Philosophy and Politics (with Darren McStravick)

awesome well life hey guys being a very
long time it's been eight months since I've done a discussion like this so let's get straight back into it okay so I have with me Asuma Zod so ah so a few would be more than happy to I'd love to for you to introduce yourself okay normally I need no introduction I'm well known within the really small demi-monde of digital vegan activism that's where most people watching this video will know me from but that's only the latest hat I've been wearing um I have a background in philosophy I noticed Derek you normally do describe yourself as a philosopher rather than political philosopher or rather than someone involved in in politics I guess I can say intellectually I started off in the Western tradition ancient Greek and Roman as well as German 19th century and all that stuff you probably listen to my youtube channel I grew up in an extreme left-wing household so I also got a background in economics as part of my progress kind of emerging from communist and socialist ideology I started to understand capitalism and understand how deeply flawed a lot of those sources were but I also read stuff like Karl Marx for myself along with Lenin Stalin what-have-you at the end of process though I was generally quite dissatisfied with Western European thinking and philosophy and then I moved on to Buddhist philosophy and that was about ten years of my life doing Buddhist philosophy and again if you guys know my channel you'll know I didn't turn off my brain and suddenly become uncritical or apolitical I was interested in slavery in poverty and real history moral problems I was a very mud and blood you know Buddhist philosopher and still again still cared about politics ill cared about economics at the end of that period of my life that was when I started to get more serious about veganism which is also which is kind of interesting in itself and you know hmm you know in each of those periods I was looking for how I could make a positive difference in the world and I'd become strictly vegetarian back in the year 2000 the year 2000 doesn't sound like all that long ago but I really never heard the word vegan back then so it existed but you know the the prominence of the word vegan hadn't come up yet so that just really briefly at that time you know I already thought that wearing there was immoral but I didn't describe myself as as vegan and my diet was probably 90% vegan but you know I identified as strictly vegetarian and then when I mean that the transition to being vegan that was not really a significant change in my life but it made my my actions consistent with my my purpose that that extra step um but you know I didn't think of vegan activism as that significant politically or philosophically until until relatively late you know and I was involved in ecology and real world politics in different ways before that - again people in on my channel know I did get directly involved in ecology and lobbying for change at City Hall at government level and that sort of thing anyway out of the ashes of my engagement with Buddhism I tried various other things including that I tried to get involved with humanitarian work the political activism and active research with Korea in a jib way which is one of the reasons why my list the languages of studied is so long so I study quite a list of Asian languages and I started working on languages in digitus North America so throughout this you can say I've been simultaneously engaged with research and humanitarian work there's have been kind of the guiding principles my life and all of it at the same time being frankly quite philosophical for betterment and now you know as I say veganism is kind of my main my main identity in part because so many of these other things I worked on and didn't failure so it's really easy for me to imagine a parallel universe where the main thing I was working on was indigenous languages in politics and I just happened to be vegan or the main thing I was working on was politics and human rights in Cambodia Laos and Thailand or even Buddhist manuscript and historical research and I'm vegan where that's you know that's one of things but as those other things as those other you know features in the landscape collapsed veganism become the main thing I'm known for giving morality lectures on a life a lifetime rich in morality like let's actually talk about these foundations pretty much all of your ideology so look was just some people gonna see this who don't know you so I've said a lot about myself could I just ask you one of the mentioned about you is that you describe yourself mostly in terms of philosophy but you say a lot of things you want to open this video our politics can you talk a little bit about your own you engage with philosophy and what you know why you wear that hat or what it means to you okay so basically I got into a neutral philosophy is that mind or your end I don't hear anything wrong sounds fun to me I'm sorry there was an echo just for a second okay so basically I'm introduced to philosophy through a guy named art Dawkins quite a while ago perhaps 2016 although before that I handle and usually was called easy philosophy I had a few Inklings as to what philosophy was through the ancient Greeks but I never read any of the stuff so I literally had no idea what I was talking about in other words I was a sophist but I had to learn the hard way and I think that's what got me most interested into the subject so because I would classify myself as an atheist I'll be very staunch about my beliefs and I would actually try to express them online and because I listened to a lot of Christopher Hitchens back in the day I thought I was some genius debater so I got myself involved in a lot of dissent a lot of arguments with random people um who would be be open to discussing it and my attempts at deflecting their arguments would prove to be very in efficacy if you will so over time I got involved in more debate with more people and I realized that wow I'm not some genius debater I'm just some kid who has no idea what he's talking about so and I learned that lesson through talking to a few people I learned a lesson through talking to a guy named Darth Dawkins back in 2016 and my clash with the drunken peasants fanbase Oh No kidding huh yes they lambasted the hell out of me back in 2016 but that's because I acted like a complete [ __ ] I made substantiate arguments to them I learned my lesson swiftly and soundly to say the least so that was my first introduction to philosophy but what got me interested in philosophy itself was my introduction to a guy named Jack on strike now he is the owner of a discord server could debate Colosseum although he has pretty like large connections to a lot of people in the great to make community I Jack I'm strike another guy made McCrea ottoman deus ramses ii a few people in the skeptic community that are probably more base-level who like to discuss things with people who are like flat-earthers or presuppositionalist and that segues us onto the subject of a of darth Dawkins because I had a debate with him and I remember he completely flabbergasted me so he told me to look into one thing she said the three laws of lodging like I don't know there's laws of logic of laws just intuitional so I looked into them and as my first introduction and then a sudden student honestly understand the types of conversations these other people like Ozymandias ramses ii what they were talking about because before it will just go well over my head I thought I'd get the gist but then I get really bored so I was like I don't actually understand this stuff so I started looking into it and then I've got my first wave of books that I bought yeah great philosophical methodology theory of knowledge a meta epistemology and skepticism so that's I'd say probably three favorite books in this part but I've got stacks of others on the Fossey with language philosophy of logic even which is actually pretty rare um the philosophy of mathematics is the fostering of science and then on to phenomenology flosses mind onto ethics if your philosophy of art philosophy or political philosophy philosophy of social science philosophy of psychology and critical theory and decision theory so these very very interesting subjects and I'm I skim through all these books but I make sure that they're really like sequentially ordered so that way when I read one book the next book I read will be well grounded on the previous book so while I'm reading right now has been quite um inefficient to meta philosophy so I'm just rereading it because I've read it like three times so far so I was trying to get a better understanding of it so I can also like make a video on it so reading all this stuff I've got a much better idea of the general scope of philosophy and um and with that I've happened to be able to understand a lot more important stuff over time coming from the mouths of other individuals I think that's actually really important you should start off by listening to personalities you need to start off with the fundamental stuff and then with a critical skirt listen to the personalities so that's my introduction to philosophy as the boys you can put applause on the same story motivated because you've been through this process of yeah yeah but I just mentioned one of the difference you mean you in terms of my my approach to philosophy I mean you mentioned boredom and boredom is a real factor I mean like I'm not gonna simply leave no well how can you this is such a great book and even warned but you know partly to avoid boredom probably cause of what I did what I thought was real what was fake my approach was really based on primary sources because I found the secondary sources very insincere so like you know if I want to know Aristotle I'd go and read Aristotle directly nowadays a lot of people will give you warnings about that like well you know so when I was 19 or younger even reading this stuff you know I brought different kinds of distorting biases and expectations to reading it and I'm cursed with a very good memory this is a blessing in a curse but I know I'm now reading this book and I think the last time I read it that was nineteen years old and I can remember how differently I responded to the same pastors of texts as a 19 year old and I'm now 39 it's weird experience but yeah you know I have a series of videos that's still ongoing that are on my channel and they're also my girlfriend Melissa's channel where we are really reading a lot of the foundations of European philosophy Socrates Plato Aristotle Thucydides Xenophon it's not it's not that long list and it's a list I've put together for my girlfriend and you know I just say so those videos will not you know you may enjoy watching those videos and they may or may not interest you enough to read some of those some of those ancient sources in in the the primary source um but it was an interesting challenge for me because I mean when I met my girlfriend she basically you know expressed her her jealousy she was like look you have this background you have this education that you gave yourself she was aware isn't summit learned in the classroom and you said what you know what is it she should she should learn from it and the other thing is because she's with me at this stage of my life I really said to her look the most important stuff is ancient Athens it's really knowing what happened ancient Athens into this pretty short period of history in ancient Athens - its kind of one century that's this especially important century in Athens and when I was younger again I mentioned the sense of disappointment with Western philosophy that's I wouldn't nurse with that I mean you come out of an atheist background and I don't just mean that you're atheist but that you're engaged with ideas and debates and atheism um one of the most disappointing things about European philosophy is the extent to which almost all of it is directly or indirectly about God about these kinds of so to give it to give example what Kant Immanuel Kant says about epistemology all of it all of it is indirectly about faith in in God you know and and it's really funny because I've recently talked to a couple people I just mentioned in passing in a video and I got email from people saying no no no you misunderstood concertina I was lying no it's but the extent to which someone like he really is setting the groundwork for um for an argument for the existence of God so you know of course there are a few atheist philosophers but you know when I was a young man so give two example I was I was pissed off with Aristotle at 19 because he doesn't deal with slavery or he doesn't deal with slavery the way I want him to deal with slavery and it's like how can i how can I take seriously a philosopher or it's all you with democracy and equality as the old slavery but likewise a lot of that the classics of European philosophy um just so much of it was about the Christian monotheistic project that I got pissed out of it so you say if if my girlfriend had met me when I was her age she's now 25 I probably had a totally different approach and I wouldn't have seen the the ancient Greek works as being as valuable I would have been more in my kind of anti Eurocentric period of I don't know I don't know some something from ancient Buddhism would be on the reading list or something yeah yeah yeah but as it is now it now that I've now that I've grown a long beard now that I'm a middle-aged man I do see the unique significance of those sources from from Athens in a very different light yeah but you know that's based on knowledge not on ignorance so I can say that over time in your history um has a fluctuated between thinking that perhaps the the Greeks were the most important philosophers with their ideas and all perhaps was it like was there a time where he ever thought that the Germans perhaps had the best ideas um well the the one okay they're really only a couple of Germans that I that I really relate to positively and they're very dissident voices so we're really talking about Arthur Schopenhauer and Max Turner and a few other kind of radical unpredictable figures who were not accepted in the mainstream I mean you know I regard Friedrich Nietzsche's as garbage I regard him basically our basically regard him as being like a newspaper column that's not a real philosopher he says a lot of stuff just to get attention um you know so I just don't I don't think you should be taken seriously as a philosopher and you know somebody like Hegel GWF Hegel you know whose significance has been massively exaggerated for many reasons including his his alleged influence on Karl Marx and thus Marxism and this communism um you know to me again this is this is really garbage so no and again some of these other issues are there the preoccupation with you know Christianity and monotheism the themes that are being dealt with and you sir just one of the things say um what is philosophy my perspective is actually that philosophy is a problem-solving method or plural it's a bunch of problem solving methods and then discussions we have about problem solving methods and you know so this is someone says to you that they consider Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung a great philosopher in a sense Sigmund Freud is a philosopher um but I think it's worth asking the question well what are the problems that he solved or what are the problem-solving methods he introduced to philosophy and you know I don't think Sigmund Freud you know found a cure for anorexia I'm sorry this is a maybe a gross example but I think you know if the point was that this type of neurosis that would be Freud's term can be solved through philosophical conversations which is his belief his belief wasn't the talking cure in some way like a Socratic notion you sit down have these peculiar conversations and solve your your neuroses your mental problems your mental and sexual problems you know I think it's worth saying well he didn't solve the problems he actually failed now again sorry this isn't saying the work of Sigmund Freud is have absolutely zero value I think actually it's an interesting philosophical question can any book over 200 pages be of absolutely zero but but you know this this this question in this sense I have something in common with Karl Popper who's a philosopher of science which is III do think fundamentally philosophy is not like poetry or literature you know the value of poetry is not going to be problem-solving but yeah when it when I say so dismissively well I don't think Nietzsche is worth anything I don't think he goes with anything one my bias is I'm looking at philosophy as a problem-solving method and then - there's the selection of which problems you're trying to solve so again just because I have it on table as the example Aristotle tries to solve some problems with democracy but slavery is not one of them he just doesn't problem but you know all right that's interesting so you know and so on many many philosophers in that sense are deeply flawed but just to mention I mean someone like Schopenhauer at least he's an atheist and at his time he felt censor he couldn't express himself terribly directly as as an atheist and he's really a dissident voice in that era so for me Schopenhauer was part of my appreciation for for Buddhist philosophy where I started seeing European philosophy as just one voice you know and you know as you say kind of the falling apart of the Eurocentric myth that progress and new ideas was something happen everywhere and was not you know not uniquely Western European which I'm you know I mean I guess I'm glad I climbed up that tree you know saw the view from over there to some extent but sure having been up the tree again a question of which problems yourself you will not find the basis for democracy in the Buddhist Canon or Buddhist philosophy and that's again which problems you know solve that's a problem I'm really into and I'm really interested in how do we have a democratic society now in the future so yeah from that perspective yeah the legacy of ancient Athens and one special century in ancient Athens is it's really tremendously important yeah absolutely would you say it would be the most important concepts that have come from the Greeks that have contributed philosophical discussions even to this day well um well you know so so I'm a nihilist so I'm I'm you know biased in the sense when you compare the ancient Greeks to what follows after in the Dark Ages what's so productive is the culture of doubt the culture of doubt and self-doubt and cross-examination everyone and everything is being questioned and Socrates to some extent exemplifies this but whether you're looking at Socrates or you know two generations later with with Aristotle um the question of what is good and what is bad and what is justice and even what is democracy and you know what is the afterlife it may seem pedantic that you sit down in one one Greek after another they'll start all these discussions by defining the terms good practice anyway but yeah come on do you do you really need to define what is democracy at the start of this passage or whatever and the answer is yes you really do because this was a time in a culture where those things there there was there was not just debate there was real doubt yeah and you know in a lot of ways the essence of Christianity is of trying to get people to live with no sense of death no no you know this part of the mentality of faith and Christendom is things that raise doubt don't even think about them you know shut that out of your mind don't let you know that this idea that that's the devil you know whispering in your ear or something no no unthinkable unthinkable you kind of partition your your your mode of thinking and the Greeks you by contrast live in this constant state of doubt and cross-examination including you know the court system including everyone being dragged in and put on trial and possibly flogged or fined or be and including it's not really my bag but in terms of the progress of science you know the fact that there was an open debate which was based ultimately on on arithmetic you know observations of the movement of the planets about whether the Sun was geocentric or heliocentric whether the earth rose around the Sun or the Sun revolved around the earth and this debate was not possible a couple of centuries later and in Christian Europe and by the way the heliocentric model lost the arguments in support of the earth at the center they actually won so the fact that you could have the debate and you can have the evidence presented doesn't mean you mean Socrates was executed it doesn't mean doesn't the fact thing of a trial doesn't mean that the you know innocent people are founded as innocent but yeah that's um so to me I'm kind of answer in terms of it under an underlying value but you know if you wanted to write to answer your question obviously I mean you know that the big ones are you know democracy equality justice you know those those social and political concepts yeah I have to say those those are the absolutely the most fundamental and you know beyond that it's today people use the term cultural relativism in a negative sense it's true that people like Aristotle and even more so people like Herodotus they did examine their own culture and its values and assumptions in contrast to other fundamentally different cultures yeah and give a simple example you know um a lot of people notes infamous that Athens was quite tolerant towards what we now consider pedophilia or pederasty yeah but the end of the cultures right next door where those were serious crimes and they were aware of that Condors they had other cultures where the idea of marriage was totally different more ideas about morality and so much other different and so that also was brought about a type of lively doubt where do our cultural values and assumptions come from and the answer was not from God you know the answer was a more sophisticated examination of law and cultural convention and even legend and myth and what have you so yeah for me this is the thing as a nihilist I think doubt is something we have to learn to value positively you know in our own cognition in another level in our societies and so on okay so like we were gods to say for instance discussion waiting out what tends to be like the minorities opinion wouldn't that point out and/or illustrate a issue to be found within democracies very essence I say for instance even a quite democracy to be type of a bill to popularity or perhaps my equals right what's your take on that but well okay democracy in the ancient Athenian sense is ruled by the demos and it's it's ruled by the poorest so this is one of my personal bugbears or enthusiasm so Menino it's true we have this fear of the majority beating up on the minority but you know in each of the social classes represents their own interest and so on but having the poor in government I can't even say in Parliament directly making decisions in government I think does very fundamentally change things so you know in terms of what is the function of government and what are the what are the what are the conflicts that arise you know most of our countries are struggling with a fundamental indifference of the government towards the poor as opposed to the government being preoccupied with you know providing social services to exactly the people who need the social services the rich really do not require that the trains run on time it's really the poor for whom the trains matter um crucially so you know it's nice if the trains are good enough that the rich can enjoy them that's another thing this is this is a fundamental shift in terms of what is what is government what is democracy now I think what needs to be pointed out here is that Athens did not deal with anything like the situation of Canada committing genocide and having an indigenous ethnic minority who are in that sense you know we're really oppressed and second-class citizens yeah um and it's a question could they have I mean you know Athens was um you know of course it was just one city but also they never extended any democratic rights any foreigners in fact even if you had one parent who was foreign it's just your mother does your father was won't you never participate democratically and so on so I mean I think there's a there's a difference to be observed here between one point on the map and you know a Dominion that's what Canada is referred to as you know the the Dominion of Canada and when it's a Dominion that was extended over you know a foreign enemy people who didn't ask to be conquered and who then become you know an oppressed minority within it so but if if we're comparing something to the alternative so you know I do not regard Parliament as as democratic I regard what we have in Canada as kind of a system of oligarchy and you know this is one of the questions but if if you had democracy direct democracy in the Athenian sense then in theory the native people would have been in that demos that would have been well in the Athens is called the boule wasn't called though wasn't called the Parliament they would have been in government from the earliest period including the period when they were the majority so it's impossible to imagine how the evolution of that culture would have been different if you had democracy but obviously I think the result would have been a hybrid culture like I don't really think there's a parallel universe in which our native people remained completely untouched by you know the technology culture and customs of Europe but if they really were just physically in the halls of power speaking their own language and involves and so on it it's unimaginable and so sorry I know I'm where the other person I'm talking to is in Australia but the situation we were in now is that we have a parliamentary tradition certain criminal I know I think this is true of us truly - you guys don't even have seats in parliament reserved for indigenous people or anything like that - it's not the case I'm not sure about that but they may be pushing towards that I hear it's very progressive around that around those areas especially like um but to me it sounds more like it's just virtually signalling in order to quell the the animosity that not a lot of progressives have with a lot of the politicians but for the most part it sounds like they retained their level of the degree of I guess tribalistic conservatism however like they are still at least making that movements towards that type of progressive kind of Audiology yeah what do we well if the question is basically how would how would democracy deal with you know while pressing the minority I mean you know the death of Socrates himself is in some ways a you know a warning about this and I think that's why a lot of people in Athens lost lost faith in democracy um you know democracies are capable of being tyrannical that they're capable of I mean Socrates was executed for heresy they're capable of engaging in witch witch trials and witch hunts and and all those terrible things but sorry I mean it's kind of one one thing leading onto another I mean I think the the conclusion of that when you see the danger of democracy the danger towards minorities the danger of starting Wars the danger just making bad decisions is that as soon as you have any real democracy suddenly you have this tremendous incentive to care about public education you know wow I can be put on trial just like Aristotle or these people the mob that surround me they can make a decision to go to war or dump sewage in the ocean they can make bad decisions at any time that are going to be terrible for me so I have to you know I have to when we have to work as hard as possible to raise the the quality of education and level of discourse so that we don't go back to you know witch trials that's our cages or what have you and and the elitism built into other forms of government really I think leads to indifference towards toward so attrition and you know even even atheism is an example of this where I think you know elites you have the attitude of oh well those people can still believe in in traditional Christianity you know as if those people don't matter you know well you know aren't anyway I mean to me that's a sickeningly elitist attitude but the the belief that Christianity should continue is the opiate for the masses this shows that you know that the masses do not have a share of governing or government power I think it sorry I just say I think it is tremendously meaningful to reach out to and really try to change you know life for quote-unquote those people the you know worthless sorry and you do see this I mean the bizarre outbursts from the far right wing lately who are by no means the only the only the only Christians shows the extent to which those sectors of society having deep in neglected and I guess I've reverted to some medieval attitudes yeah that's that's definitely tribalism I would say but let's actually shift gears a little bit whatever you want to nihilism but we'll do that through the vehicle of first discussing what beliefs ought to be held to maximize your effectiveness as a political vector like what kind of approach is what virtues do you need to be holding in order to most accurately and functionally approach politics economics and anything around the social sciences right but so you phrase the question terms of belief to mean you asked what do you need to believe to truncate in both his boon for the most charitable 'ti because there are some beliefs that pigeonhole you in to dogmatism definitely remand other forms of like fallacious mindsets so what would you say would be the best sets of beliefs at least from your experience right yeah so my opinion is that the the best the best type of beliefs the cultivators is none at all now some people might find that you know unattainable but I think it's possible to live with knowing self-doubt so you know um okay so you know to give an example you get people involved in humanitarian work and you might think it's useful for them to say I believe in this cause I believe that what we're doing is uplifting the poor so let's say I'll give an example um you have a group of people from France and they've raised money in France they have government money and maybe some charity money also and they're going to a village and Laos and they say okay we're gonna lift this village you know out of poverty now it might seem self-evident especially for someone who's grown up with a dogmatic systems belief that the best that you can do is have everyone motivated like a sports team saying we're gonna win with a belief that what they're doing is is right is right and good and it's gonna achieve its aims but actually procedurally cognitively ethically and even pragmatically what you want is the exact opposite is you want people to be really skeptic and with self-doubt examining each of the decisions you make yes at every step and asking exactly those questions is is it right what we're doing is this gonna work why do we assume this is this is gonna work so project I'm thinking of this was published although the author was anonymous because he was an insider on the project they said they were gonna let these people out of poverty and improve their agriculture and one of their big projects is that were gonna fill the build a bridge to connect this community to another community and this specific project this was in northern Laos was such a disaster with all this French government money that at the end the villagers had literally abandoned the village so that the population of the village was reduced to zero so as a humanitarian project goes that's about the greatest disaster you can have the time the recipients the of the donations ran away rather than continuing to receive your charity and notice this is this is kind of the slippery slope of faith is a great example this is totally secular they weren't a religious charity by the way think they were government supported secular charity so they decided we need to build this bridge and there's you know a little road leading up the bridge obviously how are we gonna do it well they're gonna force the local peasants to build this bridge well they don't want to and you're paying less than the the local minimum wage they weren't paying nothing but they were paying almost nothing much less than the local informal minimum wage let alone the legal animam wage in that country and say well we'll get the military to round them up and and force them to work if you if you believe in the project I mean you see oh this is of course with the religious mentality knows if you believe in the project you'll you'll do it right mmm what if you're examining it at every stage and it's like well wait a minute what is it we're really trying to accomplish here now how are we coming how did we come to this decision and what are the opens and what are we gonna do if you know a B and C I think it's possible to be you know to it exactly lack those beliefs that people assume is at the center of politics and you know effective advocacy effective intervention effective humanitarian work and I think it makes you a much more more powerful devastating person in that field because when those issues comes out I'll give you one more example so I mean I'm choosing to use real-world examples I directly experience when I was in Laos it's oh this is bizarre this all taxpayers money so that was a French taxpayers money project that utterly failed oh there's another one paid for by the German tax payers the German taxpayers were paying to plant more rubber crops in Laos rubber rubber plantations that's a very strange form of charity because that sounds like a for-profit business but again you have to believe that this is up look uplifting the poor this is gonna end poverty or have some kind of positive so show comes now I exactly don't believe that so I did a whole bunch of research on this well it was there which again just reflects my character I mean for me this is also philosophical in a way and by complete luck I was at the airport tiny tiny airport in Laos trying to go up to do humanitarian work in the far north and the director of that project from the German government was there and I asked him questions of a sceptical kind of just knees one for brevity but I said to him you know when you look at the history of of rubber prices I know you're committing to this project you know as humanitarian cause but the price of rubber you know it goes up and down all the time like I've seen significant you know crashing this don't you think you're kind of setting up these these poor people you're helping to you know kind of be undone the next time there's that there's a crash in the road of course and I remember he laughed he really laughed he laughed in my face and he said no no in China the demand for rubber is infinite he believed in the project okay so if you don't need to be an expert in economics to know even I'm sorry the demand for cocaine is not infinite the price of cocaine goes up and down and there's a lot of demand for cocaine then there is then there is rubber the and what he was saying was untrue in another technical sense but even you really need to be a nihilist you need to be living with constant skepticism and self-doubt to pick up on this kind of thing yes proper or is one word and you know see people don't think they have faith in a work rubber isn't a word like Jesus or something but it's still an abstraction what do you mean by rubber the type of rubber they produce in northern Laos is actually not the same as the type of rubber that's produced in Malaysia and when the rubber from Laos arrives in China its value is lower than garbage recycled from the United States of America garbage rubber is of a higher grade than the lotion rubber and they were doing these financial projections on the basis of infinite demand for the Malaysian quality of rubber arriving from both from Malaysia not this or must that's absurd and people's lives are being destroyed I'm sorry look I'm involved in this you know people sorry a lot of leftovers will give you [ __ ] oh you have a white Savior complex on stuff look um I'm white I identify as white so if you want to consider me Jewish and not white for that reason fine but you know I've got to tell you you can't assume that the government of Laos has people who can read English at my level and scrutinize a report and go through the footnotes and figure out what's wrong with it I have a real role as an intellectual and indirectly this has impacts on thousands of people's and the lives it's having impacts on our the poorest of the poor above all else the rich are gonna be okay either way whether or not the rubber plantation works out whether or not that building a bridge project works works out and so on so look I say it's a totally good answer you you sir it's totally a question you you presented me with the question was in effect is there something you should believe you know as a means to an end in terms of engaged in politics but you know my answer is is the opposite I think the discipline is living with that you know that razor's edge of shore of doubt and self-doubt all the time how do I know what I think I know and you you become sharper in that process and sir and the only thing was going to say is all those examples I had to be able to raise that issue in that moment you know I happen to meet this guy at the airport it's because I live with this philosophy that I'm able to do that I don't I don't actually think there's an objective sense in which I'm a genius but living the way I do and reading the way I do know I mean it's not like I have a memory or something but when I met those people I'd have all this stuff on hand and the fact that I don't believe in the project you know I don't I don't even believe in what's the definition of rubber you know I'm sorry they sound ridiculous you know the fact that I'm questioning and doubting this stuff all the time it it leads to that kind of sharpness that you get to use when you happen to be in the meeting with the representative from the European Union when you happen to be at the airport and you know whether it's a formal or informal um that you can use that in a democratic setting to make your case or ask the right questions or raise doubts about what's going on yeah that's that's my sincere answer that question definitely so like um this can actually take us on through the subject of the education system itself now because I'm going to be going to come into psychology this very much interest to me because because I want to reconstruct the education system I think honestly that we need to say incorporating mandatory philosophical philosophical types of classes that perhaps specialize in logics Oh critical thinking itself anything that can actually sharpen the mindset of people because honestly if we if we keep cultivating this this type of personality all its going to do is lead to the downfall of downtrodden groups and also downfall of like our economic robustness because if we keep having like people in power who run on their own system of faith that's of course not going to be reaching of the conclusions that they're intending to because they're going to be ignoring certain variables that may contradict what they're running off which will lead to these thoughts conclusion they attend so what do you think would be the best types of classes we should implement in order to reconstruct how our people think well okay so again my answer is a lot of dealt a lot of doubt so encoded at every level um I have looked at studies of attempts to incorporate critical thinking into the curriculum and I gather I think they were at the high school level to get critical thinking it's possible they were at the college level and I'm I'm misremembering that article but they weren't small small children what have you and they set up formal criteria for what is critical thinking so they had a test you know like an IQ test or you know this kind of test where they would test you for how much critical thinking you had and they did baseline midline ed line testing so it's a to see before you got this education how good were you a critical thinking during and after so you you you saw the impact of the course now step one there is already tremendously difficult and important so again so I already said how do you define rubber where are you to find demography how do you define critical thinking so obviously there was a huge leap here in actually defining critical thinking is something you can measure if you can measure it it exists um and what they found was that the education offered actually lowered the students ability to do critical thinking yeah so this is this is a really interesting puzzle and it raises the questions of authority in education and what is education and so on so I've done a lot of reading and talking about loss of education within the last year year and a half yes well a lot of it's not on YouTube Broca's my job in China so I was giving lectures on philosophy of education in China to Chinese students just very interesting also this is completely non democratic dictatorial society and I was talking about Plato and Aristotle and philosophy of Education and the West ISM and relatively new ideas like Montessori education Montessori is new compared to Plato but this is not that new you know but what I point out of the students was of all the so we went over the whole philosophy of education as history of philosophy education ancient to modern as much as I could put into the course and when we got to Montessori I point out of them this is different from every other Floss of Education this is the one system of Education where we can prove as a scientific fact it makes people smarter I don't know any other yes I don't know any other system of Education the clip yes and we've done double-blind testing and all that stuff yeah I'm sorry I mean double-blind might not be quite the actor term but there was a study in Texas where they took the crucial step of assigning the students at random so it wasn't the parents choice whether or not kids wanted to Montessori earlier studies as you imagine that showed that smarter kids were coming in Montessori you can say oh but maybe it's just because the parents are smarter or something's kind no even when it was a randomized government controlled trial and people were randomly assigned to these things so there was no role of wealth or social class Montessori actually produces smarter people and it's a measurable difference and scientifically when you're going through the data looking for what the difference is this is my opinion but it is also based pretty directly I would say there was one factor that is outstanding and is not debatable boredom yes sorry is less boring right engagement is absolutely crucial all right well and every other system of education of kids at war I mean to look if I want to teach Aristotle and people say it's boring this is actually the sexual fundamental problem so yeah look I point this out to say I've made kind of two points quickly one we can have so-called improvements of education you know where people say they're teaching critical thinking but what are they actually teaching what are the actual outcomes the not the improvements and then to you can absolutely want the Montessori system which was developed for totally different reasons it was actually developed to help mentally disabled children and children of poor factory workers in Italy or disadvantaged and socially marginalized it wasn't it created to create a hyper-intelligent a lead of wealthy people in California but that's what it's doing it's only the richest of the rich now who get access to the Montessori education with a few interesting exceptions there are some schools for the four that I want as education but but I don't think but I just mentioned I don't think want to sori cleans to teach critical thinking yeah but it but it evidently does all that leave kids get get more to the education so this is this is again the kind of thing you have to be the open to well for some reason this type of education works better and then I'll throw in a quote from the Dune books I have not read the dune books that's it's a science fiction series but there's a quote in there that says men mankind gave over a lot of their thinking to machines ie to computers they let computers assist them in there and information because they they imagine that that by doing so you know the machines would set them free would free them of the burden of their their labors what in fact um this only made them into slaves because the machines themselves were simply controlled by other men at other more powerful machines you know kind of terrifying you know reflection on on the role of computer technology okay if you have a problem today that University education or high school education is authoritarian and fails to teach critical thinking the fundamental problem is if we take this same format and then put the name of critical thinking on top it's like what the Communists did communists put new you know headlines on education this is going to teach freedom and equality and all these wonderful ideologies are stamped on to it how much did education really change in communist China or communist Russia or remain horrible authoritarian and not teaching critical thinking and and so on and oppressive in in various ways um yes or obviously I'm not gonna ridicule Western education today as being quite the same as that but you know whether or not it's possible by invoking the name of critical thinking to actually teach critical thinking this I'm extremely skeptical about and conversely maybe something like the Montessori method maybe we've actually struck on part of part of the solution of the problem yeah so I think engagement might actually eliminate the need to teach critical thinking directly perhaps through engagement these students can learn intuition aliy the critical thought and logic behind the subjects that are being taught so perhaps that would actually unlock massive massive problems so what exactly does Montessori teach like do you know they're actual subjects yeah sure I do um so thankfully Montessori is not based on the mission one unrelated but parallel thought Montessori is is based on a rejection of the lecture format so I myself I lecture on YouTube and I was in China I had the fun I was a university professor I got to stand at a podium and theatrically lecture so I'm you know if anything I'm positive biased about lecturing because I'm I'm good at it yeah teacher in Montessori will stand silently and the students will sit on mats in a circle but each student is separate and they sit on a mat and they have their workbook and the they have a lot of emphasis on tactile learning implements so the book is going to explain the lesson let's say the lessons about grammar and then there probably have little pieces of wood with verb adjective noun and the sentence and they'll read this book and they'll use the pieces of wood and move them around and then figure if they got it right or got it wrong and if they don't understand what they're doing they'll put their hand up and ask the teacher to come and explain okay I think I've got this figured out but what am I supposed to do with the adjectives and that's how it works so in a sense I mean it's closer to a video game than a university lecture you can imagine but it's not there's no video component but what you're doing and learning alone but together with the other with the other students you can imagine your lunch break you might talk to the students of what you did but it's not it's not this back and forth format now I just contrast this thing else you know so whether it's university or high school I think this is true of most primary school also in Western education you write an essay you hand it in you get a grade back and maybe you get some red circles or whatever I don't think I ever once had a teacher sit down with me and discuss the essay the way I would as an editor I've worked as a professional editor of of nonfiction and if you think about critical thinking and again this would be a lot of hours if I'm a teacher and I have 40 students that maybe 40 hours of seven maybe even if it's thirty minutes each you know and the student has to be willing to you have to have a culture again this is a non authoritarian thing if I'm standing at the classroom I can just dictate to you if I'm just lecturing but to actually sit down with you and say okay well what you're doing here I understand you got this Wikipedia article and you found this but what you didn't consider was and to talk that through with someone that way now you know look is that teaching critical thinking from my perspective I think yes I think I click just if you personally wrote an essay Darren and you you showed it to me and you know I went through with you that way I think there's a sense in which I am teaching critical thinking on whatever the specific issue is like okay what you don't realize is implicitly you know this is saying this or whatever whatever the issues are about sources or how you use them and Minoso this is so this is this is just one example and it may be a unique example but the role of editor is is very different from the role of lecturer and it's very different the role of grading a paper - and I think a very small minority of students have that relationship with their parents where their parents may play that role and talk you through with them but definitely not a teacher it's not part of the education process and we think about it that's more valuable than writing the paper would be because sorry this is a quotation I use all the time I only remember who I'm quoting maybe I'm invented it but I don't think I did we do not learn from making mistakes but from noticing them yeah if I can write an essay that's full of these errors but if I have someone point them out to me and then I go and rate a revision or I write a better I say or something that can be a much more meaningful new process and that's not that's not what we've got because it's time-consuming so sorry this is this is a specific example and it's shallow but it's actually of horrendously crucial the teachers I've had throughout my high school years especially throughout my childhood years they most most of the time they would just point out that I had an error here and there but they would never actually go in yet why they're pointing out the error would happen era was conflicting with like say Frances methodologically and now just told me to follow thee be strict methods they won't even tell me the methodology you know just tell me the methods and that's the thing that doesn't real thinking it doesn't teach you how to understand the nature of what you're doing in learning and in practice so that's a very big issue in the current education system or least the education system I want to maybe audience has individually different experiences with their education system that's this was better but my my experience was horrendous it was terrible I feel yeah we we have this in common but I mentioned so I got to apply my own philosophy of Education in this sense in how I learned Chinese so I do manage the Chinese is a very very hard language to learn but you so if you do the normal method you will never learn Chinese because even if I if I just circle what's wrong and hand it back to you you will never be able to figure out what you're doing wrong that there's no the gap between languages is broad enough I think this is true with more content-based things too it's like well okay there was something wrong with how I'm using the source but I'm not actually gonna develop a sophisticated perspective on it by just being told I get a get a c-minus but you know um what I would do every day when I took this this Chinese course I would either be writing or rewriting an essay and then I would sit there with the teacher face to face and we go through and it could take a whole hour where she's not just circle she's explained to me what I'm doing wrong and it's like oh no in Chinese you don't say it this way because this is the type of verb where you split it into two halves and put one at the start of the sentence and one at the end it's it's not simple you know it's it's not as if you know there's there's nothing easy about understanding and I remember I had a condo in Surrey and here in Canada by contrast the way they they teach Chinese is they play an audio CD you know you have more than 40 students in a classroom they press play on a CD you have a photocopied handout and you select multiple choice you know a B and C so if you do that you'll never get I know this is simple but it still cuts deep you'll never be able to understand why like the Chinese word for interesting you say oh this is interesting they have several different verbs that mean interesting that you have to use in different contexts for different types of things and you know one of my professors said oh no they don't use the word interesting this way well if you don't have the time to sit down and how are you ever gonna progress from that you know it's it's really tough but no the the photocopied tests with the audio CD playing that's that's a brick wall for that kind of learn absolutely I think I think that represents a lot of the problems with with Western education sure yeah the teachers seem to be more focused on who what when where and where but they never seem to be focused on the why or how they seem to be focused more description rather than explanation and just occasion an emphasis on justification because that's what gives you the the idea and inkling as it's the nature of what you're actually doing and what you're trying to achieve I have mixed feelings about that just because our education system now is bad and it has limitations yeah and within those limitations I think there is something positive to be said even for returning to memorization of brute facts yeah sure in that you know you can't have a system where you say look look guys these are the facts you need to know this is what's gonna be on the test and you know you're free to draw your own conclusions maybe we can even have discussion in class or something but you know that's so India we've been talking a lot about China and Chinese culture but by contrast India has a really proud tradition going back 3,000 plus years you know they're their form of law was based on memorization so the laws of a country every distinguished gentleman would have memorized the law I wish we have law that was that brief today that you could memorize all the laws of the country you were you were living and they'd write them in kind of rhyming couplets and this kind of thing to make it easier to memorize so the idea of memorizing and reciting texts as being fundamental learning um you know my education was so terrible we didn't even learn facts you know we really didn't we really didn't we really learned was sentimentality and learned yeah so I mean if you think about like what is the history of Canada what was impressed upon us were sentiments about openness and fairness and about being better than the Americans and being better than the Spanish and the brotherhood between the English and the French who used to hate each other but we don't need more and it would not being racist it was really all about sentimentality and you know if you asked any of the students at the end of the education when did Napoleon die they can't tell you and you know it does matter you know you need to know when and where Napoleon died why did Napoleon matter so much for the history of Canada and you know we we didn't learn that either you know so what what did what was the points position on slavery so look it's a bad system how to move forward you know I'm not sure that I would I would embrace moving away from from the teaching of raw facts just given what we've got to work with right now it could be that in some ways the teachers role could be improved by liberating them from some of the [ __ ] they're expected to do and say okay maybe you can have a more limited role of teaching facts especially if we're gonna continue having 40 and 50 students in a classroom is there needs to be some level of triangulation there needs to be a incorporation between theoretical and practical if also that if you've got me like example Psychopaths corroborate my idea or perhaps go against it so look it's all about budget I mean you know this is the problem and watch what you're saying I mean you know so a lot of people especially left wingers have wanted to get kids out of the classroom and put them on the farm and you know give them experience of actually applying science in those kinds of contacts the vegan film director who made Titanic James Cameron yeah he has a very tiny school that's all vegan the food's all vegan there that's based on that principle where the kids get out and learn how to how to build a solar panel and how to plant plant trees but you know so I mean I sympathized the impulse to a limited extent I recently went recently a couple years ago heard a very passionate argument for trying to include computer programming in school education and they made all these arguments for it but I'm actually I do have mixed feelings about that kind of thing where you're teaching practical and hands-on things to to youth I mean you know it's very easy for me to justify teaching Aristotle and the theory of democracy together or even I mean again nobody learns how does City Hall work how do you take a complaint to City Hall how do you put a small how do you go to small claims court how do you go to court and represent yourself we don't learn doubt in school there all kinds of things of that there are philosophical and political that are not involved in school at all instead you learn volleyball you know you know when you get into something like teaching computer programming or teaching how to actually how to actually work on a farm I'm divided because you know on the one hand I can see the the in the abstract what you're saying is the value of having having practical experience of things but on the other hand you're in effect giving vocational training to people that's going to be relevant to the lives of less than 1% of the students yeah and you say very briefly you know when light bulbs were discovered it would be easy to say oh in the future everyone's gonna be working in a light bulb factory like light bulbs are changing the whole world and they did light bulbs change the whole world they changed life right now how many light bulbs are in this room but how many people do you know who were in the light bulb industry it's it's a tiny percentage and it's it's sad but true how many people do you know who actually work on a farm it's you can look up the statistics for any given country it is a shockingly small percentage we just deserve a news story I promoted on patreon we just had 12,000 pigs died when one farm one factory farm caught fire and burnt down in Canada so 12,000 pigs the farm had fewer than 1,000 employees yeah and of course you know it's a 24-hour operation people and you know some of them were in the office it's it's viable but it with very very small numbers of people are employed even when you got 12,000 pig that's a lot of pig poo that's a lot that's a lot of food and a lot of poo and a lot of blood and a lot of misery so I'm vegan if the audience doesn't know but anyway uh yeah so that's all I am of two minds about that if you talk about having hands on and then the other the other reality is ultimately I look at one of the best systems of Education in the world's also important to be open to looking at what's good system education Japan for childhood education has one of the best systems education in the world on a large scale and Japan is going bankrupt you know um you know that the government is it's very very seriously at a state of you know debt to GDP ratio that's that's facing bankruptcy and maybe in the future we'll look back on this period of Japan Japanese education as a golden age that was lost I just mentioned they are doing a lot of things right in some places on education and again I think the Montessori system is a great example Montessori is not cheap you know having one teacher with eight students is not cheap yeah and you know but we love we have we have tough decisions to make you have any suggestions for books anyone I'm majority agree Wanaka great on the subject of philosophy of education Wow you so that's a great question I do have a book reviews playlist on my channel excellent and there were a couple of those are our floss of Education books but you know honestly it is the most neglected area of philosophy I agree blowing yeah okay if you if you know go ahead but the funny thing is also philosophy education there's a lot of money involved because you know just a lot of people earn their living as as teachers so you'd really think there'd be more just more interest and more emphasis on that but aside from the ancient stuff meal reading reading what Aristotle has to say or Plato is interesting in its way but it's utterly irrelevant I mean again there was this other kind of brief burst of interest in philosophy of education was you know shocked or so so jean-jacques rousseau he's both a figure in the turning the turning point of Europe's history in terms of democracy but the major influence he had in his own lifetime was actually philosophy of education but today that's the it's just horseshit I mean there's no salience sorry same with no offense to Aristotle Plato but as no no relevance at all to to education our times yeah so so I just mentioned Susanna positive but it's amazing how poor that the literature is on flawless education what I wonder I've never found a book like this I'm betting someone wrote a book about the history of education in Scotland and one of things I really learned in the last year and a half is the Scotland was a unique and important place in exactly this respect that the history of education in Scotland was different from England and significantly differ from any other part of Europe so transformation in public education and universal education and so on it really happened in Scotland not in Italy Italy was a more advanced country in every well did not in France what have you it happened first in Scotland so probably someone whether it's an academic article or mainstream book probably there is some reasonably philosophical reflection on how this came about in Scotland I looked at the history as much as I could while it was in China this last year and it seems to me one element that's probably neglected was just the emergence of one language in Scotland they started off everyone was speaking these different isolated languages that nobody else spoke anywhere in the world these Scottish languages that you know were of no use even in England and then they engage with Latin they tried to make Latin their unifying language and then eventually they gave up and made English the unifying language of Education but the struggle for universal education the belief in education and admissions to my Chinese students also the Scottish had a culture of shaming you if you weren't educated of shaming you if you weren't a member of a book club it wasn't good enough to be a farmer or a factory worker or a soldier that you should be a member of a book club and should be reading you know serious nonfiction what everything you should care what they should say and be reading and it's quite that Scott Scottish culture is still quite nasty that way um you know in America people won't really tell you you're stupid dear to your face so it's it the history of education in Scotland is probably really worth studying and then you know and that's over a couple of centuries I think there's an open question maybe someone has done a book about education for example in Switzerland and what's gone right there but that'll be very recent that'll be just since World War two once again what's wrong but yeah I'd say that's in terms of the philosophical questions being asked to answer that might be where you'll find something worth reading have you read anything from Oxford that what I say for instance I come across a book could be Oxford handbooks for force of Education are you ready there's lines I have the story both Oxford and Cambridge in the UK have made attempts at that but I think it was actually Cambridge who tried to do a whole series for specifically political philosophy and I remember going through that but what is is this a new serie maybe you can tell me about it is it greater is it terrible cuz most you're not terrible yeah I haven't read it but I've looked in the title contents and I've read a little bit of the introduction this is a while back because I was I was looking as hard as I could for good books on the introduction as an introduction to the fostering of education but couldn't find anyway I fell one by Clouseau and I found one from Oxford none from Cambridge that one from Plunkett seemed to be to seem to have more of a political spin on education rather than know the actual in-depth fundamental foundational education yeah do you think most of these books that have most of like more of a political spin and look one of the other things that's kind of taboo in our system of education is to talk about the motivation of the author you're not supposed to say I things that are that are ad hominem but in most of these cases these books are being written for a reason and that may be really antithetical to your philosophical interests like I mean you're saying you want to get it the foundations of why is education taught this way how do these assumptions come to be built up and there are I mean most of them raised very uncomfortable truths you know why do we ring a bell to bring children in from the schoolyard I have read it claimed that that was based on the Pavlov's dog experiments that you could challenge to respond to ringing both some of these things raised you know uncomfortable truths development of Education and the the role of you know kind of heavy-handed role of the state and forced assimilation and making people into good military recruits and definitely an in continental Europe the first the first emergence of scientific or rational education was was military education because before that is many before you have centralized education what you have are isolated tutors and they're mostly teaching you know medieval you know christed christian materials and then also things that aristocrats value like dancing and playing instruments and really useless kind of stuff and then as mathematics and science become more important in war for as in metallurgy you know being able to make metal becomes incredibly important but also things like being able to angle a cannon and shoot a cannon ball and do logistics they started needing math and science education for the military so in many parts of Europe the first steps forward or in the military so this is just a digression but being really honest about the history and philosophy of education may be totally antithetical to the the author's motive in writing the book yeah something similar is true you know when you do the the philosophy of Medicine in history of medical science it's really dark it's really depressing the stuff you get into and you know a lot of it's about you know kind of covering up dead bodies and you know things that were done wrong and killed huge numbers of people over long periods of time and stupid ideas that never got challenged or it's like again it seems like right up until the 1970s we were in the Dark Ages it's just amazing how terrible the history of medicine is until really recently and when we did get something right it was luck you know we discovered the cure well not even the cure for malaria which would start a treatment for malaria by sheer luck you know and never understood the scientific principles and so on see the the but if you want to read about that history you need an author who's really honest about it who's a critic yeah of medical medical history who's who's gonna show you all the staggering you know down down the path of progress I'm not someone who's trying to sell you a dream and I think I mean this is one of the problems with loss of education is who's who's really gonna deal with this who's really gonna deal with it because we know look ultimately all these things we have to learn from failure even the examples of humanitarian work fundamentally we have to learn from failure but if you're not gonna be honest about that failure you know we're not gonna learn this a large part of philosophy is propaganda and probably philosophy of education is one of the most you know propaganda heavy areas of philosophy which is the same but you know it is what it is hopefully I'll be able to start making some contributions to the subject because that's honestly one of the most interesting subjects at least for me to actually understand nature of these things so I think but when it comes to my dreams I don't just want to reconstruct the education system I think another imperative part of riki [ __ ] the education system also to reconstruct the research system how we conduct ourselves in doing research which would also have great implications to the economic structure of society like say for instance since your band's case I think it may be the the the folio failure of the of the economists that they're they're going into financial turmoil so if we if they've perhaps had that a research system a more robust approach to social science they would also not be failing as hot as that they are in the financial sector perhaps so I think it's a very necessary parts to not only just focus on reconstructing the education system when you're doing such a thing you also need to focus on the other fundamental parts to a functioning society so let's actually move on I wanted to learn more about you guys what I mean let's let's first start talking about um what exactly your fundamental beliefs are when it comes to like Safe Routes certain facts about reality let's let's start off this is basic is that so like let's let's let's start off with like um what do you think our ability to know the world around us is and let's use the vehicle of a piece epistemology or metaphysics even like what approach to reality do you have a you a naturalist are you a super naturalist what kinds of ideologies philosophically speaking do you use to base your judgment and attitudes to the world I think you know so I could be called a skeptic so you sounds like a bad joke people now say classical liberal it's become the butt of jokes can I say classical skeptic the really ancient meaning of skeptic which is in the philosophy of sex that's empirica in that sense I can say my epistemological approach is skeptical not in the sort of you know 21st century Internet use of the word word skeptic but you know I just see a lot of the problems of epistemology they again they're implicitly or explicitly directed towards the question of faith in God they're about faith in things unseen it's very rare that we're really taking sort of the I don't know the framework of the tools of epistemology and and seriously inquiring into is this is this apple orange or is it red yeah you know if I perceive it as red and you presume how do we truly know what is red and what's orange and you know okay these are these are problems we can we can solve so I think a lot of the a lot of the pessimism about empirical knowledge in the European tradition is trumped up in to create a basis for belief in God or belief in in abstractions truth beauty valor justice universal human rights or what have you but it is especially most of the time it's God any of you give an example a guy like Vic enstein his philosophy of language it's it is it's simply a basis for monotheism and again people who don't know that it'll pick up on that don't realize what the text is doing but this isn't just talking about the the meaning of words to say many words again I'd say Immanuel Kant you know critique of Pure Reason again it actually is a theological work in that sense it's final its final purposes certainly would say a little bit about what I mean when I say you know sex is America's you know that the claim made by sexist in Paris is when we really inquire into things thoroughly we don't come to certainty or uncertainty we come to a kind of equanimity because we we're comfortable or we're aware of what it is we cannot know or how uncertain our knowledge is yeah I wouldn't even say equanimity I I'm willing to say doubt I'm going to say that you can have a dynamic kind of attitude of inquiry and and and doubt and you've already heard me say in a particular applied context I think that's a better way to live then constructing abstract beliefs but you know so you ask the question you know what can we know I don't think there's any doubt about the extent to which we can know that an apple is red and you know your sense of when does something stop being red and start being orange it really is subjective mmm but again this isn't actually a problem anyone philosophically or politically is struggling with you know we can get into all the problems we really are showing when I was in China and sir I mean it's really when you have deep cultural divisions that the perception of color is gonna be different I owned a jacket it was the same jacket I was married in and I have different photographs me wearing this jacket on the internet cuz I had it for such a long time and I perceived it as black and all of the Chinese people around me precedes it as green and it blew my mind I was talking to my teacher of me I'm talking in Chinese I was like you know I'm saying Chinese green you think okay and I opened the door to the classroom and there was another teacher and I said returnees pardon me this jacket what what color would you say and she said green you know when the lunch break came I went I went to lunch and there were other white people eating lunch there some what do you think this jacket is Green no it's black yeah they show this this kind of this kind of a physiological problem can't exist obviously this is a culturally constructed notion of color and you know the perception is different also we can use a mass spectrometer or a laser or something and you know measure how much light reflects off this surface and where does it fit on the spectrum we can scientifically define when exactly does it start start being a black or Seraphine green but you know most of the questions about your optimism or pessimism they're not about empirical knowledge yeah exactly about the steps beyond the Pyrrhic all knowledge to abstractions so really briefly I think the the sickness of our society is that people are taught from an early age to believe that is a step from something unreal to something more real so even somebody like Immanuel Kant does that the presumption is that we have phenomenological reality the empirical reality of what we see is their senses and then whatever's beyond that is something transcendent transcendental more real than merely the redness of the Apple or the the greenness of of my jacket and you know already in Schopenhauer so Chopin hours not an ILS but you have this fundamental idea when we're talking about an abstraction we're talking about less information than something we am perceived empirically and to me that that was a fundamental what really I already understood that I didn't have the words for it but it's a fundamental step forward for any would say if you're raised kind of in normal Western culture where you realize that when we start dealing with abstractions we're you know we're dealing with human created conventions that are that are less less information not more it's not like Plato's theory of forms it's not the true good or the true beauty or the true justice or the true God we're moving away from exactly what we can know into something that's unknowable but obviously you know to some extent in language useful I mean as we said before I can use the word rubber and even that word can be terribly misleading you know what I talked about rubber crops in in Laos so yeah and that's obviously the theater and that's that's one of the sensory many people will say to you that studying philosophy is is useless but one of the great things about politics is that it shows you the ways in which philosophy really does make you make you sharp like you're able to say well rubber doesn't mean rubber it could actually on this context rubber has two meanings yes you know I think politics in that sense makes the study of philosophy more rewarding because this isn't this isn't just a parlor game of debating how do how do we truly know that an apple is red yeah let's let's talk more about skepticism which great subterranean or do you call yourself in the FATA cool um well so look it's really so Pierrot I don't I don't think he has extent works I mean so the memory of what Piero's philosophy was we know through sex doesn't Peregrine's maybe there are some little some little fragments but I guess the short answer is I'm I'm caronian but I mean you know so to give a parallel example when I talked to Isaac known as ask yourself on the internet so Isaacson internet personality is YouTube channels called ask yourself he said of himself that he considered himself only a descriptive nihilist and not a prescriptive nihilist yeah and then you know he discussed what that meant to him and so on and I said to oh well I think actually in your terms I would be a prescriptive nihilists not just a descriptive one I think that's that's the sense in which I'm not any of the forms of classical skeptic is that it's not merely a descriptive skepticism or an analytical skepticism actually it's a it's prescriptive that really what I'm putting forward is is a kind of moral claim you got two prescriptively this is this is the way you ought to live and and in a sense that also that also kind of loosens it up on you in another way because um you know we all have to live with a certain level of pragmatic belief yeah you know what is and what isn't a good saucepan and you could say okay look there are some parts of my life where I'm away or I'm relying on crude Dogma um even geographically I can't really apply my skepticism to all politics all over the world sometimes you know I hear a news report it was something going on in Africa where I really don't know the put I don't respond to it as skeptically as I do something from Cambodia but I'm aware I have that self-discipline okay on the basis of this one newspaper article that may be [ __ ] this is the situation of what's what's happening in Africa but I can't I can't be a good skeptic all the time yeah yeah I do you think like usually on the subject like cuz you're familiar with the subject the problem of skepticism right yes yeah do you think it's even possible for us to solve all those problems like just the epistemic regress it's not a problem that's even solvable and if it was to be solved what kind of implications do you think I would have on us as a society okay so this is quite alien to me I had a friend who was in philosophy academically and he would refer to the problem of skepticism and the problem of nihilism as if they were they were self-evident things it really is a sense of my not understand what you what you mean um no you know okay if someone is is a theologian if they believe in the monotheistic God then it's very clear what they mean that they can't have knowledge of God or can't have knowledge of good and evil right um no I don't again I don't think it's a problem that we can't know whether or not the Apple is red or that anyone saying they can't know if Apple's exist at all maybe maybe that is the problem if you want to you know we can talk about that like do we know an apple exists but I don't I don't think that's that's the issue and you know my response whether you're talking about something abstract like good and evil you know something abstract like the monotheistic God or what have you with all these abstractions I recently used the the comparison of a speed limit I don't believe speed limits exist they're not real but there are cultural conventions we create and we agree upon actually even the colors are probably like that we've already mentioned this the concept of what exactly is green and what is red and what is brown these things will vary they're different in China than they are in Canada the United States or England um so he's bidding me to keep talking and he'll be right back I assume you guys at home would see that he said he's not I can't for the moment [Laughter] anyway with engaging with abstractions the fact that I can't know what is good what is evil or any of these other kind of super no fixed abstractions for me that is a non a problem in the same sense that it's incoherent that it's not an on problem if someone asks how do you know the true speed limit there is no true speed limit speed limits aren't something that exists in a supernal or fixed form speed limits are something that we can agree upon as a cultural convention it's an idea we can we can create we can draw out of thin air and obviously we do it for various pragmatic purposes to try to save people's lives maybe to have better ecology or what-have-you as we go all right so I'm now filling for time as Darin comes back to the table but mmm you know in as much as in the Western tradition people have tend to look at philosophy as a search for truth with a capital T as something abstract something more real than merely empirical reality where they can reach beyond empirical experience and lay their hands on the truth of the capital T um that's not my conception of philosophy so I don't share those problems so in the same sense that I'm not worried about knowing the true or real speed limit I'm not worried about knowing the true or real difference between good and evil okay so like no discussion before we had on discord I think from from the like really in-depth run-through of your ideologies I came to the conclusion that it seemed like you were a philosophical pragmatic pragmatist a quasi realist and you had some sort of it wasn't a relativistic type framework of morality okay what a that means to you so when you say I'm a pragmatist does that mean anything particular to you I mean you know I do know the kind of Wikipedia definition of rhyme with is something in the sense that you treat philosophy is a very um as something that just gives us a better idea of how to apply apply critical thinking or what have you in in like an academic sense or in a scientific sense that is only used as a specific tool not necessarily a subject that and of itself is like a useful thing like it's only supposed to be some sort of residue of the sciences or perhaps I'm thinking about logical empiricism but like I'm and I'll actually also be questioned about that later but um a practices yes so they ignore oh yeah the medieval concept of philosophy that continued up to the 18th century was philosophy as the handmaiden of theology yeah so work philosophy was really linked to the church and what it was doing and then the what superseded that was the concept of philosophy as the queen of the sciences yes though for example as I recall the the PhD thesis of Hegel GWF Hegel was some remarks on the flaws on the behavior of fire some remarks on the behavior of fire as I recall and there was a debate between Schopenhauer Hegel about the behavior of a horse's legs while running whether or not all of the legs of the horse were ever off the ground or if they always had one foot on the ground this kind of thing so you know there was a period of trying to package philosophy as as the queen of the sciences um you know it's interesting to me that in Aristotle already there's instead the fundamental idea that politics is the queen of Sciences that the top of the apex the ultimate you know philosophy or technique or area of study ultimately is how these things contribute to how we're gonna organize you know a society and in who's in power and and who gets what who's richer news poor etc um so you know look you sure if someone's approaching me from philosophy of Sciences I can see why they see me as a pragmatist but it's true my purpose is never really scientific I mean yeah not just I remember I read a passionate essay about linguistics and Laos so a lot of what I've done is also overlaps with linguistics it allows indigenous people in Canada in Asia various languages and this guy made this passionate statement that you know linguistics is a science and it's fundamental purpose and objective is to provide a complete description of all the methods of communication on planet earth you know and I remember just reading them thinking I have absolutely no interest in being in that field you know if that's what linguistics is you know I'm not I'm not part of the the field of mystics it seems you know and I mean I think that is it that is a scientific conception if someone works in the study of insects or fish or something and they say well what we want to do is explore the whole of the ocean and provide an encyclopedic description of every single fish that ever swam in the ocean you know maybe going back to the fossil record of today I understand that but that's that's not my view of life on Earth and that's not the way I think of philosophy or politics so sure I mean you could say you could say I'm a pragmatist but obviously it's it's ultimately all of it comes down to a kind of political and moral purpose sure yes what would you say is your purpose perhaps uses a vehicle to explain what that moral purpose is what is your moral framework what so well what do you actually subscribe to when it comes to ethical theories right so my delusion is that I don't have one you know my delusion is that I'm strong enough to stand with no moral framework whatsoever so no you've already seen the video and now I think most people are many people have spoken to they reject that they think oh no well that's impossible you must have one and you're just in denial about it but you know I gave you the example you I know you've already seen the video so you can say very briefly of a man who sees a cow in a field yeah you asked the question would you get down on your hands and knees and drink the milk out of this cow's udder now I don't think I need a moral framework to kind of answer this question and and and and deal with this scenario um you know I want to do humanitarian work in Laos and by the way I did a lot of research I learned a lot but the actual amount of humanitarian work I did was relatively modest so by the way I'm not I'm not boasting that I accomplished a lot in Deebo I learned a lot but uh the amount of humanitarian difference I made was very very small nevertheless okay so Laos is a country that's literally full of craters because it's been bombed so heavily by the United States it may or may not be the number one most bombed country on planet Earth in the history of the world the United States dropped more bombs on Laos than were dropped on Germany and Japan combined during World War two that's out so you know you can look at that and be like no do I need a moral framework to you know obviously there are other factors here let's just say okay you know this is a problem what can I do to improve it kind of what can I do to help what one positive role I can play now look I think partly this has to do with your analysis of human nature and to what if then human nature does vary between individuals I think I don't know if I could say most people or most philosophers I mean maybe most philosophers would say well gee you know eyes'll the majority of white men who go to Laos just want to get drunk and smoke opium there's a lot of opium tourism you know people who are there to smoke smoke drugs in marijuana but also opium or use other drugs they want to go to discos and they want to sleep with prostitutes um you can see why the majority of people are going to last and you eyes old you know me I specifically I went there I did historical research I was you know ancient stone inscriptions handwritten manuscripts I was studying languages I was studying politics and philosophy and I was trying to do humanitarian work so therefore if so facto the difference must be that you have some kind of belief maybe a religious belief or ethical or some kind of framework that differentiates you from those people that that sounds like an excuse to me that sounds to me like a way of not really dealing with you know what what the difference is and you know I think the real difference might be might be more disturbing so an unrelated but I think you know meaningful comparison you may have noticed that a lot of people just want to dismiss Adolf Hitler as insane and maybe it's more disturbing to deal with the fact that he was wrong you know but made decisions you know in in the same kind of way that that you and I do that his manner of thinking was not you know was not so different maybe it's more disturbing to understand that so I mean the difference between people and how they play out I understand why some people would assume this is because of a really strictly posited you know moral moral framework um and you know even looking at things like you know desire and I mean sorry let's just say again you know being a nihilist this doesn't mean that I believe or sort of this word believing um obviously you know that there are even aesthetic differences between people that can run tremendously deep so I've known gay people in my life but I'm entirely heterosexual I also known bisexual people and you know it's not a belief it's not a difference in moral framework ideology and honor even on an aesthetic level you know there is a sense in which they perceive the world you know differently from idea they see beauty in men and so on when I when I don't and what-have-you um the way they perceive in the way they feel is actually different you know you know so if we were a really nice question why is it that I look at you know the bomb craters in Laos and the history and the polity of zoom using the bomb craters a symbol for the whole political historical situation it's not like I literally just looked at a photograph of longer why do I look at it and respond to that as an opportunity for humanitarian work and research and somebody else responds to it literally going there to find cheap prostitutes yeah the guy's looking for cheap prostitutes they outnumber me by about a thousand to one in this case maybe I've chosen a good example it's not because they're members of a different religion from me it's not because they're Catholic and I'm atheist I mean you know if the roles were reversed maybe you'd say that or something but it doesn't it's not because they're Muslim and I'm a nihilist or something um you know to get into why that is I think it might be it might be more disturbing and obviously this is this is a difference between people that's that's quite a bit more common than the difference between Adolf Hitler and and you and I yeah so we just had the more important discussion with you about psychology rather than morality when it comes to diagnosing telling what we need to do to people with people like this like Adolf Hitler is just more important to talk about the psychology than the morality is in general um look you know okay I guess this is maybe struck on one of the ways in which I was influenced by Schopenhauer just because showed me the will and desire you know so so central to our discourse differences in what I desire are not differences in what I believe and again already even some like homosexuality versus heterosexuality aesthetic differences and you know that I see this as a learning opportunity and an opportunity humanitarian work as opposed to else I just I don't think those those fall under the rubric of belief or faith or even moral framework okay in terms of a moral framework you know I do say to you all the time what I talked about is doing the best you can yeah I think it's different from trying to do good or trying to serve the will of God or you know nationalism or some other abstract and again I think part of the tragedy of life is understanding that many of the people whom you may perceive as evil are from their perspective trying to do the best they can and in most cases they're struggling to make money the only way they know how or the way they're most familiar with so obviously as a vegan you know you know I just saw some footage of people cutting down a forest and in Indonesia and killing orangutangs but whether you're looking at cutting down a forest or running a slaughterhouse the reality is I mean there are I'm totally open to questions of good and evil it's not like I'm saying these words should be taken out of the dictionary yeah we all know that most of what we're dealing with are people who are trying to live a good life and trying to live a meaningful life and are struggling to do the best they can and are earning money the way they know how and they're not questioning you know they're not questioning a lot of things there and but even the flip side of that they're probably also spending money the only way they know how many people people want to be happy and people want to be loved and if they do that by getting drunk and sleeping with prostitutes you know that's the same I you know that's the same set of impulses that's the same attempt to find a solution to these to these problems and yeah so you know again my pretense my claim is that I'm living without a moral framework and you know if if I'm wrong then I think the sense in which I'm wrong is going to be at such a low level it's going to be a such a low level of cognition that I might as well be right and yeah you know like you know I do believe red is red and and green is green and black is black there are you know yeah but yeah and and you know but I don't think but it's what point was I don't think doing the best you can is something that separates me from those guys who are on permanent vacation and going to the soil because they also in their way are doing the best they can and that's probably why but that's probably why people are so afraid of new ideas like veganism yeah present someone hey look you know there's another way to live you know there's another way to spend your money maybe another way you know hey there's another way because most these people already care about ecology well is another way to solve that problem there's another way to have an impact and a lot of people can see a respond they don't want to know about it because as soon as they do know about it now there's this you know there's this wait there's this onus on them to change to start living more more and alignment with with what does they know ya know it seems to me that you perhaps fall in line with the type of moral intuitions so like how would you be able to say to anyone else if they were doing something that's outright wrong or perhaps outright not in their own best interest despite them saying clearly that they want to do something if it's going to go if they're actually the exact opposite direction of that how exactly do you approach them in a way that actually tells them that what they're doing isn't actually in the best interest how do you do that okay so I don't I don't consider myself an intuitionist and but oh I'll give you I'll give you a prime example I think this I think this is answering your your question um so look I've given you the example that I don't I don't believe in speed limits but there's a sense in which I do believe it like ie I think it is a good thing to have speed limits I just don't think they really exists there were cultural convention there's something we create and the something I'm afraid against a blank canvas there isn't some objectively real standard we can work against okay now almost everyone believes that pedophilia is evil bad wrong that it should be illegal there is actually no consensus on what is the age of consent at what age does does pedophilia stop being a crime and also understand there's no consensus among children internationally um how many years in prison does the crime result they know you might you might think there'd be a universal standard you might think the whole world would have the same year but like speed limits I mean the point is there is an understanding that there there should be a limit somewhere and then we're gonna create a limit and whatever a limit we create is in a sense arbitrary right it should the speed limit be 65 or 70 or 55 or armed or 30 or 100 you know the they're possible but the most fundamental assumption here which isn't gonna exist in every society is that there's one speed limit for everyone that there's one age of consent for everyone even that even that we could throw out no but even that we through it we could say okay you you have a better car because you drive this type of car the speed limit is 80 for you you have a better driver's license you passed the test you know you drive it you're an a grade-a driver for you the speed limit is 80 but for him he has a worse driver's license for him at 6 you could have that kind of system right but the the the deep assumption is one way or another people are going to come together they're gonna discuss this and then they're then they're gonna set the limit so in in seeing that as arbitrary and culturally conventional and existing and in written law and so on um you know that's I don't think there's any intuition involved if there were a moral intuition these things would presumably be universal or there'd be no debate or there'd be no real role for democracy in them and you know even something like murder I mean we when you get into details of okay even something I suppose more how many years do you go to prison for murder for you know I'm there actually is no whole international or even now it's it's not it's not something easily decided at all I mean okay my goodness I'm so broad that murder is bad well yeah and then you get into what is the difference we first a free murder and second-degree murder you know what if it's a thief who broke into your house and you can get these kinds of details so no I wouldn't identify as an intuitionist and again my perspective is being a nihilist means that I'm much more able to deal with these questions and contradict to me they're not contradictions sorry really briefly but I think this puts a human face on it yeah I had an employer so he was my boss he was my boss at work and he had for decades you could tell you've been telling the same story again again he was an old man he had four decades at cocktail parties been stating his opinion that he thought the the age of consent should be lowered dramatically he thought the age of consent should be when a girl has her period and he alluded to there are various ancient cultures with a lot of ancient cultures people got married at 13 years old they were happy there were pre-modern cultures this is normal and you know he did this in a in a kind of self congratulatory way now I think nobody in his life had ever challenged his belief he dealt with Christian you know kind of standard you know ideologue true believer responses you know some people think it should be 18 or 16 or whatever or people just yelled at him what have you and you know um the way I responded to him is is closer to Socratic method I asked him what kind of a society do you want to live in do you want to live in a society where it's not safe for thirteen-year-old girls to go with a group of their friends to McDonald's like they can't go to a McDonald's without their father accompanying them or an uncle or a male because you know fully grown men can hit on them and seduce them where that's culturally and legally acceptable I say you know I accept that it's it's a completely artificial contrivance like the speed limit you can set it at 16 or 18 that only at a certain age is it acceptable for men to start seducing young women right and you know again it could be 21 I don't think anymore on earth it's 21 but I don't know you know but whether it's 19 or 18 or 16 or whatever whatever it's gonna be but what this creates is a culture where girls can go unaccompanied to McDonald's and it's understood by everyone they're not gonna flirt with them they're not gonna engage in they're not gonna attempt to seduce them yeah so again this is like a speed limit a speed limit benefits us all it changes you know the way we live in society now so this was a nihilistic response you notice this is not based on good and evil and this is not even based on the presumption of the victim suffering right because as you know there will be counter examples there'll be some example of someone at 13 who got married and was totally happy or whatever I'm you know people are gonna people are gonna be able to make into something so and this is not based on on on any of that and you know I think you know I think could say he was a little bit devastated by this you know the conversation you know you know went on from there so again I don't think this is intuition ISM I think this is a kind of rigorously rational approach that proceeds from believing in nothing to believing in nothing but along the way you know shows up well what the options are no sorry and then look front final conclusion on them with with speed limits and with the age of consent and with how we're gonna treat murder there were gonna be measurable outcome different so early early in the conversation I was saying to you well if you do if you look at philosophy ocation you got to measure the outcomes if you do humanitarian work you gotta look at the outcomes um if the speed limit is too high a lot of people are gonna die if the age of consent is too high like if it's 21 too many people gonna be more into prison it's like you know everyone's gonna be going to prison because they they start having sex at 19 and that's illegal because the age of consent so anymore you know obviously there are going to be measurable outcomes so in sing at the arbitrary and so on but this kind of discussion is going to guide us to making a reasonable decision it's not gonna guide us towards a distinction between good and evil yeah so what why because like you have this very nihilistic approach to things we're talking is commendable to be very intellectually honest that's that's definitely something that's I'm struck by but what do you think people have such a negative attitude towards nihilus in the first place yeah so nihilism had one period where it was regarded positively and that was the period of Russian nihilism before the Revolution yeah there was a time when nihilism had a good name and one of the slogans was and this slogan still means something to me um go to the poor be the poor yeah that's interesting in itself because you know nihilism you know you might think they're slow in case you expect they're slow going to be forget it just live in luxury for yourself or something no nihilism is not necessarily linked to narrow self-interest or self intelligence what have you I think there's an interesting argument that some other philosophies like libertarianism may be linked to you know that that kind of tendency but that the charity Limpopo charitable impulse was there from the first so nihilism actually had a relatively good reputation for that one period in Russia and then once the Communists came to power they started vilifying the nihilists and indeed hunting them down and killing them because they killed just about everyone who didn't support the the Bolsheviks in the revolution Aryan and Civil War period and things didn't get a lot better after that with Lenin and Stalin and so on so they were written down negative negative way in in terms the history books um you know does nihilism have a worse name today then skepticism or atheism I mean look I feel confident that I can defend myself when people have a low opinion of me a bad opinion me when I want to describe myself as a nihilist I noticed that the government of China describes their enemy the enemy of communism in China as historical nihilism that's the term they use for the opposite of communism so from me part of it is saying okay that's exactly what I am you know what's funny you say the opposite of having faith in communism is historical nihilism well that's me well I'm exactly someone who looks at the lessons of history and sees that there's nothing to believe in there you know I feel I'm learning the lesson of history and I'm rejecting your totalitarian system of belief so what I'm hopeful of is that in its small way exactly the repression nihilism has had in in Russia it's real in China it's more abstract and hypothetical um that you know that can become something positive that can blossom and that we can we can kind of identify with positively those of us for whom basically atheism is not enough and skepticism is not enough yeah and I just mentioned even specifically someone like like Max Turner who is he's self-described as an egoist I feel that that's also not enough I don't think it's challenging enough for me or challenging enough for for society yeah now back to the question of du quois of a prescriptive nihilists is her actually two approaches they can call yourself a prescriptive nihilist in the sense that you believe people ought to be Annihilus we can use prescriptive nihilus in the sense that you believe that no such thing as a horse so would you say that you agree with both of them okay so look earlier on in the discussion it was clear I put a lot of value on democracy I mean I think the real question is not do you believe in aunt but do you believe in coercion ultimately by state power or the law I mean that that's really what comes down to and I mentioned this is not totally abstract because for example the anarcho-capitalist s-- and the the libertarians there were people who opposed that right now I would I what I believe in strongly believe in i I do see a really large sphere of acceptable use of force and regulation and how else to put a coercion use of coercion not to bring about change of progress you and I both we didn't even challenge that we talked about education we def totally assumed that if parents are raising their child illiterate the government is the right to say no your kids gonna learn how to read you know parents are against reading forget it if the parents don't want their kid to use soap kid is gonna learn in class so prevents illness no this is not this is this is mandatory and we one of my favorite examples to use is sewage treatment anarcho-capitalists believe you should be allowed to dump your poo in the river I don't believe that I totally believe it I totally support the the the policy of you know coercing people into flushing their poo into the sewage system and having a scientific sewage treatment so I'm gonna okay so this is abstract question over there so I will answer your question of what the abstract aunt so in in the real world the real art is coercion is state power is law I care a lot about democracy but I'm not a libertarian I'm not an anarchist I'm not an air capitalist or what have you I think you know we come to conclusions like if people drink water that has poo in it they get cholera so you're not gonna allow people to dump their sewage water apart from ecological end and other concerns okay so that's the real world OTT is dealing with coercion and pain for a necklace just very quickly sure yeah dude like you have a disdain for analysts and if for any particular reason I'll just write down abstract on it is to come back to it yeah you know the way I feel about that one of the first videos I made on utilitarianism it's still up well I think all my videos talk on my channel I don't know if I've deleted much of anything a couple or I've over over 900 videos but anyway one of the first ones I said something which which may be shallow but is true about utilitarianism and I'm gonna say it here about anarchism too I pointed out look when you look at any of the major ethical and political questions of our generation or of several centuries um when has the position of the utilitarians mattered you know did the utilitarians have a position on the Vietnam War that mattered or expects wines that when you go through the list and I I think that really is a challenge to anarchism also now anarchism is a relatively enormous movement compared to utilitarianism I mean utilitarian it's really it's a couple of people in academia and there's kind of nothing else to show for it I'm anarchist they do manage to get enough people together to have a riot every so often it and that sort of thing oh well yeah I mean when you asked about your question was posed as disdain um that is a reason to have disdain for anarchism now anarchism I think is a philosophy that can work as a critique but as a critique only so you know the same way I mean Catholics Catholicism can work as a critique you can read a criticism of the in justices of life in Saudi Arabia written by a dogmatic Catholic who's really just trying to push to convert people to Christianity that's their bias but it's still a totally good report on how [ __ ] up the Saudi Arabians society is how so you know the fact that someone's ideologically wrong when they're there their philosophy said positively doesn't mean that they use it productively once they did negatively when used nipper T so Eric ISM can be very productive security however anarchists cannot even deal with these types of questions we've just talked about I've okay how is sewage treatment gonna work and most of the time the response they get from a Turkish is just to guffaw and land do you engage in hand waving how you know the value of liberty and freedom is so great how can you possibly you know contrast it to you know sewage treatment so well that's exactly what I have to do you know I don't believe in an abstract notion called freedom I'm a nihilist I don't believe in your God and I don't believe in sacrificing sewage treatment on the altar of your bloodthirsty God in school and you know whatever you have in mind when you say freedom you know I also can use the word freedom but again it's not taking out the dictionary for me um people getting cholera and dying having to poo in a bucket and dump the bucket in the river that's that's not really what I'm thinking about when I think about freedom I don't think it's what you are either you know if you're the anarchist in reality they're probably diluting zone so no let's let's get serious let's really talk about sewage treatment I mean you know let's talk about public education let's talk about you know all the things that that really well let's have to open up prisons are run and operated to me those are very very fundamental questions that anarchism utterly fails sila so that's another reason to have some degree of contempt for foreigners okay so come back to your earlier questions that I wrote down do that again in case so I talked about the the real world ought which comes down to state power the the abstract thought okay when people ask about the existence of an abstract god what they really mean is is there a characteristic of ought that we ought to do something that is true for all people in all times in all cultures that is what they mean they don't mean is there something I personally feel I ought to do I ought to clean the dishes you know I you know I ought to and I get some to buy groceries nobody is questioning that the question is of what I would call a supernal odd or an objectively real odd now you've already hear me say I don't really believe there's an objectively real difference between red and brown or between green and black that exists for everyone in all cultures now I also think it's a problem like I don't think that cognitively impedes us it leads to some funny situations as well I don't believe there's an objectively real distinction between where the speed limit is at but it's somewhere right etc etc so no I don't believe in that sense in an abstract odd but again the reverse is right we come together we we have these we have these cultural conventions we have laws we have you know state coercion and so on and you know you you can talk about art and you can talk about requirements within those within those contexts if if you have chosen to build a bridge that's choice you don't have to build a bridge you can choose not to but you can have a boat going for okay what what are we to do with this bridge where do we you get into requirements that make sense look if the bridge is gonna be this long it has to be this high it has to be this strong it has to have this budget you might wanna have a lower budget might make you burn oh if it's too cheap it's gonna be dangerous so we have requirements in arts that are true within this contexts and with these cultural conventions etc etc but knowing an absolute odd or universal odd obviously does not exist and it exists much less than an absolute speed limit but an absolute and Universal difference between red and brown yeah you say that your favorite discussions and discussions of morality and myopic thoughts that seem to be brought up as a result of people believe in things like utilitarianism or even deontology well I mean look there's a difference between kind of chalkboard philosophy and real-world philosophy word where it has consequences um on the chalkboard I guess I understand why people get hung up on these things and they ask they demand to know um you know is it possible for me to convince others of my morality for someone else to share my sense of aught that's really what it comes down to yeah is it possible for me to convince you Darrin that a painting you regarded this painting as ugly and worthless and I say and I talked it through with you we stand there in the echo I said well what you don't realize is this is his approach this is what he's saying this is the significance of the painting whether that's in vogue otherwise and now you see it as beautiful or meaningful or valuable you didn't before okay so I've convinced you of an art of a convinced you of a value or something but there's nothing real here none of it exists right yeah and that's okay I mean the thing is unless you're a disillusioned monotheists or you're like Plato or something you have some really bizarre philosophy about you know objective morality existing and you're you're mourning the loss of this objective morality um there's nothing wrong in that picture I'm not left you know reaching into abstractions trying to find some objectively real standard of beauty or what-have-you but yes I can convince others of my my my moral beliefs or my moral conclusions or ever you want to put it they can share on that but it's completely subjective even when it's inter subjective and that's okay yeah oh when it comes to being subjective do you delineate its into two different discrete types of subjectivity like say for instance relativism versus a physiological objectivity do you even do that or do you just treat it all as relative necessarily yeah I guess I guess the truth is I don't because I'm not I'm not ever in a circumstance where you you need to divide it into into one of the other but I think it is true that we do in 2018 we talk about cognitive nihilism which is more this this epistemological thing as opposed to moral nihilism or cosmological nihilism or what I talked about you know historical nihilism but yeah otherwise no I haven't I haven't really had a reason to to separate into into categories that way you know one that gives the epistemological side of it it rarely comes up over or explicitly but it really does inform things silently and implicitly even that example of me talking to my boss the fact that I didn't respond to that by saying to him you're a bad person because you know you believe in sex with underage girls like there's no it's not coming back in that way the fact that I respond the way that I did that's what reflects the epistemology but it's not like I'm responding to him by asking an epistemological question Wow how do we know the significance of the number 18 you know not where I'm gonna go with it yeah yeah so what do you what would you say are your because this could have tie-ins to your um your moral not moral your political ideologies what exactly do follow the left-wing do you follow the right-wing you fell into the centrist or four-carat libertarian etc what exactly would you call yourself would you basically tie yourself into politically speaking right so you can you can probably guess this is very parallel to a lot of the answers I've given before yeah you know it would depend on which culture I was living in and and where I was and so on and I don't mean that in a shallow way or as an evasion so in a recent video you know I pointed out well some people consider me conservative and some people consider me left-wing if I lived in Texas I think I'd be considered left-wing I did some research on the politics of Greece and it seemed to me that in Greece at that time I would have been at about the center of the political spectrum I would have been a kind of mainstream Democrat you know on on most of the issues that were there when I lived in Taiwan in Taiwan there is no left versus right dichotomy they have an independent test versus reunification aesthetical spectrum and you know where where I stand in Taiwanese politics is different um you know so the history of so I again I mentioned this in a recent video people used to call me an erogenous within Buddhism I like to refer things to their origins the difference between left and right goes back to the French Revolution the creation of the rebel Neri Parliament and there were other very specific political terms that actually firmed to the layout of that of that room there was actually a bump in the floor that was jokingly referred to as the mountain and people who happened to sit next to the Melton it was referred to as a mountainous tendency you know it's just because the the floorboards were warped and that that part of the room but the people who actually sat on the left side of the room as opposed to the right side of the room um that was where that where that idea first came from the seating arrangements in the the French Revolutionary Parliament which were watched and influenced conceptions throughout Europe right now in the United States of America is it left-wing or right-wing to be Anti Corruption to want reforms that get-get corruption in the government the answer is its it's neither one alright is it left-wing or right-wing you know to want to make you know cutting the foreskin off an infant illegal so so this is called circumcision you know cutting the cutting off part of an infant's penis illegal it's it's neither one now there are other examples that are kind of examples in a sense it shouldn't be left-wing to care about first nations languages indigenous peoples languages creative way mohawk any weight or what-have-you but again I'm a nihilist I'm I'm gonna tell if it is in reality where I live in Canada it seems like only left-wing people care about that issue yeah you know maybe I'm wrong a little change but it's a very small minority it's a very weak issue with the left there's no and you can also see there's no connection there's no meaningful sense in which it is you know a left-wing issue so again now some people would respond as percent well aisel this is really about self-knowledge well yeah my I know what I care about I know what what my desires are and what objectives on what indeed even like I asked most I know what kind of society I want to live in so I don't know about all these isolated issues oh okay no one's veganism is veganism the left-wing issue or right-wing in a sense it's neither or it should be neither there's nothing left wing about about veganism there's nothing left wing about ecology but it's quite likely if you're watching this in Texas probably in Texas only left-wing people care about ecology what do you think about people who say that they use them is necessarily intersectional okay great question but yeah so this question was so I'll write down intersectional okay this question was you know am I left where am i right where do I stand these things so I think you know Sarah can look at this and say okay so I have self-knowledge I know but the particular objectives I want or have you and then I can look at the left and right and figure out you know what I want to do yeah in as much as that's true that's what everyone should do and you should and you know it may take years I mean whatever you're relatively young you know you may figure out I mean like most people have never even thought about prison reform okay once you think about it holy [ __ ] this is a huge issue you know what's the full education reform you're already on to his education reform a left-wing issue or right-wing issue is prison reform it's these issues once you know them understand them you're not gonna feel at home probably anywhere on the political spectrum maybe you're lucky and you live in a country where these issues are debated and are our mainstream mainstream part of politics though I think this is also part of the reality of true democracy is that true democracy would be able to capture you know express and debate these issues and fake democracy can't fake democracy is just not okay what's next anyway I don't I don't think it's both self knowledge someone else might see it that way and there's some truth to that you know again what I really credit for this is nihilism is that I don't think in ideological terms about these things you know even if in the end I'm gonna take the pieces together and maybe I'm gonna cynically write a speech that tries to convince left-wing people to care about prison reform um you know what what I'm doing I'm not thinking etiology intellectually I'm not starting from an ideal or concluding with an ideal or matters of belief and thus I see the world in this in this different way and over time it takes time issue-by-issue i build up a sophisticated kind of portfolio of political political opportunities to make the world a better place that I'm looking up and if I could make if I could make the world a better place by being a member of the Conservative Party I'd do it right right now it doesn't seem to be the case if I could make the world a better place by being a member of a left-wing party you know I'd probably do it too you know with some some caveats in both cases how much how much you have to tolerate them so the intersectional issue look intersectional ISM is is really a chalkboard philosophy it exists at academic conferences and not much else so I think the first misconception vegans have some vegans have some vegans have the misconception that intersectional ISM is a big movement that veganism can co-opt and you know if veganism can latch on to it and make itself more important and I really feel the opposite is true I think intersectional ISM is a very narrow academic discipline and veganism is gonna make itself narrower and smaller and weaker by trying to latch onto that and get involved so that's that's that's a pragmatic argument the counter-argument is the the central notion of intersectional ism the concept of overlapping oppressions you know could this be useful for veganism maybe sometimes just barely and how so look in Sri Lanka the butchers are almost all Muslim why because Buddhists believe Buddhists believe killing animals causes bad karma in general the Hindus don't want that kind of job that's probably small number of Buddhists and Hindus who slaughter animals okay so you have an ethnic and religious difference it is ethnic to what the Muslims are ethnically different from the Sinhalese Buddhists or the Tamil Hindus or what have you so you have an ethnic difference related to production of me does that make intersectional ISM kind of useful or meaningful here and in preaching veganism in this in this context I honestly don't see the utility I don't see how that's used but it's totally a situation where you know there were overlapping questions of race ethnicity oppression religion and and veganism and animal slaughter sure the actual publications I've seen that have come out of vegan intersectional ISM are garbage so I'm not optimistic about it yeah but you know on the other I look hey I'm a nihilist I'm profoundly open-minded if someone was really gonna do something you know productive with that I mean you know I mean looking and the other the other thing is I mean you wouldn't call it intersectional ism but I mean taking advantage of opportunities like the positive connection between veganism and Buddhism can you do Sling positive of that be be you know yeah so you know I mean can you take advantage of a positive connection between veganism and african-american culture and hip-hop maybe but that kind of thing we normally don't describe as intersectional ism because intersectional ism is really just this this academic discipline yeah you can tell I'm I'm keeping all the way real this would be more entertaining video if I if I gave you a kind of ATS JW rant that's that's not what I do yes like respect the honesty that's absolutely does it's perfect so like um do you think that is important to preserve things from exist from X what's the word like when things go into extinction area you have that whole preference for things to not go into extinction and if it if you do is it moral or is it aesthetic um so I assume you're talking within the human realm here you're not talking about species you're talking about animals going state you know but elements of human culture and language culture extinction and species just in general well okay good I mean I think to me they're to two very different things so look you know I have no problem with the tradition of circumcision going extinct I think that would be an absolutely better place I think that was something we looked back on as part of our historical past that we'd evolved out of the reality is you look at something like I think the mean the main example people questioned about is why should the cree language exist in the future or the aegean which so doesn't know that our language is indigenous to canada well again it's a bit like the morality of building a bridge if you want to build this bridge you've got to spend a certain amount of money and commit a certain amount of resources it's got to be a certain span a certain idea there were minimum requirements yeah if you want Canada to be a democracy that is not built on genocide you know the meaning of genocide in this context we all understand we know what that would mean not genocide the opposite of genocide what that would really mean it is is a wide open question in Canada what would be a Canada that's not built on genocide and you know the number of elected members of parliament we've had who are First Nations is incredibly tiny the role of these languages in our society is so marginal it's way more marginal than Chinese the Chinese languages everywhere and so on so you know these are questions that come up come up in the sense now you know is there an absolute value intrinsic to the language or intrinsic to the tradition I don't I don't believe in any absolute values I don't know is intrinsic you know to anything but you know in Europe should the French people just stop speaking French they could all just speak English or they could all just speak German and maybe there'd be in an economic advantage that nobody is discussing this possibility there's no debate about the French language going extinct with it within within Europe but you know um yeah I think if we were going to really rigorously philosophically or political you know discuss that that that that matter you know then then we'd get into you know what in what sense is the existence of the French language you know a good thing or a bad thing or required by this or that this is that vision of society sure but no obviously you know it's it's impossible to believe in tradition for the sake of tradition it's impossible to look believin in preservation for the sake of of preservation because you know that that would look at this point especially when we're talking about these these really marginalized cultures nobody is suggesting that the Cree in a jib way should be allowed to fight wars and take people slaves and have a farm economy based on slaves who are taken captive in war that was part of their traditional culture there's no discussion of reviving that you know the question is now when they're their culture and religion and languages have been so devastated the question is what what can survive it there's no there's no question there's no question whether or not they're gonna use soap there's no debate they open they want to use soap that want to use toothpaste they want to use the internet and bang machines oh those those debates are dead so the question is what what can we salvage and you know I mean for me so I grew up Jewish to some extent I grew up communist to a much greater extent my parents were communist is a much more important part of my upbringing yeah is there any fragment of Judaism that I I preserve him of is there any fragment of communism that I probably not you know probably it's it's actually at zero so I think generally with I just pointed out generally in questioning tradition most of those discussions are over at that that end of the spectrum or is there any little scrap of tradition you're gonna you're gonna keep it all and you know the exceptions would be looking at like Afghanistan today you know Afghan it can we convince the people of Afghanistan that it's better to have daughters that are literate rather than illiterate yeah really can we really destroy this cultural tradition is that's we're talking about vigilance or absolutely hostile relationship so yeah and then it's a very different kind of kind of discourse yeah yes but you see my answer I I think nothing that I just said can be applied to habitat conservation for wild animals yeah I just say so I mean you you provocatively suggested that the same answer might might serve for both but I think that's that's actually a totally different questions which is bad we'll probably avoid the question of extinction yeah redundant anyway so um now with regards to politics and vegan activist II in the modern I guess marketplace of ideas how exactly do you think we should be doing it and well first of all how do you think it's going right now well I have mixed feelings with the state of being activism it's it's better than it's ever been in the past and yet it's it's pretty terrible it's pretty pathetic at this so you know what things are things are better than ever been in the past and when I talk to people were over overly cynical or overly pessimistic about it I point that out how much better the situation is now than it ever was previously the the main comparisons I use are two successful movements for social cultural and legal change like gay rights I also like to use examples of moves to ban cigarette smoking to change the culture of smoking cigarettes but also to change laws you know there have been legal changes you're not allowed to smoke and in various places and even a change seatbelt regulation these things all have in common that their movements that were based on small minorities of people to totally non-violence there was no civil war so some vegans including Wayans young and director action everywhere including to some extent carry Franchione and the abolitionists even the word abolitionist that's based on a comparison to the abolition of slavery in the history the United States of America and it's specifically slavery in the United States of America not not Sri Lanka not Thailand country's abolish slavery not just America but it's based on that one narrative well the abolition of slavery in the United States of America involved a civil war with that killed a very significant percentage of the population yeah and it's also worthwhile to note it was a civil war predominantly fought by white people against other white people and there were black combatants I'm not saying there were zero but under saying when you look at the economics of the war of who paid for it and the number of people who lay down their lives it's very significant to note there were there were these were mostly white people fighting over this this issue that's the horrible reality of the the civil war it's better to say that it's not the same as for instance in Haiti in the Caribbean slavery was ended in Haiti by black people rising up and killing the white people it was a that was a slave rebellion not a white on white slave owners civil war this model has absolutely zero applicability to the current or future situation of veganism and the instead by contrast the type of lobbying the type of struggle for for social political change that gay rights just went through within my lifetime it's a wonderful positive example how many people were really involved in the gay rights movement was it even 1% was it 2% involved or or activists at all a very very very small percentage of people were directly involved in in the gay rights movement how many people even cared like most of the public was indifferent and of course some people were actively homophobic and then a very very tough you know argument to make in convincing the majority to to entertain the legal changes they wanted and and what-have-you um I remember being told in school when I was in junior high one of the professor's in junior high gave his certain teachers in junior high gave his official denunciation of homosexuals and his explanation for why homosexuals should not be allowed to be schoolteachers and his argument basically was built on the assumption that all homosexuals are pedophiles - all arguing against that in the 1980s was very tough trying to convince governments and people that no it was perfectly safe for a gay man to be a to be a schoolteacher that being a gay man or a married gay man or something you know who has sex with other development is not the same as being a pederast or a pedophile or being a threat to the student but that's really not it's not in the 1980s or 1970s or 1960s it was not an easy argument to make that actually it should be a civil a civil right to be openly gay while being a schoolteacher so that's tough now I'm only mentioning how tough that is because I think a lot of vegans think it's it's really tough to convince people to stop drinking cow milk and start drinking soy milk you know I guess I mean I guess it's tough I don't think quitting cow milk is nearly as tough as quitting cigarette smoking cigarettes movies - I don't think quitting cow milk is nearly as tough as quitting homophobia you know and that may sound like an ugly person but we we culturally you know homophobia was part of an image of strength and virility what it meant to be a man and in this example I used also taking care of your children and defending your children against corruption and evil there's a sense of morality and all this stuff packaged up and sexual and at the end all of it these are huge you know difficult cultural transitions and a small minority of people who were well organized and cared about them passionately brought about those forms of cultural change without a civil war and - I think basically democratic and transparent means maybe maybe there's some some footnote there but you know it wasn't through violent revolution or so that for me is the road forward for veganism and you know can you accomplish a vegan world there's going to be a whole series of small victories that draw attention to the basic concepts underlying principles of veganism before you get any any big victories but sure I'll give you a small victory we could have a 20% tax on leather shoes and you can have a negative tax 20% off any shoes that are completely non leather that are completely vegan we and partly this is because leather is now obsolete and even just in debating that you'd be making people who are hey you may see leather boots as something invisible as a status symbol that's part of daily life but if you can engage the public in a debate about that law and realize wow leather is unnecessary it's obsolete it's hard to take care of it's expensive it releases toxins into the air most people don't know chromium hexane it's bad for the workers who create it and there's this you know unbelievable you know animal Holocaust thing going on in the background - you might be in resonance you know their ecological as well as ethical arguments um the lead-up I mean in the same way the most the most important thing about gay marriage probably was the debate before the law was passed was engaging the public in a debate about homosexuality and future society probably the debate you'd have leading up to passing a law like that would be more significant and that is how veganism will make progress um that's that's my claim beautiful well I think I was absolutely fantastically said thinking it's time to wrap things up is we're rebels be two and a half hour mark so much for coming on that's been absolutely fantastic uh totally conversation for the one was expect now but I hope it's good for hope if your viewers and you know the other thing I'd say is one of the reasons I'm talking to Darren ultimately I'm out here to recruit talent the kind of social political change I'm talking about you know it's gonna involve small groups of people who have high levels of trust and cooperation and I don't know what the future holds for you but I'm not planning to disappear whether it's five years or ten years from now I'm out here on the Internet I'm not making money out of YouTube but what I'm hoping to do is find colleagues find talent and in the future you know we can save the planet all the more it comes down to the discussion but do you think you'd be um you'd be good to have another stream sometime in the future corpse meet a bunch of post graduate so I'm hoping to have about a maza men the second in the very early parts of the stream he has a master's he was a philosopher but he's retired now I'm open-minded sure I'm open to that kind of thing and just gonna rely on my travel schedule my work schedule because I'm going to France in a couple of weeks now but otherwise sure Darren I'm happy today's subject by the way will be objective morality it should be perhaps next week ish maybe the week after that I want to make sure that everyone's given sufficient notice and on top of that just to end this dream as well I would like to say special thanks to my patrons Janice speed and yeah but yeah thank you so much guys you guys have been absolutely amazing shout out to giant lolly you're amazing thank you so much and yeah thank you so much guys for watching I hope this has been educational I hope it's perhaps advance your thought at least a little bit and perhaps you will have a different approach to activism in the future perhaps you have different pros to politics in the future perhaps you have the different approaches to philosophy in the future perhaps you'll be more interested in philosophy so I hope you've learned a little bit here and there from what we've discussed and I'd like to say just you guys are amazing