Your "Mental Health Problems" Are Who You Really Are.

a whole lot of people wrote in to tell
me how heartless and vicious and cruel I was when I made a video what seems like many months ago was probably two weeks ago drawing attention to the potential possibility that my fellow vegan youtuber Jaco wacko Vigano would now be dumped by his girlfriend given that he's no longer vegan given that a big part of what brought them together as a couple I made them stay together as a couple was veganism vegan activism and I think the chorus of opinion that rose up against me was no no no she should stay with him she should be loving and nurturing and caring because of his mental health and there's this appealing illusion that I here want to lash out against in the youtube video forum there's this appealing illusion that your mental health is something other than who you are if you're a liar if you tell lies to people it's on you it's your responsibility no one is accountable but you more than that that's who you are okay there's no distinction between what you do and what you are alright with time our actions form our character but they also demonstrate our character in a very real sense they are our character there's nothing else we can refer to there's no soul there's no transcendental impalpable self that's exterior too and can be contrasted to the some of our actions our thoughts our decisions so on and so forth right so the man who tells lies is a liar why is it that when we start using medical sounding terminology that we start to absolve people of the responsibility for the decisions they make for the action when we say oh he's a compulsive liar he has a mania he has a phobia he has a mental health problem ok your physical health is not something other than your body these are two ways of describing one in the same thing your body is not something other than you then who you really are your mental health is not something other than your character it's not an excuse for your behavior it's just a way of describing your behavior your mental health your sanity or insanity it's on you you're responsible you're accountable but more than this deeper than this that's who you are in a very real sense from my perspective as a nihilistic atheist you have no soul there's neither something magical hidden inside you nor is there something up in the sky hovering above you that remains untouched and unshaped by your decisions your actions your inclinations your behavior on the contrary in a sense you're less than the sum of these parts so yeah in looking at the strange and sad case of this man who knew all the facts and neukkimi are on YouTube and even perform them for an audience he knew all the reasons to be vegan he knew the reasons even while the counter arguments against veganism were immoral and internally contradictory and were and should be discarded he knew it all and he at least parroted it he at least echoed it even if he didn't really think it through or understand it but he had all the facts and disposal and he made the decision to reject all this and not just go back to eating meat but to go back to declaring and propounding the very excuses for eating meat that he rejected before excuses that I think he's familiar with from his own parents from his grandparents yes if that's your man you should dump him if that's your man you should break up with them I'd like to make a really strange cultural reference here but I think millions of people around the world know it I mean some things are well known like Batman and spider-man but you know there's a there's a real cultural phenomenon now that's been covered on every news station I think they've been documentary films made about it which is the brides of Isis the women who fell in love with men who went away to fight for Isis for the Islamic state for the Caliphate women who in some cases fell in love with and got married to a secular man sometimes even an atheist man but in some cases a man who was a very moderate Muslim or didn't have much interest in Islam and they stayed with that man as he became radicalized as he became a fundamentalist as he regained his faith or for the first time discovered faith as he took the steps toward becoming a terrorist or becoming part of a rebel army wherever you want to put it okay it's really easy to imagine that the person you love is something other than the some of the decisions they've made but the decisions you make that's who you are and worse as time goes on most of us our imaginations become narrower and narrower we become creatures of habit we no longer challenge our assumptions decisions we were made when we were teenagers tend to sheep people still listen to the same music in their 40s that they listen to they were teenagers people eat this foods and they don't try new foods they don't try any music yes these things may seem trivial but there are other decisions we make that are much less trivial where without regarding the decisions we've made in the past as authoritative they nevertheless tend to take on a kind of authority in our life in the narrowing of the middle-aged mind if I may put it that way okay the man you love is nothing more than the decisions he makes in a very scary sense he's something less because he's unlikely to ever go back and re-examine the assumptions that led him to make those decisions that he's now comfortable with that he's now living within those bounds if you fell in love with someone and then they decided to convert to Islam later where they decided to support Isis later dumped him don't tell yourself this isn't who he really is I know who we realize I know the man I feel no you know a man that exists in your mind's eye in your imagination what you know is a dream what you know is something unreal of your own invention if you fell in love with someone because he was a vegan activist don't make the accept that don't make the excuse oh it's just his mental health his mental health is not something other than who he really is