Knowing vs Feeling: Effective Activism & Effective People.

this video is really reflection on the
difference between what I feel and what I know and how that plays out day-to-day real life conversations about veganism long-term horizons for vegan politics vegan effective activism Oh in my life and maybe in yours um had a conversation just 30 minutes ago at breakfast here in China and I was not at my best I hadn't just woken up I woke up very early maybe six a.m. maybe a maybe 530 am with my whole body really aching from the work out ahead of the gym last night and I wanted to get to work on Chinese right away I wanted to hit the books start writing out an essay in Chinese so I ate chocolate vegan chocolate and for me I'm someone who uh someone who avoids caffeine I try to have zero caffeine in my diet so to me that's a pretty hard drug so I was a little bit jittery a little bit cranked up on chocolate because I hate that when i first woke up got a couple of hours of work done before i went to breakfast and and had this conversation so at a conversation with a meat eater and i've talked about on this video in the past to some extent you know if you believe veganism is for everybody then various things follow from that you know from that proposition that you want everyone to be vegan or that you would be happy for others if they become vegan even if someone is politically very different from you religiously very different from you if someone was a jerk to you back in high school and then you meet them years later and they become vegan would you be would you be happy for them say that i say thats upgrade there were definitely some people i was a jerk to in high school and I wonder if they'd be happy from Heath empty all right I don't need you to be happy for me it's okay but I just say on that level of knowledge there's knowing that veganism is a positive thing for everyone for the whole world and i would be happy for you no matter who you are even if you're a terrible person even if you're Bernie Sanders in prison even if you're some kind of criminal or we just have very deep ethical political differences I would be happy for you if you become vegan because I know veganism is for everybody and in some sense I want they're pretty amazing but in terms of how I feel on the level of emotional reality and this connects to my own very pragmatic political attitudes I don't want everyone to be vegan I meet a lot of people and I don't care face-to-face because I think they're useless people I think there's self-indulgent stupid fatuous people who are never going to accomplish anything in their lives and when they give me their excuses for why they eat meat why they're going to keep on eating meat I feel like I can nod my head I feel it's not what I know but I feel like great one less idiot poison leaving the body weakness leaving the system I don't need you I don't need you in this movement I need the best and the brightest I need highly effective highly self-discipline people who can really make something happen and you know this just mentioned YouTube has a lot to do with physical beauty appearance especially if you're selling diet books or what have you and a lot of vegans want to look a hundred and ten percent healthy on camera just so they can represent veganism positively although you know you can be a fat vegan you can be an ugly vegan that's cool i've used example before of mod vegan i can give a link to her channel again doesn't cost me anything to link to her channel now mod vegan is extremely good-looking but that's not what gets me excited when I see your channel when I see your channel I think here's a highly intelligent highly effective person who can organize lunch here's someone look here's someone who I can see giving a deposition at City Hall here's someone who I can see doing the paperwork at City Hall to book the time to give that deposition to present to government that argument I was talking to someone else recently a much much younger person but she understood within Canada you know lobbying for political change in the education system I was talking her okay you know if you want to influence the school board if you want to influence public education policy obviously for example so that animal rights veganism in ecology ecology as linked to veganism get covered in our education system okay let's talk about in the next 10 years the serious steps for that I'm interested in highly intelligent self-discipline highly effective people but from all walks of life by the way doesn't require formal education doesn't necessarily mean you've got a university degree you could be a high school dropout and have those qualities in a country like Canada that's unusual in country like Cambodia all the time you meet brilliant people really intelligent people who never had high school education so you know depending on where you are in the world when I lived in place the Cambodia and Laos I did know people with zero formal education but who had informal education of a very high level and almost everything I know that's worth a damn is from information anyway it wasn't from my formal education that I learned the things that that brought you to this some this YouTube channel now but that is a difference between what I feel and what I know so in this conversation just half an hour ago and I was as I mentioned a little bit jittery because I'd eaten chocolate i've been up since very early working hard on chinese and you know this meat eater just pelts me with questions and expects me to have instant perspicacious profound answers to all of them it's this game a lot you Feakins will pin to it before now in my case I talked a pretty good game I can if you want to Pelt me with those questions I can come back with answers but of course her response is that this meat eaters responses were stupid and self-indulgent and fatuous and ultimately her argument that she came down to I knew from early on that was implicitly her point her argument was that she's not interested in being a good person morally she's interested in living a life of self-indulgence and pleasure that for her the pleasure of eating a steak with her family is much greater than any ethical or ecological concerns about killing the cow or you know on a macro scale because we're never talking about just once take millions of people eating steak the impacts on river is the skies etc etc but you know as an illustration of the kind of disconnect between us at at one point she said to me you know well it doesn't matter IE well there's no point in being vegan because there will always be demand for meat in the United States there will always be she is saying in fact there will always be more than zero demand for meat in the United States indeed there will always be significant demand for me and i responded this she interrupted me repeatedly by the way in mid-sentence and I would let her finish her interruption and say okay now I'm going to finish my sentence I left off it sums I do that to advance yes I understand now I'm going to finish my sentence but I respond to that point the point that there will always be more than zero demand for me with a very specific comparison to cocaine I said there will always be more than zero demand for cocaine in the United States there will always be more than zero demand for nicotine for cigarettes in the United States I think she interrupted me already then and I let her say and then I said okay I'm going to finish my sentence you know it took me quite a while to get out this very basic point but what I was saying was you know the comparison to cocaine it's a contrast I'm not saying meat and cocaine of the same thing her her response was just a buzzcut orion and frankly idiotic but you know my point about cocaine was there will always be more than zero demand for cocaine United States the question of what that means for government policy for public education for labeling you know the way we have labeling on cigarettes you know for criminal law all these things that's one category but the question of what it means for me is actually something very different yes there will always be demand for cocaína United States there will always be demand for for red meat in the United States but that does not mean that I should therefore purchase and consume cocaine or that I should purchase or consume red meat it's actually totally irrelevant it's profoundly spurious so that's from my perspective and interest point but it answers exactly her point now I actually i just mentioned i wasn't posing in this conversation aika member having many i've done research on drug policy mostly in Southeast Asian countries like Laos Thailand Cambodia you know countries where the government does not have an infinite budget to employ police officers to try to stamp out the use of drugs like cocaine and heroin I remember one conversation with that guy was a real scholar very eccentric character and I remember he actually thought that in the future drugs like heroin would disappear partly due to government repression but partly he thought science would invent better drugs there competition for heroin other addictive variational substance i remember i said to him simply um you know I think heroin it's it's like blue jeans new fashions come and go but you know blue jeans remain for sale year after year uh I don't think heroin is ever going to disappear from the world no matter what government policies with up there will always be some people addicted to heroin I think there will always be some people addicted to cocaine there will always be demand for those drugs but that is not an excuse for any one person to use cocaine on that human level and even all the questions that are complex about what should the government do some people genuinely think that heroin should be legal not illegal the same way that cigarettes are legal and that the government should regulate it in different way the government should have this kind of harm reduction approach to try to reduce the use of those drugs very interesting debates terms of political science very interesting debates and a lot of interesting studies on that but all of that is actually irrelevant to the question you and me I to I right now is it the right thing for you to do do I want you if you're my friend if you're my brother if you're my son if you're my father through my grandfather do I want you to eat meat is it okay for you to eat meat is it the right decision if you'd eat me actually that plays out on that same level as is it okay for you to smoke cigarettes is it okay for you to use heroin and the question of what the government is doing you know the difference between government policy in the Netherlands in Amsterdam or in the United States in New York City the question of the attitudes of the medical establishment of doctors or even the questions of specific medical findings I talked to an expert on heroin in in Thailand and he was of the opinion that medically you know the effects of heroin on the body were much much less significant than many other commonly used drugs like like alcohol when it was an interesting perspective it may it may be irrelevant to the problem of heroin if the impacts in your body are less but the the addiction is worse they're all these other all these other issues but I wasn't I mean you know the guy the guy knew what he was talking about the medically on the level of the nervous system in the organs he actually the heroin was less of a problem than many other drugs like sick it's an alcohol that people commonly use okay interesting but irrelevant to this eye to eye mandame an person-to-person conversation we are going to have about what's the right thing for you to do what sort of thing for me to do how are we going to lead meaningful lives ethical lives right now and in the next 10 years anyway this particular media responded by just saying that it was totally unreasonable for me to even mention cocaine the cocaine was an extreme example that saying cocaine was like meat in any way was stupid etc now I don't think I need to explain to this audience that I was not saying cocaine and meat of the same thing they are profoundly different things I was saying in this one aspect the question of how public demand for a product shapes my choice of other product that it's actually irrelevant the fact that there will always be some demand for meat the United States doesn't shave my decision the fact there will always be some demand for cocaine doesn't shake my decision it wouldn't shape the decision I give to my own child my own brother my own father grandfather but she basically responded this by ranting that I must be a fool to offer an argument that dares to equate or compare consumption of meat with consumption cocaine all right you know maybe I'm not going to respond on that level what I actually did say to her I don't know if it'll stay with the earth it'll she'll ignore it or what have you but I said look you know you have to send these are questions of ethics and she I'm not listing everything we talked about she also raised issues of how the animals are slaughtered and blah blah blah I said let you have to understand from my perspective I actually regard you in a much more negative light than the way a Catholic regards me a Catholic is quite correct from the perspective of their faith to regard me as someone who's going to hell however I'm only taking myself to hell I'm not dragging down anyone else with me yeah it's my personal choice from a Catholic perspective I'm rejecting the phase faith I'm ejecting Jesus Christ as my savior I'm rejecting heaven in that afterlife I'm going to hell from a Catholic perspective but I'm not taking you or us to hell right and from a vegan perspective actually what meat eaters do is much worse because what meat eaters do is killing millions of animals it's paying its way every time they buy meat they are paying to perpetuate the system of industrialized meat production industrialized you know animal exploiting agriculture and they are in a very real sense destroying the world's ecology at a point in history when we really do not have much slack much a margin to mess around you personally when you turn on the lights which do not have a choice about whether that electricity was produced by solar power by a you know smokestack burning coal or by a nuclear power plant you don't have that choice unless you are wealthy enough to build your own power plants or build your own solar panels the vast majority of people every day use electricity and can't question where that electricity came from and that does have an ecological impact when I flush the toilet I can't choose where the sewage goes I can't choose the quality of the sewage treatment plant I can I actually have done this I can go to City Hall and debate with the government there are plans to build a new sewage treatment plant I've been involved with that kind of politics in Canada I would have loved to been involved in Laos I did research really do that was a very interesting question Laos where does your sewage go where does your electricity come from but on a day to day basis man-to-man I die as a person on your own two feet flipping the light switch you don't have that choice here and now and you do have a choice about what is on your fork what is on your plate what you buy at a restaurant will you buy the supermarket and yes from my perspective what you're doing is much worse than merely being against my religion or against my beliefs or my values and some other sense like Catholicism or what have you you're doing real harm you're doing harm to animals you're doing harm to all of us you are actually doing harm to our future as human beings on this planet ultimately we've got to share the same plate there's a sense in which i sit down the restaurant you and I'm except for choices we have separate plates and there's a sense in which we share the same plate and we share the same fate I don't think there's any way I could communicate to her what I was really thinking and feeling however because the truth is I don't want her I don't want her to become vegan I don't want to convince her to be vegan on level of feeling a level of knowing sure everybody should be vegan on a level of how I feel I don't really want a bunch of idiots to become vegan and I don't really care if I perceive you as someone who is just a self-indulgent idiot living a life totally devoted to pleasure I don't really care if you become vegan or not because you're not going to help the movement you know I can help me with my attempts to move forward as a vegan activist as someone who wants that a future in a real political movement in a real community making a real difference in the world oh that's a really bleak note to end this video on