Veganism as an identity, and as an identity crisis.

even though on paper it looks like the
worst thing ever that i you know through my career away or whatever else on paper it looks bad but in real life i am so blessed and thankful and grateful for for that i do not report on fitness and bodybuilding news on this channel but once in a while the world of fitness and bodybuilding overlaps with or intersects with interesting political and philosophical questions sometimes within the vegan movement sometimes outside of its bounds you might or might not have noticed this recent evolution in the physique and philosophical perspective of john venus quote why did i do this to myself over the last two years i've been losing all my passion for lifting weights why do you look smaller softer less impressive are questions i get asked often nowadays the truth is i never really valued my physique or appearance much the reason i pushed myself as hard as i possibly could was to be a quote unquote billboard for veganism a lifestyle i once thought was my life mission to promote with everything i had now that i have fully left my vegan identity behind i find no reason to train like i used to anymore i have also struggled with being a fitness person taking shirtless photos that did not always have the effect i intended inspiring people to eat plants even while preaching body positivity and self-love it never felt like me as i did so while having an unnatural looking body that incites desire even lust in others a lower state of consciousness there is nothing wrong with wanting to look a certain way but if we are doing it for attention admiration compliments and other vain reasons there will always be a dark side to it and i never intended that to be my quote career close quote so john venus now has to ask himself some very difficult questions if fitness weight loss and bodybuilding are not for him the meaning of life what is if fitness weight loss and bodybuilding used as a means to promulgate and propound and promote the vegan movement is not the meaning of life and it's not the way to lead a meaningful life for him what is what else you got what have you got left who are you really when we strip away vegan activists as an identity when we strip away fitness influencer and when we even strip away the body the body that gave him this fame gave him this renown gave him this career which he refers to as a quote career close quote it was a real career it was real money it was real fame and in its pathetic way veganism is a real movement right veganism is a message that gives people a sense of meaning and purpose and direction in their lives but i'll be the first one to say to you this should not be the only source of meaning and purpose a direction in your life it shouldn't even be the main one right you should be leading a meaningful life already you should have your own passions and interests and political projects and research projects your own initiative taking your own direction and then you add veganism onto that if veganism is your primary or only purpose if living for this movement is what gives you a sense of direction your life i'd say that's a formula for disaster i'd say it's a formula for personal failure i think i think it leads to tragedy and to tragedy only i can sympathize with and i can empathize with the position john venus is now in to a much greater extent than you might suppose not because i've ever been a bodybuilder haven't been and i never want to be a bodybuilder i never want to bench press 400 pounds and i never want to have the kind of physical pain and even the disturbance to your sleep that comes with bench pressing foreign just the disruption to your sleep cycle that comes with pushing your body to that limit to get those results i never want to experience that enough i've experienced enough with weightlifting that i can imagine i don't sympathize them because i have any experience with making money out of my appearance as a model as a bodybuilder i don't have any experience making money giving health and diet and fitness advice not for that reason what i have experience with is having to bring to a sudden screeching halt everything that made my life meaningful just a few months before and take on a whole new direction after 10 years as a scholar of buddhism i had to come to a complete stop and say okay if i quit now if i give up buddhist scholarship if i give up the study of buddhist languages if i give up the pursuit of humanitarian work in buddhist countries the study of the politics and history of if i give all of that up what have i got left you know what the answer is me if i give up that philosophy what have i got left my philosophy right that's partly the philosophy i had before i got involved in buddhism that i brought into the study of buddhism with me and it's partly the new philosophy i have coming out of buddhism part of my critique of buddhism my repudiation of buddhism on the way out right new philosophy new perspective okay and i'm not going to say it's easy it was terribly terribly difficult terribly challenging transition in my life in every way including philosophically including in terms of self-image identity body image whatever you want to say where you have to think if i'm not a buddhist anymore who am i and what am i right and i had to come up with some new answers straight out of that experience i threw myself into the study of cree and ojibwe first nations languages languages politics history of canada's indigenous people again something powerfully linked to politics humanitarian work this sense of mission and purpose of making the world a different place right all of these things you know it's like veganism in that way right i mean if cambodia is just a place on the map to you that's one thing if if laos is just a place on the map that's one thing you when you go to laos and you see the bomb craters and you see the cripples the people have been crippled by unexploded ordnance and bombs dropped out of the sky by the americans that are still going off to this day believe it or not when you go there and you see the poverty and you get involved in farming and agriculture and the history and the politics they unfold and you see before your eyes the attempts at elections and making a transition to democracy and you see that transition fail and i worked inside one of the newspapers and you see the way the communist party censorship the government censorship and how much freedom of speech there is the limited amount when you see all that and feel it and you're involved in it and you see the fate of millions of people hanging in the balance of these political factors sure okay you know it's not a book on a bookshelf anymore it's not a place on a map and it's not just a language in a dictionary it's not just a task right this takes on all kinds of meaning in your life in the same way that veganism makes the transition from being a diet and being just a set of dry facts about ecology or even being a conceptual awareness of animal suffering to being something that's meaningful and present in your life every day and then you know what for me and john venus alike all of that comes to an end right veganism for him went from being meaningful to meaningless this whole thing with bodybuilding and preening and modeling and presenting herself as beautiful went from being something he was obviously proud of and reveled in right to being something he found repugnant something he rejected and now he's got to look in the mirror and say who am i what have i got left what am i going to become next he's got to take on a new direction find new meaning and develop a new identity okay and in that in that alone i feel i have something in common with john penis when people ask me now if i still think of myself as a vegan activist you know what i say no at what point did paul mccartney stop describing himself as a member of the beatles i'm not a member of any band right and the band i used to play with the band i used to be a member of it doesn't even exist anymore i'm not a part of the vegan movement i'm not a leader i'm not a follower i'm not even a member of a club or salon or coterie or circle of i'm not part of a group of vegans comprised of five people or ten people so no i'm not a vegan activist i'm a vegan and i come on youtube and talk about veganism because veganism is a part of my life you know what sometimes i come on youtube and i still talk about buddhism the extent to which buddhism is a part of my sometimes i come on youtube and i talk about laos or cambodia or that kind of research okay but there is also a sense in which all of that is dead to me i have to look ahead to a further horizon to something genuinely unknown and i have to decide and i have to find out what kind of person i'm really going to be and i've been living my whole life as a people pleaser and as a person who um is trying to change the way that i speak or filter what i'm thinking about or what i'm speaking about when all of a sudden you're faced with a massive amount of pushback and hatred um as a people-pleaser then you start questioning a lot of things about your own reality right and even though i thought i overcame you know um my attachments to people's opinions it was clear that i didn't because um i felt horrible knowing that you know people who you know i you know looked up to or who i am were friends with were just publicly um you know slamming me in these things right so it was challenging but it got me to really do the inner work i had to realize that the most important thing is to be my authentic self and that i wasn't being that the clip i'm about to play for you is two minutes long it may feel like the longest two minutes of your life but stick with me here get commentary and analysis afterwards i would like to draw your attention to the fact that her reasons for getting involved with veganism her reasons for becoming vegan are entirely detached and rational whereas her reasons for leaving veganism her reasons for becoming an ex-vegan have to do with desire and it's a sense of desire that she asserts as biologically innately real i'll just dive straight into things i became a vegan yeah like four years ago and i was driven by environmental sustainability and climate change reasons for becoming a vegan at that time i was getting my undergraduate degree in environmental science and anthropology so it was like emergence of like society and humans with the environment and like the main focal point where i researched was on food systems and i concluded that the current food system and where we get our food and how food is produced and the animal abuse associated with that is unacceptable and i transitioned into a vegan lifestyle so i was like trying everything that i possibly could to avoid switching out of veganism and got my blood work done and you would think that vegans are normally deprived and stuff but i wasn't my iron was on point because i eat so many greens and yeah my hemoglobin was good my b12 obviously was on point like everything was good the only issue was the low blood pressure and finally it was like okay i can't keep living with like coming in and out of like consciousness in a way and blacking out multiple times in the day so i introduced seafood not seafood uh fish and eggs i just kind of like lived with it and had been living with it until about one month ago when i was at the grocery store with my partner and we both like the chicken both kind of cut our eyes and he was like wouldn't chicken be so good i was like yeah i have so many mental barriers to eating animal-based foods and i have so much guilt around introducing animal foods back into my diet but then it was just when the chicken option came up it was like i i really want this it was something like physiological but the chicken was amazing it was so good i was like what is this heaven and since then i have been having chicken about once every four to five days and my low blood pressure symptoms have virtually vanished disclaimer i am not a christian i am in fact a very vocal atheist i identify as a nihilist however i can recognize that christian culture and christian civilization provided people with a certain kind of education and awareness in a certain finite set of themes that is now bit by bit disappearing from our society so some things that were not just familiar but overly familiar just a generation and a half ago are now becoming obscure and hard to understand for a new generation growing up in a much less christian society one example of that is the mentality of desiring the forbidden fruit objectively a woman is no more attractive no more appealing no more sexy when she's dressed up as a nun than when she's wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt and yet it was an incredibly widely attested factor in our culture in our society in the west that up until quite recently there were all of these men with an erotic fascination having sex with a woman dressed up as a nun now why would that be they were raised in schools very often including high school where there were nuns who were their teachers and superiors who often were mean to them who often beat them with a ruler who spanked them with a ruler they grew up with these kind of oppressive figures dressed up as none females who were by definition both forbidding and forbidden they were a symbol of authority they were a symbol of something unattainable and of course they might imagine that underneath the nun's uniform these women were tremendously beautiful or attractive there were a lot of people who grew up with that sexual fascination and then it was exhibited in a kind of lifelong fetish so this is something western civilization was not just aware of but i think everyone was quite bored of hearing about i knew a man who actually uh was sentenced to prison briefly he was actually sentenced to prison because he was a peace protester he was an anti-military protester put it that way but he was he was sentenced to prison briefly as a young man and he had a lifelong fascination uh with having sex with women in police uniform and he once had sex with a woman who was a judge in her judge's uniform the judge's robes um it's not deep but it's real i mean this kind of fetishism this kind of response to forbidden fruit again it's something that just a generation ago people would have been so familiar with they would have found it boring to discuss and yet today i think it's interesting that we see this phenomenon of you know anti-veganism playing out it seems to me all the players in the game including pro-vegan critics they really seem to be unaware of how powerful this type of desire is and how people um rationally or irrationally like i either either thinking it through rationally or without any such steps taken in the mind they will really assert that their own desires are in fact innate biological needs this is the most common thing in the world you know you want something but you'd rather believe that you need something right you actually have a very fetishistic and kinky reason why this woman dressed up as a nun is more attractive to you but you want to think it's something natural and necessary and innate and good because you don't want to question psychologically why it is you you perceive it this way why does you experience it this way right now in terms of objective scientific facts here uh women who actually choose to become nuns you know not not if you pay a stripper to dress up like a nun also common also common to pace trippers to dress them as police officers and so on all these other authority figures all right there is no objective sense in which a woman who is a nun is more attractive than any other woman in the same sense can we all just agree here objectively chicken does not taste good i'm vegan okay but i remember the taste of tasty chicken white chicken breast okay there's a bit of a greasy taste to it and then otherwise it's just salt and it's flavorless chicken has an almost neutral flavor it almost tastes like nothing aside from the salt and massive amounts of salt added to it and to some extent the grease or the oil if you're having chicken that's cooked in a method that adds a lot of a lot of oil and grace to it right we we know this we have there's really a sense in which you can even measure what does chicken taste like and why is it that in our culture and in all cultures all of these sauces and spices and oily batters have to be added to chicken to make it taste like anything at all all right this young woman just described to you vividly how she had this response to seeing chicken now she had this response to the flavor of chicken and she then makes the leaps of inference that this was a cure for her medical problems and it does sound like in her case she had legitimate medical problems but eating chicken is not the cure or eating chicken is not the best or the only cure if you have low blood pressure there must be a better way to deal with it than eating foods you know to be unhealthy but that can raise your blood pressure fried chicken is the cure for low blood blood pressure what a concept you should get a peer-reviewed paper on that this is really ridiculous right but i'm inviting you here to focus on and really think about the mentality of forbidden fruit what is it that made the chicken seem so fascinating what is it that made it taste so sweet it was precisely the sense of it being forbidden it was precisely as she said her own sense of guilt of challenging that guilt and overcoming those inhibitions millions of people are fascinated with that stuff and i gotta say i feel qualified to speak on it because i feel none of it to me there is absolutely nothing that makes for example a muslim woman wearing the head scarf and veil that makes her more appealing than a woman in blue jeans and a t-shirt nothing the fact that it's forbidden the fact that it's mysterious does nothing for me all right my life is about real relationships with real people on the basis of real self-knowledge and real mutual knowledge and real friendship and real common ground you know i want a woman i can relate to as an intellectual i want a woman all the things i want have nothing to do with this kind of fetish for the unknown fetish for the unattainable fetish for the forbidden and the forbidding i don't fetishize authority figures anyway i don't relate to any of it so i feel like i'm standing back with a sense of perfect attachment here and it's the strange thing that in 2020 within the sort of vegan demi-mod seems to me that i'm the only person pointing this out and saying wait these people these ex-vegans for the most part they joined veganism for these very rational very detached reasons that they can explain in so many words in a narrative form right and then they drop out of veganism for reasons that are wildly incoherent that have everything to do with passion over reason they have to do with desire overcoming their minds and if we go back to the first premise in the case of this woman oh oh so you think all of a sudden you think chicken tastes great when it has this forbidden quality when you know you're overcoming the years of guilt and your ideological commitment oh really so tell me something your entire university education in ecological science and anthropology is that worthless now all the facts and figures that you knew and shared with the world and cared about about ecological devastation about brush is that all meaningless now is that what desire means to you or is it the case that your fetish has to take a step further that you have to convince yourself that this fetish you're indulging in is a physiological necessity that meat is actually a medicine that cures this mysterious illness you made up in your own mind that you have you have to take those further steps precisely because of this gulf between what you rationally know what you're ethically committed to and frankly what turns you on so make sure you give this video a like and make sure that you subscribe to my channel i would be very grateful thank you for tuning in thank you thank you thank you thank you uh i'll see you guys next time i got a simple straightforward and fundamental question from the audience and it's a question i have not seen or heard answered already on the internet so let's tackle it in a relatively short video here i was asked vegan to vegan honestly sincerely when these people go back to eating me these people having been vegan for many years having been committed to the vegan cause morally ethically ecologically when they go back to eating meat so many of them experience these transformative effects whether that's in their sex drive in their sense of physical strength and vitality whether it is psychological or physiological we now have a pretty large sample size we have a significant amount of anecdotal evidence of people feeling that it's a revelation and a transformation they feel tremendously energized they feel some kind of effect when after being committed to veganism they go back to being they go back to being carnivores whatever you want to say why is this this is in one of the most heavily observed heavily discussed heavily researched areas of social anthropology okay it's because they're engaging in boundary pushing behavior it's because they're engaging in taboo violating behavior now not everybody is like this i myself am completely alien to this experience of human nature but if you just start reading the autobiographies of historical figures it doesn't really matter if they're like politicians or actors or actresses you will see there is an incredibly common pattern in human psychology which was like when they were growing up as teenagers um they tried to have sex with their boyfriend or girlfriend in the backseat of a car and the whole time they'd be terrified that their parents would find them or their older brother would find them that they'd be discovered they'd be caught and then they remained fascinated and excited by this for the rest of their lives they became a fetishist for having sex in the backseat of a car and it just it just stays with them um there are white people who grow up with a racist family in the american south and their whole life they have this fascination with being a white person having sex with black people because it was taboo because it was forbidden because they're crossing a line because they're engaging in boundary pushing behavior there is a very clear psychological dimension to someone who adhered to and believed in and promoted a vegan diet someone who either believed this believed in this as a form of self-abnegation like they may have thought of it as a kind of monastic vow they may have thought of it in terms of personal purity they may have thought of it in terms of a moral mission to change the world like an externalized mission where it's not about their self-improvement but about improving the world they may have thought about of it in terms of a humble service to help animals the suffering of animals however it was they thought of it it is ultimately a self-evident kink fetish boundary pushing moral precept violating behavior that they get a thrill out of when they then return to eating meat and the psychological dimension this i think is transparent and it's demonstrable because all of these people can remember what it was like eating meat when they were just a kid growing up with their parents before they'd adopted veganism and it didn't have any of these effects on them like oh you know with some of these examples they've now become like memes on the internet everyone's being fun oh i ate fish for the first time in 10 years and wow i had this you know amazing transformation in my libido my sex drive it often is the sex drive do you notice that it off both male and female we've had several reports of this right well again i'm sorry this is one of the most studied most talked about things in anthropology talk about kind of you know boundary pushing and you know liminal zones of morality and so on so liminal meaning on the limits of morality um i remember i even once read a sorry it can be any it can be any boundary that people are raised to not cross or in this case what's maybe a little bit more interesting is that it was a boundary that they probably adopted maybe as teenagers but maybe in their early 20s it probably wasn't a moral precept they grew up with or that was enforced on them by outside authorities so they believed in themselves but maybe that makes frankly the erotic effect of transgressing that boundary all the more thrilling and all the more satisfying so look i'll use two examples from opposite sides of the of the globe i knew a guy who was a uh boxer and i forget how far he took i think he was in the training camps to be on the olympic team for boxing like you know like he was somewhat serious he was not a world champion boxer but he was training seriously for boxing at whatever level and you know he knew i was vegan we talked about vegan ethics and he described to me the scene of him going um to a farm wasn't even really a slaughterhouse with a group of other you know young men training to be boxers to drink the blood of a of a horse like a horse that was to be killed that day you can imagine this is like a [ __ ] stone age ritual i mean this is you know let's take it back to experiences people had 10 000 years ago you know and you know everyone doing this ritual they went this was legal by the way i mean the same thing people eat meat this wasn't illegal this was in france this is a white van in france this is a western civilization and you know they went and they had they each had a cup and you can imagine they're young guys who are in some ways nervous and in some ways maybe cocky and proud and you know they stand around and you watch this animal die and of course if you hadn't used your imagination the blood comes out of the animal hot and thick and of course it's disgusting if you let yourself be disgusted but they want to seem tough they want to don't want to vomit it's like probably if you can remember being a teenager and drinking vodka or drinking whiskey for the first time and it doesn't taste good you're not used to it or something you can imagine there were a lot of psychological moments to this and this guy told me absolutely like with conviction that he got some kind of boost in his strength and energy out of drinking you know horse blood and as i recall he did it again i don't know how many times but he on another occasion it was just uh it was just cow blood it was a slaughterhouse for for cows and going getting the hot blood so him and him and this group of athletes it was something not unknown within the subculture of of boxers now you can do a chemical analysis and say okay what is actually in horse blood fat salt water i mean there's there are some things you can be reacting to there there's some level of chemical effect but primarily just this whole scenario the whole setup it's obvious what kind of effect that's going to happen to you and it's going to have a lot of the quality frankly of some kind of dark satanic ritual there's gonna be a sense of fear fear of death seeing blood seeing this animal that the smell if you guys as vegan activists have been animal slaughterhouses you know there's the smell of the animals they stink already but you know there's the smell of death in the air it's it's probably that alone that even if you don't feel afraid consciously you're probably reacting to that and feeling keyed up and so on and then you drink this hot salty beverage um and you know i read another account i mentioned in another video briefly of a young man who was fighting in the civil war in northern myanmar and he went out and in very bizarre circumstances he was rescued basically by a tribe of local uh local people still living in in tribal conditions whatever you want to say local people living in very simple traditional conditions and to help him and the other the other guys with him uh they they strung up a goat and slit its throat and offered him hot goat blood and i mean he was somewhat starving at the time you know he didn't describe it positively he was he felt really disgusted by it he didn't want to shame the people who did this ritual form because they were also trying to help him back from you know he was to some extent dehydrated and starving and um you know he didn't want to insult his host kind of thing but he described how revolting it was and then he felt kind of dizzy and weird and awful after doing this no uh if you just drink salt water if you drink salt water from the ocean you can feel pretty weird so i also don't know if just the salt content is part of the part of the psychoactive effect of of drinking up a significant quantity of blood out of now okay so yeah there are exactly two dimensions to this story on the one hand there's a kind of physiological medical nutritional reality of what's in the blood you're drinking or the meat you're eating that's that's not that complex that's a pretty short shallow story like guess what if you eat eggs you get a ton of fat and a ton of cholesterol and not much else there's not a lot of food value in eggs you know if you suddenly start eating red meat you get a ton of salt a ton of protein ton of fat cholesterol and other stuff that's bad for you you know it's gonna have some effect on you but having a vegan protein shake you know i i feel a little bit of a boost after drinking a vegan protein because i'm getting some getting some nutrients if you just drink something that's full of sugar you can get a boost from the sugar and caffeine and so on that side is is pretty shallow and pretty straightforward but um you know here on youtube most people really play it cool i think you're kind of underestimating how much veganism meant to these same people and look i use the same verbs in a row you can call them fake vegans you can call them insincere you can say they were never really activists who never really cared about ecology or whatever all that's doubtless true all that and more they're probably terrible people but for a lot of these people veganism was one of the most meaningful things they had in their life give a great example uh charles marlowe complete idiot complete scumbag former heroin addict junkie by his own admission by the way i'm not making any allegations here um i can remember him talking to me and him saying to me in a very honest down-to-earth way that when he found veganism he was really searching for something he wanted something more meaningful in his life and you know not conventional religion he wanted a sense of meaning sense of direction a sense of moral purpose and veganism gave him those things and veganism gives you a self-discipline for many people a sense of personal purity again but even just that one word mission a sense of mission sense of direction it means a lot to people and then by that same token violating that pushing the boundaries going beyond it wallowing in your own field violating the the laws of purity that you're taking by yourself that is gonna have for a lot of people some kind of some kind of psychologically thrilling element so look guys i've mentioned on this channel before relatively long time ago i do not experience jealousy i do not experience any kind of thrill in violating uh boundaries for the sake of finally any boundaries doesn't turn me on it really it does nothing for me i mean all this you know you know there are people who grow up in the catholic church and then they have fantasies about like you know having sex on the horrible wooden benches in the church and it's precisely because it's forbidden melissa had a friend a female friend and she was tempted by this guy and she admitted she said to melissa but you know what the worst thing is she said i know i only want this guy because it's forbidden because i'm not allowed to be with him she met him in like a workplace scenario there were various reasons why it was forbidden love oh you know what i remember i remember okay now now she's got problems now she's that that's that's something you never said there are people for whom the forbidden and violating the law is something very exciting there must be some people who just who just grow out of it um you know you tell me what is sexy about a pair of handcuffs really think about that i mean the pathetic thing about human nature is that a huge percentage of us i don't know if it's 30 40 look at a pair of handcuffs and get turned on because people people want to be restrained people want to be beaten and humiliated and what the and i know when i was a teenager when i didn't even know what up when i was like 17 there were fully grown women who wanted me to do this stuff to them there were there were girls my age too there were women around who thought oh wow this is some kind of tall self-confident guy you know in terms of what people get turned on by and what they get fascinated by um you know the human mind creates these divisions and boundaries creates the division between black and white go between you know christian and jew between you know whatever you want to say you know jew and gentile i had one ex-girlfriend and she grew up christian enough that it was it was a little bit thrilling for it was a little bit kinky just my jewishness you know i don't think of myself that way i don't think of myself as exotic from her perspective you know that was you know that was exotic that was thrilling we even had there was some first-person testimony from a privileged vegan another vegan youtuber here and she talked about how before she became vegan just because she grew up with the idea that like deep fried chicken wings were for men that it was thrilling for her to wear a leather jacket any greasy unhealthy chicken wings out of a bucket she was doing something that like a blue-collar man would do and not something a refined erudite you know a woman would do like gender roles and social class the sense of violating abound she felt thrilled by this she felt proud and powerful by this so you know um people want to violate boundaries and and they experience it i think that is the purest word as a thrill um it's not taking the peach out of the orchard it's knowing that you're climbing over a fence and stealing a peach and that you have to scramble to get back over the fence as quickly as possible and there's an attack dog coming from you that is the bleak and brutal reality of what human beings want and yet most people are too lazy and too self-indulgent and they don't actually get out of their chair and take real risks in the real world they don't do some of the crazy things i do they don't go to do humanitarian work on the border between laos and myanmar and have people threatening to kill them they don't have these kinds of they don't take meaningful risks in their life they want to take meaningless risks so i guess you can say um in a phrase this is the psychology of uh of the roller coaster ride but most people before they get into the roller coaster they put on their safety belts [Music] maybe we can we can practice