hippies and dreadlocks or something he lived that life what do you think he did with the rest of his career after he uh after he gave up being a buddhism oh he taught he taught conflict avoidance he taught uh yeah conflict resolution i think that's the that's the term um all right so we talk a lot about conflict resolution and we have a sort of political education we're growing up that has to do with minimizing avoiding and de-escalating conflict and certainly currently in the year 2022 that is what we hear about on the news all the time the police we find fault with them for escalating a conflict instead of de-escalating it so on and so forth but when we turn to the questions that matter to us most both on massive scale of a society of millions of people planet of billions of people and on the most intimate scale the one-to-one scale of friends lovers colleagues and family members very often what we're actually talking about is escalating a conflict taking what might be a relatively minor or relatively subtle conflict between two people and raising the stakes raising the consequences so that and until something really fundamentally changes now we can give you about a hundred different examples here but i think you can imagine let's just say you have a brother and your brother drinks alcohol smokes cigarettes and gambles and he doesn't do any of these things to such an excess that it would be perceived as a mental illness in our society he does you know he's not diagnosable as an alcoholic but this adds up to a lot of his time and energy what are you going to do if you really want to convince him to make a change if you don't want to normalize his behavior you want to abnormalize his behavior you want him to see the consequences of his actions you even want to exaggerate the consequences of his actions you want to in a sense create consequences for his actions that they currently don't have i mean currently he may be able to say he can still hold down his job and his girlfriend puts up with him and he has a wonderful social life and his drinking and smoking and gambling that it's really not a problem but it's a problem for you and in a sense you want to convince him that it should be a problem for him too let's say you're born and raised muslim your father is muslim your mother is muslim but you're not you're an open atheist in a muslim household household and assume you're in your 20s it's not you've moved out of the house you've got brothers and sisters and in the same way that someone can be a little bit of an alcoholic and a little bit of a smoker and a little bit of a gambler and just get by in your life let's say this is a very realistic scenario for many of you let's say your brothers and sisters they're not atheists and they're not devout muslims either they're just a little bit muslim they just they just get you know they get along with their parents they get along with the church they get along with worldly authorities oh that's a real easy situation to avoid conflict and both of them are right we can be conflict avoiding conflict resolution we have conflict minimization we can we can describe we can all we can all just get along and years and years are going to go by and nothing is really going to change right so what about the conflicts in which exactly what we want is to insist that people be uncompromising that they face up to the consequences and implications of their beliefs of their decisions of their of their commitments that actually what we want to do is abnormalize their behavior to lead them into a situation where they are distantiated enough from alienated enough from the trappings of their daily life things that they've they've learned to ignore things that have become invisible invisible to them through repetition and familiarity things that you see and do every day which can include prayer i mean things you see and do every day can include drinking alcohol and it can include praying to a god that doesn't exist and you want to stop this cycle of self-justifying you know compromised uh behavior and say no no let's let's really think about this okay what if you have a family where your father takes antidepressants your mother takes anti-anxiety drugs and let's say she was diagnosed at some point with attention deficit disorder maybe she also has to take sleeping pills to help her because she's on the meds for those other things screw up her sleep and you got a number of brothers and sisters and cousins and seemingly everyone is on mind-altering prescription medication 24 hours a day seven days a week and for them it's normal i like like the gambler i talked about as the first example right um probably they're all accustomed to complaining about the side effects you know probably they complain amongst themselves oh you know i've been taking such and such on my doctor's organization oh and they tried increasing the prescription and then we tried decreasing it and then i tried switching to this other drug you know they probably do admit that there are problems admit that there are drawbacks probably they admit things like erectile dysfunction as a side effect loss of sense of smell and i've known people who take these drugs they have all kinds of weird side effects just loss of sleep and and all kinds of things that different effects probably but for them right it's become normal it's something they accept son they've made peace with and if you want to challenge them if you want to really challenge them about the question of what do they believe and what are the implications of those beliefs if you think them all the way through do you believe it's good to take a medicine that has been debunked that has been scientifically proven to not work to not be effective for the disease you claim you have it's a whole separate question here whether or not that disease even exists scientifically but you know do you think it's moral and good for you not even your doctor not even the bogeyman of the big pharmaceutical corporation do you think it's good for you to encourage people to take a drug that is non-effective and that has side effects that include brain damage medically proven we can show it through an x-ray we can show it through an mri scan we can show it through examining cadavers we can prove permanent brain damage is that really what you believe are those the tenets of your religion is that really what you're really loving all these people are comfortable okay you can't solve the problem through conflict avoidance or conflict resolution we're talking about conflict creation we're talking about you know jarring people out of their complacency and again abnormalizing what for them is completely normal behavior right it's part of the drum beat of daily life in the same way that you know if you sit down and read a book on a subway maybe when you first sit down the noise of the subway disturbs you have a long subway ride you start reading the book and you know the noise of the grinding gears and so on the subway around you starts to disappear into the background right now again i want to emphasize this this kind of conflict exists at the most intimate level your husband your wife your boyfriend your girlfriend your parents your brothers and sisters right your co-workers at the office and you can scale it up and it exists at the level of the city of the state of the province of the country of the continent of the world and we're talking about conflict creation we're talking about taking a situation where everybody everybody tolerates each other the alcoholics tolerate the sober people and the sober people tolerate the alcoholics the people who are morally opposed to gambling they get along just fine with the people who go and gamble every weekend right and the atheists get along just fine with the muslim fundamentalists we're all one big happy family and you know 20 of the population united states of america can be on a prescription with mind altering ineffective medication that causes permanent brain damage anti-depressants antipsychotics it can go up to thirty percent go to fitness we can all keep tolerating each other we all keep on avoiding conflict with one another say yes yes good for good for you you know like good patting each other on the on the head patting each other on the back everyone uh everyone enjoying each other's company from the cradle to the grave with no uh no conflict at all what about what about creating conflict and once you create those conflicts creating stakes creating consequences where there's something to win and something to lose you know for both of us now i haven't mentioned veganism in this video and i don't have to i mean we can do the whole video we can just talk about atheism we just talk about left-wing politics right-wing politics we talk about conservative and liberal politics there's so many examples i can work with here but for those of you mindings who are vegan i think you will right away know what i'm talking about whether it's on the ethical side on the ecological side or even on the health side of the equation which i talked about the least was that you live in a family where it's normal for people to have heart attacks at 55. someone has their first heart attack at 65. oh well you know that's not too bad because my brother he had his first at 55 and like you can leave it where everybody's having heart attacks between 55 and 65 and everyone's dead at 75. you can you can have family where it's normal to not be able to walk up five flights of stairs it's just normal like you know whether it's cardiovascular or be that's just considered extraordinary to be able to run up five flights of stairs and for it to be no big deal to carry you know i remember moving furniture in and out of an apartment going up and down there's a lot of flights of stairs there's 13 flights of stairs with every every piece of baggage and whatever you know that that's extraordinary okay well you know so my point is the health side of it is the shallowest and the stupidest i'm much more interested in the ethics the politics the ecology and so on but even on that level right i'm not trying to avoid conflict with you i'm not trying to get along with you right this is about conflict escalation right because maybe maybe there is a little bit right there's a little bit of doubt gnawing away at you like you let's say whether it's your brother or your father let's say you know a guy who's 55 i probably do have brothers who are 55 now i do so i'm in my 40s i have brothers who are 15 years older me so i do so i can turn to one of my brothers and say hey you know what when you take your shirt off and look in the mirror you know here's what you see and here's what you don't see and why don't you think about what you're going to be like now 55 to 65 and what the you know you can you can really try so my point is there may be a little bit of a conflict there's a little bit of awareness life doesn't have to be this way it doesn't have to be so hard to get up a flight of stairs it doesn't have to be uh it doesn't have to be so embarrassing to go swimming at the beach or the pool when you take your shirt off like as a guy you know i may have felt i feel something gnawing away at you ethically there might be some little awareness snowing away at you it doesn't really seem necessary for animals to be raised in captivity just to produce a hot dog and for them to be slaughtered and suffer and pollute the air and put the water out of all these terrible consequences a hot dog that really qualitatively is not that different from the experience of eating a vegan hot dog and you know in terms of health it's even worse there's maybe something gnawing away at them there is some small degree of conflict there that can be escalated right and look when you're dealing with left-wing politics right-wing politics you know religion you know we talk a lot about the kind of acceptance and reinforcement religious people get inside the temple it's the hindu temple muslim temple jewish them okay yeah but they're also a kind of pariah in the rest of society you know talk to any girl who grew up in canada wearing the head scarf the whole time she went through primary school in high school and justifying to herself why it is she stands out why it is she is 24 7 well whatever 12 hours a day when she's outside of the house why is it that in every class she ever took first and foremost everyone's first impression of her was her religion because she was wearing a religious uniform and every job she applies for every interaction whether at the grocery store or anywhere else like you know okay there is there is some conflict there we have a whole society and culture of saying hey minimize dies clay devoid let her know that she's welcome let her know that you see her for the person she is despite the fact that she's wearing a religious symbol around covering part of her face covering her hair you know and so on right but there is some conflict within her there's some part of her that's thinking the same way my brother might be thinking you should be able to run up five flights of stairs or something you know um there's some part of her that's thinking life doesn't have to be this way and whether it's people who have been her friends who are non-muslim just secular people people who are maybe this much christian or people who are outright atheist or it's people she sees on tv people she sees on the news some part of her is thinking i could have a life like that woman i could be like her i don't have to live this way encumbered by the religion forever and i didn't have to suffer through this in primary school in high school it's all for god and it's all for nothing it's for no reason so there is there is a conflict there right do any of you feel confident taking someone aside and as i say escalating that conflict and saying yeah you know what the stakes are way higher than you think they are making excuses for this religion there are consequences for the next century on this planet that go way beyond you and i on the level of of two people just talking to each other the consequences for who you want to be for the rest of your life maybe you've got 40 years on this planet maybe maybe you've got 100 years by now you're gonna live whether you've got another 10 years another 100 years whatever it's going to be yeah there are consequences on that scale but there are also you know much more serious much more far-reaching consequences that's uh you know let's let's let's talk about let's escalate this conflict let's make you feel responsible let's make you feel ashamed of yourself let's make you feel like if you don't make a change if you don't start innovating if you don't start coming up with some new options right you're going to hate yourself for the rest your life for squandering this opportunity and and doing the wrong thing creating a sense of urgency creating an awareness that you're standing at a fork in the road where you get to decide what kind of person you want to be what kind of world you want to live in and then what kind of commitment you're willing to make what kind of effort you want to make what kind of ambition you have to make that happen to change the world beyond you know the immediate sphere of people who already know you and love you and and care about you now tyson you know what i'm talking about here right away it does have a resemblance to one sales tactics two religious conversion right if i am trying to convince you to buy a car let's say uh specifically buying what americans call an rv a mobile home a camper van you know so this is a car you don't need you already have a car but now i want to convince you to buy another car a kind of car that you're just going to use on your vacations special vacation vehicle think about how similar that is to what i've just been talking about in terms of political conflict and religious oh you think you're happy with the car you've already got you think you're happy with the vacations you take with your family but now i'm gonna sell you on this idea i'm gonna take this seed of doubt you've got that you could be happier if you had the ability to go camping and pitch a tent what you really need is a vehicle that's big enough that you can put surfboards in the back of it and you can drive to the beach with your girlfriend or your kids or whatever you've got with the surfboards and you have a place to change into your bathing suits like you have you know even if you don't sleep there you have a little enclosed space you have a place where you can have lunch you know and then you can go to the beach you've got to buy a camper i'm going to escalate and escalate until you are ready to make this commitment to change your life so you're ready to go into debt you're ready to take out a bank loan whatever it takes you're ready to put it on the credit card to make this this change in your life it resembles sales tax and i got to tell you something i used to be a member of the teravata buddhist faith i was good at it guys all right one of the reasons i have so much contempt for my contemporaries my competitors who may be cult leaders and they may be religious leaders is that i know i would be better at running the same game that they're running you know oh you think paul bashir can talk of a good game you think james aspy can talk a good game homie come on i can i can talk the dalai lama into converting to judaism okay bro like i can i can sell buddhist reincarnation i can sell buddhist ethics i can talk people into uh the philosophy and the religion of of theravada buddhism i'm i'm good at i can work a crowd i mean like when i say word crowd so when you're talking to 30 people at once and i can talk to people one one at a time i have experience you know doing that kind of thing um you know i have experience and you know when you're talking to someone and you recognize what it is they care about and you know where you you you preach to that and so you take advantage of what their their interests and commitments already are and you make them aware of interests and commitments that they didn't even they didn't even know they had you know if i actually were to do what durianrider did jesus a friend of mine is is convinced that dorian ryder is autistic actually i have a friend who is herself diagnosed as autistic she has a lot of experience with autism i remember she was talking through her analysis of him and why she believes he also is a diagnosable autistic person i don't i don't find it completely convincing i don't i'm looking at me but he's certainly someone who struggles with exactly the kind of eye contact and conversational ability and the confidence work taking someone into your confidence and then moving them and so on that i have to say already as a teenager i knew i was good at and i knew well enough to be afraid of it i didn't want to be a salesman and i didn't want to be a cult leader and i'd like to think i'm still not you know um if you have people in your life who are communists if you have people in your life who call themselves anarchists or socialists but really they're on that slippery slope they're involved with other communist revolutionary people you know the problem isn't that they're radical the problem isn't that they're uncomfortable the problem is that they're comfortable like when you talk to those people they know about the mass murder they know about the mass starvation they know about the failures government they know about that that stuff right and the question is how are you going to escalate this conflict how are you going to find the basis for doubt and expand on it how are you going to make them feel ashamed of themselves because they do they support they endorse mass murder and masturbation they support communism their anti-democracy and to be blunt anti-freedom whatever you want to put it that they that they support this how are you going to abnormalize that when for them it has become normal it's part of the drumbeat of their life now again it's my point here is it's easy if you're unfamiliar with these things to think the radicalism is the problem and all you have to do is de-radicalize them it's kind of natural what i'm saying to you is instead you have to look at this and see exactly the compromise and the tolerance and the normalcy you have to see the mediocrity of it as the problem the problem is the extent to which they're they're comfortable with this today um okay i've and i've dealt with a lot of communists in my own family on the internet face to face i've lived in communist countries communism it has been a real problem it has a real problem you know moving ahead it still is in case you don't know right now joe biden is more or less in a cold war situation with communist china it does not look like in the next 50 years uh communism is is going away um it looks like this thing we're going to deal with more and more so in turning to uh margaret phelps roper look at her name on megan thank you melissa's just off camera doing the fact checking megan phelps roper this is a an author and a sort of ex-christian activist whose existence i was reminded of because one of my supporters on patreon mentioned reading her book she has a ted talk she has the lecture here on youtube with over six million views and she gives just four um points of advice points of guidance for the audience and how to deal with how to approach people of contrary ideological persuasions and i think she's wrong about every single one of them i think it's really really bad advice i know it's well intended [Laughter] um i know she's she thinks she's helping you and she thinks she's helping you on the basis of what her own experience was how it was she started to doubt the christian doctor and how it was she was converted or deconverted from christianity to some kind of atheism now the first point is perhaps the most interesting her point number one is don't assume bad intent i can go through all these examples and more if your brother is getting drunk and gambling what do you mean don't assume bad intent when you confront him when you're trying to create a conflict with him when you're trying as they say really still like a salesman you're trying to increase the consequences you're trying to escalate the conflict so that he'll make a decision to change his life what do you mean by don't assume bad intent now i know i think this really fundamentally reflects the extent to which she remains christian she thinks it is a good and pious thing to go out in the world and attribute positive intentions to everyone attribute the the best of intentions there's a there's a christian phrase it's a terrible way to operate frankly even in the absence of this kind of conflict i mean you know you go into the guidance counselor's office at the university and they have a sign on the wall saying we're here to help assume bad intent you go to a psychiatrist's office he has a sign on the wall saying tell me all your problems open up your heart to me bear your soul we're here to help he may even tell you he has the cure he has a pill in a bottle it's going to cure what's wrong with you assume bad intent even the people who are paid a generous salary to help you assume bad intent when i have gone to unemployment offices here in canada i think they refer to them as employment offices at the power of positive thinking not unemployment employment but you know government offices to supposedly assist you in finding a job somebody that's their that's their only job they're just paid to help people who come in saying hey look i'm trying to transition to a new career i'm trying to find work assume bad intent you are dealing with bad people who have bad motivations in all these situations and that is in the absence of a religious conflict in the absence of a political conflict in the absence of an ideological conflict such as we're talking about here that's not even as fraught a situation as you know trying to convert someone to the vegan diet that's just hey i'm trying to get help your job description says you're here to help me you're paid for governor know me but they're not there to help you and sadly they are bad people with bad intentions some of you guys are watching this video and you're 55 years old and you know exactly what i'm talking about and some of you guys are watching this video and you're 18 years old you have no idea what i'm talking about yet um you know sadly i mean right now real world 2022 when you go into a police station the police might have a sign on the wall saying we're here to help you no they're not you have to deal with the police on an adversarial basis you have to assume bad intent you have to go in with all the evidence for your case you say hey police officer i'm gonna compel you to do the right thing and here's how i'm gonna do it and i've had that experience even when i went in just to report that i got hit by a car i was a pedestrian hit by a car and you would think they were interrogating the taliban the level of hostility and threat which i was very good at at dealing with i cope with that very well other people would have broke down weapon it was it was that bad and i could say the same here so i'm pointing out the window because that's where it happened when i confronted the police here about uh drug addicts openly uh injecting themselves i i don't know it was heroin or phenomenal but injecting those with needles uh in public broad daylight and the police refusing to enforce the law in those circumstances assume bad intent so look um her claim is so this is megan phelps roper again i think she just hasn't recognized the extent that she remains fundamentally a christian person with a christian a christian charitable perspective on the world quote assuming ill motives cuts us off from understanding why someone does and believes as they do quotation number two when we assume good or neutral intent we have a better framework for dialogue now what i'm saying to you is not the opposite of what she says when you're dealing with someone in this kind of ideological conflict so you meet someone who's a communist quite recently i spoke to a guy and he had an instagram account and believe his most recent picture of himself on instagram was him proudly posing in front of a communist hammer and sickle flag it was him identifying as a communist and he was writing to me and saying he's a fan of my youtube channel and he he appreciates what i say in criticizing communism but he nevertheless remains a diehard devoted communist now what would it mean if you were going to talk to someone and you know my only real interest in this conversation in one hand okay yeah i appreciate you watching my channel i appreciate that you're willing to listen to someone who's a total anti-communist preacher but you know obviously my agenda is to try to make you uncomfortable with the compromises you're comfortable with is to make you realize that what you're doing here it's just as bad and evil and wrong as a young man who commits to the neo-nazi movement and poses in front of a swastika flag you know it's it is just as bad it's just as serious and what it tells me about you is just as dark like on the judgment of the individual person whether or not the knock-on consequences are as bad as is really another another question what do you think you think i'm going to assume good intentions they're going to impute good intentions to him i neither assign good intentions to him nor do i assign bad intentions to him i assume that he doesn't even know what his intentions are himself his intentions good or bad i don't just work with the assumption that they're unknowable to me i work with the assumption that they are unknowable to him i've talked to people who used to be vegan they used to be vegan activists and then they became ex-vegan and they became anti-vegan no one of these guys i could name him but i won't i notice at that time he got a girlfriend with really big breasts and he started posing on his instagram with her in a wet bikini showing off her breasts her face wasn't very pretty i'm just being honest with you she was one of those women she had a really impressive pair of breasts but not a very pretty face and he was letting you know about it on on instagram you know there were a couple other changes in his life he was a guy who'd saved up a lot of money and then he'd taken a few years off work and he then returned to the workplace there are a few different changes in his life at this time when he didn't just quit veganism he actually became an anti-vegan activist endorsing like butter claiming cow butter is healthy things that most meat eaters don't believe most mediators think it's okay to indulge in butter but they recognize it's unhealthy you know because endorsing you know butter and and beef and things it was totally ridiculous now look still today like now in retrospect i can't draw you a diagram we can't set out billiard balls on a table and talk about cause and effect like okay like you went back to the workplace started having work colleagues you you got this girlfriend with big breasts like i can't give you a cause-and-effect relationship like oh you got laid and all of a sudden you don't care about ethics anymore all right now and by the way i'm not even claiming it isn't that simple for a lot of people it is for a lot of people it's that simple what they wanted was to get laid there were people who became vegan to get laid they became vegan because of a particular boyfriend or girlfriend but they became vegan they started being an activist started going to events to get no doubt it can be that simple okay but my point is i don't know and my conviction is he doesn't know either i think he's not aware of how his sex life changed the way he views ethics ecology and ultimately even health and diet now real quickly i think you guys know uh there's a youtuber just using the name tooker he used to be a fan of my channel i used to be vegan he knew a lot and talked about veganism and he knew a lot about my specific cynical perspective on veganism he made a video giving all his reasons why now he's ex-vegan now he eats meat and drinks milk and does whatever he acquiesces in the culture of time and his reasons when i'm listening to them this is subjective when i'm hearing them i'm hearing [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] then he admits he can't get laid right that's the one that stands out to me as something palpable and real i i think i'm reading this guy and his expression i think he's down bad he talks about his desire to get married and have children to find one i just mentioned he did he didn't mention his desire to sleep with 10 different women or 100 everyone he's talking about finding one woman and getting married and having kids not all guys are like that some guys would rather sleep with 200 women but that that was his that's how he put it i can't set out the billiard balls on the table and give you cause and effect right and i am not claiming that i know his motives and i am not even claiming to judge his motives as good or bad my point is when i approach these situations i assume and i treat people as if they do not know their bad intentions themselves when you're talking about someone who's born muslim who's a raised muslim do you think they know their reasons for continuing to be muslim for continuing to make excuses for their religion to justify their commitments to religion is that really something they can know themselves almost by definition they'll only be able to know that and reflect on that and analyze it after they've lost their faith it's after you've quit all right now communism my parents were communists i was in effect born and raised communist i rejected communism okay i can sit here now and tell you in detail i can tell you how i felt about communism at age 10 at age 15 at age 20 oh yeah now now that i don't believe in it and i can talk about my motivations and my parents motivations we can psychoanalyze this down to smithereens right oh i know now now that i'm outside of the ideology that i'm outside of the belief system right someone who's still inside it i wish i could say to you good or bad they won't know their own intentions but you know through this they're always bad they are always bad intentions but they won't be able to recognize them not even if you say them yourself you know sorry whether it's islam whether it's christianity or or another religion i'm going to mention an example from from buddhism um you know how many people can say to you while they're still inside the faith that the reason why they still practice this religion was that every time they questioned it as a child every time they stepped out of line their grandfather took a stick and beat them while you still believe while you're still afraid of going to hell after you die and while you still maybe want your grandfather to love you and approve of you like while you're still in that relationship you may have some really intense relationship with the grandfather who beat you their child that's when you can't see that and that's why you can't say that it's a bad reason it's a bad motivation it's a bad intention fact that you're afraid of your father whipping you or that you know there's this weird like almost bdsm relationship to authority that shapes the way you live your life it's there's no way it can be good it's bad but but i won't know that about you and you won't know that about yourself i was once um i was once uh at a buddhist retreat so i could describe the whole situation uh but anyway this is a buddhist institution and uh relatively philosophical there were a bunch of people there with phds or some level of expertise and buddhism but it wasn't academic this was you know there were also people that were just whatever white people enthusiastic about meditation should say so it was a mixed crowd there were some uh chinese people there there were some people from sri lanka there there were there was good about 50 white people 50 east asian traditional buddhists and some of the discussions were at a high acting level anyway there was this white guy and he was a former buddhist monk he had experience with the zen buddhist tradition being a zen monk and he later went on to after this conversation he became a theravada buddhist monk in the burmese tradition so he was a serious lifelong passionate lay buddhist you could say you know went on to become a a serious monk i doubt he's still alive anyway probably died wearing the rope he died walking the ancient narrow path to nirvana so we're in this context and i know his level of education with the scripture the philosophy of ancient texts and i basically said we have an audience there are other people that are having this error i say to them look buddhism is a religion of non-violence detachment compassion insight this particular philosophy this critique of desire how can you possibly justify being a member of a corrupt form of the religion in which your normal religious practice is to beat someone with a stick this is the zen buddhist practice in some forms of zen in japan it carries on it's more than one form of buddhism in japan but i knew the particular group he was with in the united states they were one of they believed in beating you with like beating you into enlightenment stupid you know what this is not what the buddha taught the buddha did not teach beating people with stick and the guy stood there and he gave this completely erudite like semi-freudian semi-philosophical semi-buddhist you know lecture about his justification of why he thinks being beaten with a stick by a zen master is you know so i i loved which he spoke uninterrupted for a long time i stood there i said your parents beat you with a stick didn't they and your grandparents and your babysitter and what you want to believe more than anything else is that they did it for a really good reason and not just because they were stupid or afraid didn't know what to do and didn't know how to take care of you and didn't know what to teach you that like you know your parents might have been 18 at the time you know a lot of people whether they're 18 or 28 that your parents were just dumb mixed up young people who didn't know how to raise a kid and they hadn't taken a course in it and whatever they're beating you for stupid irrational ignorant reasons you want to believe more than anything else that these people had some kind of profound wisdom and insight that motivated them to beat you and now you are acting out that same script again with a zen master well what you want to believe the fantasy you want to gratify is that when they beat you for a stick it's for your own good it's for your own enlightenment and it's because the person who holds the stick has some kind of profound ineffable wisdom that you don't have and he broke down on the spot he fell apart into pixels i have experience making people break down crying teachers professors authority figures i do border guards getting interrogated at the border and taking apart the people who are who are trying to interrogate me all right you know and and this dude he was he was a preacher he was used to preaching this same doctrine and variations of it i'm just gonna tell you i don't know that i'm right it's a very compelling analysis and i saw this guy completely freak out and fall apart i could be wrong okay i don't know neither does he megan phelps roper says rule number one don't assume bad intent i'm saying to you assume that these people do not know their own bad intentions themselves why did my father become a communist i think he went to his grave without ever knowing himself i think you could read all his written work a lot of it's on the internet now don't read it it's garbage it's terrible but you could read what he wrote decade by decade and never find an answer and you could ask him and never find an answer and it's because he never lost his faith he never stood outside of that ideology he never stood outside of that belief system to look back on it and with real detachment evaluate you know what his motives really were and again the hardest thing about challenging these people is not that they're radical it's not that they're extreme it's that they're comfortable and you've got to make them uncomfortable you've got to find the basis for the conflict and then escalate it okay point number two from megan is ask questions i think this woman just doesn't have experience with these kinds of conflicts and the little bit of experience she has is as a conventionally good looking woman in american culture and this is to me telling she says quote it gives them an opportunity to point out flaws in our position no it doesn't so if i'm asking you questions if i'm asking you oh how do you justify supporting joseph stalin when he did this terrible thing that doesn't give the other person an opportunity to point out a flaw in my position okay i say the opposite here we're addressing something actually i could have i could have talked about under point number one too but point number one went on long enough um the real problem people get into whether they're asking questions or making assertions or offering arguments the real problem people get into is that they struggle over the moral high ground over who is going to be a good per you know that you want the other person to regard you as morally good or as authoritative all right the way to give the other person the opportunity to point out a flaw in your own position is to go ahead and do it yourself is to criticize your own position is to expose its weaknesses is to expose your own agenda is to engage in self-criticism um it's not to ask them questions and what she says here about asking questions it's just completely wrong now again if she were kind of a large imposing looking man i think should have a very different experience of this in american culture you know if you're asking someone how do you know what you think you know about the bible how do you know what you think you know about the koran how do you know what you think you know about communism how do you know what you think you know about how how healthy it is to eat butter you know saturated fat or something you know just what you're saying here it's 180 degrees wrong now when i talk to people whether they're communists or fascists or left-wing or right wings and whatever liberals are or conservatives when i criticize my own position i'm revealing its limits and we're feeling its its disadvantages but i'm also revealing the kind of person i am and like i'm willing to say look i'm a terrible person i'm a bad person i'm not trying to be better than you i'm telling you that for the kind of person i am this is the program of action that i'm proposed so really just really briefly over the last 10 years if you talk to left-wing people but the war in afghanistan the war in iraq war in syria america's involvement in israel-palestine the never-ending conflict all right so often wingers will begin with the assumption that it's completely preposterous for anyone to disagree with them it's unimaginable to them that anyone takes the other point of view you can't make progress by asking questions you can say oh well how do you know what you think you know about hamas how do you know what you think you know about israel 100 counterproductive right but i can attack my own position i can criticize my own position and i can reveal something important about the kind of person i am so look maybe i'm a terrible person maybe i'm worse than you in some ways i'll tell you something i care so much about democracy democracy is so important to me that i'm willing to support american imperialism as you call it in cuba for the sake of democracy i'm willing to support american imperialism in the middle east you know i'm willing to support a military alliance between the united states and israel even though israel may have all kinds of problems it may be a deeply flawed democracy america also has deeply flawed democracy but like the extent to which israel is democratic and represents democracy and advances the cause of democracy that's enough for me to see the conflict in this way and now let's talk about you because with most left-wing people they're instead thinking of this in terms of american democracy is they just think america sorry they think american imperialism is bad and evil and wrong and then they don't care if they're supporting hamas in palestine they don't care if they're supporting bashar al-assad in syria they don't care if they're supporting muslim dictatorships or communist dictators they don't care if they're supporting north korea or cuba you know they don't care what horrible regime they're supporting as long as it's something that's against american imperialism you can't make progress through questions you can make progress through criticizing your own position well look i'm the kind of terrible person who who sees democracy now how about you know what do you see that makes your view of this so different in criticizing my own position i'm not just disclosing i'm not just disclosing my argument or sign i'm disclosing who i am right um and that's the hardest thing to get across and you'll never get there by by questioning and by the way compare this to what i said about point one in a sense i'm disclosing my bad intentions like and i've i've said to people i've said 11 people look i am willing to accept a body count in the tens of thousands to create democracy like to replace a dictatorship with democracy i think that justifies tens of thousands of people dying in war somewhat that that's my perspective now like maybe i'm a bad person like maybe i'm a bad person the way you're not but i notice your point of view where you say you're not willing to support that and yet you are willing to justify tens of thousands of people dying in order to sustain a communist dictatorship or even in some cases a muslim dictatorship it's totally paradoxical but the left wing is insanely pro-muslim in 2022 this is you know strange bedfellows partly created by the israel palestine conflict you know so on and so forth okay but you can see what i'm doing here in part what i'm describing in this video is nihilism in praxis okay point three these last two i'm gonna do very briefly we're gonna wrap this up point three she says stay calm uh she says of her husband he would always refuse to escalate the conflict he would change the subject he would tell a joke he would recommend a book or gently excuse himself from the conversation close quote again i think her perspective on one end she doesn't have a lot of experience with this the mandatory perspective is just as this kind of good-looking female in these very peculiar uh circumstances you're talking to someone who's a communist you're talking to someone who's a devout muslim you know and you want to change their mind you can't stay calm it's totally counter to breakfast.com even you're talking to your brother who is a gambler and drunk okay the whole point is to let them know how much this means to you how much it hurts you how much it bereaves you you know like you can say to your brother i just can't stand the fact that when we were growing up you were the smart one you were smarter than me i thought you were more gifted than me and now you eat meat you drink alcohol you gamble you lead this totally dissolute life and compared to me you might as well be [ __ ] like i'm moving ahead as an intellectual i've made all this progress and growth and i see you living this this little life don't stay calm show how it hurts you show how it chews you up inside show show it gives you nightmares so i can't stand to talk to you anymore i can't stand to look at you because i see how you've squandered your potential in life what could be worse and again this is just confronting your brother about drinking and gambling but this exact same thing you're talking about your brother has become a communist your brother has become a neo-nazi your brother has become a muslim fundamentalist whatever the theological commitment is right saying to your brother oh uh let me change the subject let me tell a joke let me recommend a book oh oh yeah have you read karl marx's desk patel let me let me change the top conversation excuse me though from from the conversation de-escalating doesn't work and the worst part of all is it makes you complicit if you de-escalate with your uncle and your uncle's a nazi if you de-escalate with your grandfather your grandfather is a member of the kkk your grandfather's a racist he's a white supremacist you de-escalate you get along with him use these tactics right you are gonna feel dirty and guess what you are dirty you're making yourself complicit you're making yourself part of the mechanism of excuse-making people the enablers that surround him in his life and obviously this can be true too with drugs alcohol psychiatric medications so many things oh oh good for you let me just de-escalate let me recommend a book let me make a joke let me change that no so you know again i know it's the first thing i talk about the video so don't trippy myself but exactly what we're talking about the first 20 minutes of this video or something we're actually talking about escalation we're talking about conflict creation not conflict of resolution not de-escalation not uh conflict avoidance all right and number four this is also interesting it's so obvious and yet you know i disagree with it point number four is simply quote make the argument as opposed to treating quote the value of our position as obvious and self-evident so i just say i think this is failing to deal with the fact and feeling to deal with the extent to which the problem we're trying to address in these conflicts is exactly that the people we're confronting whether they're people we love people complete strangers to us for them their the value of their position is obvious and self-evident right like that is exactly what we're trying to abnormalize make them uncomfortable with we're trying to reach down to the roots of the doubt that underlie this great oak tree of faith you know what is your faith rooted and it's rooted in scarcely suppressed self-contradictory doubts and that's what we have to reach down into and i don't think you do that by asserting your own argument i think you do it by asserting your own doubts and then finding the way into what their doubts are i think you actually do it not by talking about what you believe but what it is you can't believe what you couldn't accept and the doubts that led you up to your current uh point of perspective and if it's one-on-one you're going to see them reacting to that because they're going to be things they've doubted too you know they're gonna be some things you have in common and then you try to get at what it is okay guys we're coming up at three in the afternoon i'm happy to have you all here i noticed we have only 22 people in the audience there was no advanced warning for this uh this unscheduled talk i would appreciate it if you hit the thumbs up button it helps more people discover the the video it helps them discover it and join the conversation while the conversation is ongoing it also helps them discover it after the video is up i would appreciate it if you shared the link with somebody you know where it could make a difference in their lives i normally say you know only share the link these videos with people you know we're willing to hear it you know it's like there's no point taking one of my videos and dumping it into a reddit group where nobody wants to hear it where there's no there's no interest there's no comment uh no common ground but um you know in this case i've got to say maybe some of you have a brother who's a drunk and a gambler you gotta share this link with maybe you have parents or grandparents who are taking psychiatric medications maybe you have friends who in the past were highly motivated fire brand atheists and they've lost their passion for the advancement the atheist movement maybe you have friends who are in the past vegan activists and they've lost their their passion for that i think you probably do know people you can share the link with and i've got to tell you i don't present this video as a final decision on the matter i would love to think there are people who can write into me and disagree with me or even have an interview with me on skype and present a contrasting point of view all right i didn't get into this movement you know to stand alone but the fact is i am out here alone every day i'm asking these questions and i wonder why is nobody else asking them just close by reiterating what i said in the description to my most recent video uh posted on youtube okay with all of these things with all of these struggles yeah you can think about the outcomes yes but i'm not asking you to predict the future what's the future of north korea five years from now what's the future of syria five years i'm asking you to think seriously about who you are going to be five years from now what kind of a man what kind of a woman because in choosing the struggles you engage in whether those are purely academic and research-based struggles whether those are explicitly political struggles you know whether it is veganism atheism any kind of endeavor whether it's even the struggle of a creative artist the struggle to make a new film you know whether it's a documentary film or a narrative fiction struggle to illustrate and publish a children's story book you want to change the world in some ways i'm asking you to examine seriously how that struggle is going to change who you are because that is the one outcome you can control and i hope five years from now you're not dead you're alive i hope five years from now you're not ashamed of who you are of what you've become i hope you're not looking back at the last five years and feeling that you also have squandered your potential