Vegan Mind Tricks: doing the impossible by possible means.

ladies and gentlemen the fact that something is stupid the fact that something is shallow doesn't mean that it's not important especially in the sphere of politics political judgments involve decisions we make about more and less decisions of relative priority relative privation relative good and relative evil do you have a whole lot of respect for al gore when al gore dies we all got to die someday when there's a funeral for al gore are you going to hug your grandchildren to you tightly and say he was such a good man he was such an inspiration to me al gore in 2022 is vegan since about 2013 he has publicly identified as vegan is al gore an inspiration to you do you look up to al gore you think about the history of afghanistan when you think about the fate of afghanistan where today women are again being forcibly wrapped from head to toe in the most restrictive of uh islamic garb where women have lost the right to show their faces in public or even to show a tiny window onto their their eyes when you think about the thousand-year history of afghanistan 500 years leading up to 2001 500 years after 2001. the difference between al gore and george w bush really matters now i wasn't born yesterday i know some bad things about al gore you don't you don't have to look under any rocks okay if you just if you just get interested in the politics of that era you're gonna learn some bad things about al gore if al gore were a personal friend of mine i'd probably say that he was a bad man i probably i just probably i might be friends with him anyway he could be friends with someone you think is kind of morally a bad person or what have you um there are probably numerous ways in which ethically i could find fault with al gore when you compare al gore to george w bush and i remember vividly the cynicism of the time i remember newspaper articles boldly and self-righteously proclaiming that there was no point in voting because there was no meaningful difference between the two options you were being presented with you know al gore versus uh george w bush really really there was a lot of that i think that was the uh you know the spirit of kurt cobain still kind of haunting the world what was his genre of music called i forgot grunge yeah the spirit of seattle that hyper resignation hyper fatuous hyper passive you know uh seattle rock view of the world is still still kind of dominant in pop culture this sense of resignation to one's fate that there was no difference you could make in the world okay looking back now and knowing the moral character of george w bush the intellectual caliber of george w bush in contrast to al gore al gore who has published numerous books on ecology do i think his books on ecology are good do i think they're brilliant do i think they're inspirational do i even think they're morally or ethically wonderful no again when al gore dies i'm not going to hug my daughter to me and say oh you don't know you don't know what a wonderful man alcorn was i'll get morgan perhaps but then it'll be my grandchildren who knows how long a life they'll have what have you um this is not my relationship to al gore but if you think we can't judge if you think we shouldn't judge if you think who am i to judge these distinctions of of better or worse all right the united states of america would be a dramatically different country today if we had endured eight years under the management of al gore instead of george w bush and it is impossible to exaggerate what a different place central asia would be with afghanistan at its center if al gore had been president of the united states in 2001. all right so it's a high-stakes game we're playing in politics when we make decisions as an isolated individual and make a decision on the scale of a society of millions and it's a high-stakes game where you place your bet very often based on these quite fine judgments and distinctions right like judgments like what kind of person is alcor and i want to say this up front you know the fact that something is impossible doesn't mean it's not worth doing not in politics baby [Laughter] and we have to think really deeply about the way in which our preconceptions about what's possible and what's impossible shape our short-term decisions and our commitment to long-term plans and outcomes it's very easy when you're a little child to get frustrated at the piano bench and say this is impossible i can't learn to play piano you know little kids react away to all kinds of challenges um it's impossible it's impossible i can't do it it's impossible you know and let's let's be real here i mean i'm jumping ahead a little bit in terms of the topics i want to cover here i understand the frustration people have with a transition to a vegan diet as an individual i understand the transition people have above me i understand their frustration with a a parallel transition to adopting the politics of veganism the pursuit of a vegan planet whatever you want to imagine this uh the pursuit of a world without slaughterhouses whatever whatever you want to define the end goal of veganism i understand both on the immediate scale it's impossible to buy a bean burrito in canada that's not going to give you 12 hours of indigestion like for real i'm vegan i sympathize with people who say that they find it impossible to get enough protein i've lived in different countries all around the world i know there's the standard thing where vegans just scoff and dismiss complaints about how difficult it is to get enough protein i don't i neither scoff nor dismiss it i have a huge tub in the background there of a vegan protein supplement i eat massive amounts of protein every day but i take it i take it as a protein powder to supplement the rest of my diet you know um [Music] in that childish sense it's very easy to sort of hit a wall come to the limit of your own of your own patience and feel that this is impossible you know sometimes you got to sit down with a little kid and say in the whole world how many people have learned to play the piano how many people this year on planet earth have learned to play the piano in just in just one year you can do it and i know you can over one million people per year learn to play the piano it's not everybody and you know if you even think of it as a percentage of the population like how many people as a percentage population are proficient in playing the piano right now you know whether or not she learned it as a child or stuff but who today can sit up and do ragtime on the piano and sit up and really belt out a piano roll okay i don't know if it's five percent i don't know if it's one percent i mean it's it's a small it's not the majority of people if you have a democracy it's not like more than 50 percent of people have mastered the piano when currently have that skill right okay but that's very different from a judgment about what's possible and what's impossible if it's possible for one percent right it's possible for you you can do it the question is will you right 100 of people can learn to play the piano but will you are you going to be part of the one percent that actually does it right you talk about languages this way learning chinese you think it's impossible it's hard learning chinese is hard okay how many people learn chinese every year you know of course of course you can will you are you gonna be one people how about cree how about ojibwe how about den a how about the language of the inuit inducted to whatever you want to call you can anyone can like in principle there is no language in the world that a child cannot learn children can learn these languages children can learn to play the piano it seems so hard but millions of children can do it and millions of children do of course you can do it how hard is it to adopt a vegan diet compared to learning to play the piano how hard is it to master the discipline of living with a vegan diet whether you use a you know a box of protein powder like i have in the background there or not because you don't have to you can learn how to boil beans properly there are certain skills yeah melissa just ate some uh some lima beans and so on whatever you don't have to but like let's calibrate first of all this notion of the impossible if you're saying this is impossible right everything we're talking about in that human individual scale i know it's hard getting along with your parents when you're vegan is hard getting along maybe with your boyfriend or girlfriend getting along with your roommates oh getting along in the army you know you can have a vegan diet and be there i get it okay learning the piano while you're in the army is hard learning the piano and not making your roommates angry at you because you're playing the piano all night and keeping them awake or interrupting they want to read a book and you're playing the piano all the time you know you're practicing the piano that's hard too right learning chinese is it is so much harder to learn the piano it is so much harder to learn chinese it's so much harder to learn an indigenous language on the edge of extinction whether that's an indigenous language in north america or myanmar or what have you an indigenous minority language that's hard okay the life of a vegan as an isolated individual all right on this scale before if we're calibrating the claim it's not impossible right and relative to these other things it's not hard at all and yet what we deal with all the time in discussing veganism our large gallerism scale has everything to do with this conception of the possible and the impossible and really what we're talking about is the thinkable and the unthinkable you have to take people hand by hand hand in hand you have to hold people by the hand and lead them through a kind of philosophical process of discovery whereby the unthinkable becomes thinkable now on the small scale i've already kind of described that to you this is just two people talking so i mean by a small scale right the way in which a parent maybe has to sit with a child and say look well you know your cousin steve he thought it was impossible to learn the piano it was really hard for him at first and look at him now you know do you remember last christmas he came over and he played the piano and everyone sang with him he'd only been studying for three years and he could play the piano that well after three years like i want you to visualize how easy this is going to be for you once you've got the knack down i want you to realize what's on the horizon what's attainable what can be accomplished with a certain amount of work and guys look i'm i'm not glorifying learning the piano they it may be a complete waste your time to learn the piano it's just an example of how something that seems insuperable impossible to overcome right you can talk through with a child the stages they're gonna go through it's gonna be hard and then it's gonna become easy in this way and then this this is what it's going to be like to gain proficiency in something and that child me from what as a child what do you have to compare it to what other process that they've been through where they've mastered something that seemed impossible and now they can do it thoughtlessly effortlessly you know they can so easily just glance at sheet music and translate it into a live performance right that's level of proficiency you get to with piano with this moment to moment ability now learning a language is a lot like that like that too in some ways and you know certainly with a language as hard as chinese it's useful to talk through with someone realistically here's what you should expect over the next five years and over the next 10 years because it's so hard to get up to a real level of proficiency in chinese that's such a long struggle with with an easier language like italian or something or spanish it's probably a very different conversation but you know yes you know that's ridiculous yes you can learn spanish you can learn cree you can learn ojibwe you can you can learn indigenous language in mexico et cetera down south you can you can't now will you you know this becomes totally about whether or not you care enough to do it but you don't want to think of yourself as an uncaring person you don't want to think of yourself as an evil person so instead of posing the problem in terms of your own indolence in terms of your own lack of feeling your own lack of passion if you like right isn't it convenient to instead talk about what's possible and impossible everything i've just said we can repeat with very few alterations when we're talking about the political process of what can be attained politically for veganism and what can be attained politically for ecology what can be attained politically for human health you know for me veganism is not primarily about human health but it's a factor folks partly veganism is a challenge like convincing people to quit smoking cigarettes like convincing people to quit smoking marijuana like convincing people to quit alcohol there is a human quality of life uh public health aspect to it although for me this is mostly about ethics ecology so on and so forth and what kind of voice you want to be you know i realize that this seems impossible to you it's not impossible it's unthinkable and i can take you know holding hands and we can go through this philosophically and something unthinkable can become thinkable you can learn to understand it you know in my terms and again i'm not saying it's going to be easy but i mean i think playing the piano is a good a good example because you can you can visualize it so clearly the level of skill what people are doing with their hands and what people are doing with their brain if you sit them down in front of a piece of sheet music they've never seen before and they've got to do a reading people say you know they just read it interpret it and then transform that into music people get so good at it they can do it when they're drunk you see people who are blind drunk sit down at a piano and belt out this amazing music i'm i'm not endorsing either one i'm not saying you should devote your life to the piano but like the level of skill you accomplish and then take for granted okay this is so much more difficult and so much so much more difficult to really visualize than what's involved with veganism personally or politically right and yet that all of us take for granted the impossible becomes possible that's that's we're dealing with in this video oh guys i do see your i do see your comments as they come in if you have something intelligent to say you can make a comment if you want to hit the thumbs up button it will help more people join the conversation now because they'll discover the live stream what's happening and it will help people to discover the video later so i do appreciate it if you take the time to thumbs up frankly on any of my videos by the way if you know anyone who would benefit from this discussion a lot of you do a lot of you are vegans i know who you are watching this video a lot of you are vegans who are connected to other vegans on facebook through facebook groups your vegans who are connected to their vegans on reddit or what have you if it's going to be useful to people share it share the link you probably have friends on instagram who think about and struggle with some of these same issues again i'm about to disclose more explicitly what i'm talking about i don't tell you to share the link with people who don't don't want to hear it i'm not saying to advertise this to the public there is a small segment of the public who will really benefit from joining in this conversation either now or in retrospect you know either now we're watching the video uh five years ago and again guys i'm not a reckless egomaniac about this but the discussion we've already had in the last 18 minutes you will neither find this quality of conversation or this quantity of conversation on any other youtube channel or any other podcast okay there's nobody else in the internet in the english language at least doing it like this and i doubt there's anyone in chinese okay so i got um i got a message it's an instagram message and a lot of you will hear things like this all the time right i don't hear it very often because people find me intimidating which is good so yeah you guys can also comment if you've heard this kind of thing from your own friends or relatives you may have heard it from people within the vegan movement who are now ex-vegan people who were vegan activists in the past and quit so i'm just going to quote this verbatim to you all right quote as for being vegan i understand the health benefits i have been vegetarian and vegan while i worked at whole foods all the way through my college years but the conundrum i constantly ran into was this most vegans so there are some errors here most vegans focus is to refuse the use of animal products but i met very few who realized how nearly impossible it would be do they not eat fruit too because the skin is shined with the shellac of dead insects do they build their own houses because the wood caulk used in linoleum uses some parts of horse glue do they not drink water out of the sink because part because in some states some of the drinking water uh uses filtration filtration systems with animal bone shards to purify and clean the water so i just mentioned the use of uh it's bone char is really what it means that is very rare for water but for wine like for red wine very common for the production of sugar very common for the production of beer beer they use in glass i'm sorry i'm confusing that there but definitely wine and sugar this use of filtration uh through through bone remains is common obviously i'm not saying nowhere on earth uses it for water but that's that's a relatively great example but anyway it's it's a in its way it's uh it's a legitimate example so um already sir that's not the end of his his uh comment to me now you know there is a difference between reasoning on a chalkboard and reasoning in the real world there's a very false kind of fatalism that comes out of examples like the one i just mentioned i was alive at that time i was paying attention to politics so this would have been the election during the year 2000 maybe already in the year 1999 american elections kind of go on forever so 1999 and 2000 there were all these people saying it was pointless the decision they were being presented with whether they should elect george w bush or al gore uh and you can imagine well the whole system is corrupt and that there was really no ethical difference between these two men there's no particular policy that one represents the other doesn't uh represent or something that really things would be more or less the same on planet earth or more or less the same within the united states of america if they elected al gore instead of uh electing george w bush okay so now look my point is regarded in isolation any one of those points i'll give you a legitimate or legitimate enough a reason for for saying this um it was true hilariously at the time that the promises being made about campaign finance reform were very similar between george w bush and alcor the reason i say it's hilarious is none of those reforms ever happened so both al gore and george w bush they were not offering exactly the same uh set of reforms but they were both they were both recognizing that the election system they had was corrupt that it needed to be improved and specifically the way money is given to politicians the way fundraising happens the way money is collected that that needed to be reformed and that was debated quite a large percentage of the time that al gore spent debating george w bush was on campaign finance forum and this is probably not the only example you could go through a whole list of policies and prerogatives and priorities where the two men might have seemed similar they said similar things are made made similar promises so my point is not that this is a totally counterfactual totally without factual basis to say you know you could also do an analysis of the type of education these two men had or you could list uh they both breathe air and drink water what are all the things george w bush and al gore have in common or the way in which they're indistinguishable from each other as political candidates and then express your exasperation your indifference to making the decision between them now if your claim is here i mean this is several steps further into absurdity right okay if your claim is both people who eat meat and vegans live in wooden structures and that wood contains some glue some adhesive that contains some gelatin from horse hooves okay so you're saying there are four there's no important difference between george w bush and alcohol like therefore there's no difference between slitting the throat of a cow to begin with breeding a cow raising it in captivity having it live its whole life on a concrete floor and a metal cage in a shed and they're under a steel sky right having this animal tormented from the day it's born of the day it dies living this this life so utterly different from what it would experience in in the wild in nature right ensuring the perpetual misery of this animal in captivity and then slitting its throat cutting into pieces and eating it so if you have two households right one of which is vegan and one of which eats meat three meals a day every day okay you think or you're claiming or you're asserting that there's no important difference between them there's no political difference between them because both of these households have wood that contains glue made from the the hooves of a horse this is the kind of resignationism you're you're engaged in right now i've talked about this under many different headings you know this this kind of misconception about politics part of what we're dealing with here is the gap between chalkboard reasoning and real world political reasoning um i have seen by the way both democrat and republican politicians right now both members of the democrat party and proven uh politicians arguing that there's no ethical difference between the government of vladimir putin and russia and the government in ukraine now whether they're doing this cynically or sincerely it really is a parallel sort of thing they're able to say for example they're able to say well look at the lack of freedom of the press in ukraine look at the corrupt elections in ukraine they're able to point to different forms of political corruption things that are bad about ukraine and then they say well so you criticize vladimir putin for these things but you pretend that because ukraine is our ally so on and so forth that therefore they're a morally good pro-democracy government uh what have you you know i have never seen anyone audacious enough to present this argument about democracy and myanmar or democracy in hong kong right you know back when there were elections in myanmar they were flawed before they had some democracy now they have none some democracy is worth fighting for if some democracy is worth killing for some democracy is worth dying for and sorry democracy itself is a very good example of this the way this man who wrote to me is reasoning and it is stupid it is shallow but it's not trivial this is stupid and shallow but really important so i'm taking the time to deal with this that's why i'm making a video called vegan mind tricks about it this these are the kinds of deceptions and justifications people people live with he is saying in justifying his own decision to eat meat every day this is someone who used to be vegan claims he was vegan slash vegetarian throughout his college years so we assume that's about four years he got the knack down he learned how to boil beans or whatever he learned how to live he learned how to cope with the technical aspects of the diet he is saying that he thinks he is morally justified in killing animals paying other people to kill animals and eating meat every day because his definition of veganism written out on a chalkboard is impossible in the real world now it would be very easy to write a definition of democracy on a chalkboard that does not exist anywhere in the real world today it is certainly possible to write a definition of democracy on chalkboard that is impossible for the people of myanmar for the people of cambodia for the people of hong kong right like you could have a definition of democracy that's not completely unattainable on planet earth but it's just barely attainable in switzerland and denmark and when you really look at the reality of life in myanmar you think these people can't have democracy by this standard for these reasons you know could get into that why it would be unattainable in a certain place at a certain time um to give you a a proposal there are many ways to define democracy okay well one one idea of democracy is that everyone should have a say in government everyone should be able to participate everyone's opinion matters everyone is consulted everyone gets to vote for example in a referendum and there are no distinctions of rich and poor that your ability to participate your ability to have a voice a vote to influence the decision of government is not bought and paid for it's not because you're an aristocrat it's not because you're wealthy right that this is a kind of now this is not the only definition of democracy but that is one definition democracy i think if you did a poll a very large percentage of people would agree that that's a basic working definition of democracy you know okay does that exist in the real world anywhere today how many countries are even attempting to live up to that standard including countries i have some respect for does japan live up to the standard of democracy you know now again this we have many centuries of reflections and philosophizing about this in the european tradition especially italy frankly italy is really underrated for some bizarre reason in political science in the 21st century it's really underrated and ignored i mean i guess it was kind of overrated a thousand years ago you could say that you know it's gone out of style um but you know it is weird how little attention is now paid any period of italian history but you know part of the paradox of democracy already discussed in ancient greece and in ancient rome is that it kind of professes egalitarianism but it actually entails and practice a kind of elitism right who who is influential in in the athenian system of democracy in the pinnex all right people like me now again you could even say i'm prejudiced in favor of athenian democracy that reason a certain type of daring well-spoken man who will stand up and risk his life to give voice to his convictions because you were you were risking your life to take a political uh a position in in ancient athens um you could also be beaten and flogged and exiled there were different punishments for you know if you took this too lightly the democratic process but you know it was a certain type of character who had influence in athens and there was a almost all of the literature we have from ancient athens is complaining about this is a bad thing i don't know i don't know if we have a single extant document that says it was a good thing they're constantly complaining about these kind of charismatic figures who would stand up and in effect rule athens uh just by virtue of their wit and daring i'm emphasizing daring here for a reason if you get into more of the literature or if you start reading primary sources you will see what i mean um and you know alcibiades so hilariously alcabietis was not well spoken he had a speech impediment it was most sources something like a lisp but he actually had a great deal of difficulty speaking even privately one-on-one and when he stood up on stage she was not a gifted order or gifted gifted but he was daring it was a really daring character and he became one of the foremost most influential powerful people in in the politics of uh the greater greco-roman world as it then existed his adventures covered a lot of the map um so daring accounted for a great deal now i think it's fair to say there are other political systems where daring is not rewarded or instead it's a certain kind of dull conformist person who stays quiet and is obedient that's the kind of person who moves up the ranks a certain kind of bureaucrat a certain kind of yes man you know so these are these are differences but i'm just digressing on this all right even if you have this chalkboard approach to saying what is democracy here's our definition of democracy therefore it's impossible therefore it's unattainable all right that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for that doesn't mean it's not worth killing for it doesn't mean it's not worth dying for you know are you kidding me you know again i could go with many many examples here and this this argument which people really believe in again it's shallow it's stupid but it's incredibly important that like you know the fact that it may be impossible for you to have a 100 vegan diet by this by this definition therefore means there's no point in even trying for someone else to even try to have a 99 vegan diet or a 95 vegan diet people really live with these delusions but then when you scale it up that they feel the vegan movement is hopeless that veganism is a political cause and so on that's hopeless and pointless and fruitless it is a bizarre form of reasoning that people really truly live with um do you think that a world entirely without slavery is possible do you think a world with zero slavery in it is possible do you think a world entirely without racism is possible do you think we'll ever have a do you think we'll ever have a world where people just don't hate each other because of the color of their skin and other ethic you know like you know the fact that on a chalkboard and you can come up with with your definition what what like you know again how exactly define a world with zero racism or zero slavery you think there isn't an unbelievable difference between what the united states was in the year 1880 and 1980 think about those two days 1880 versus 19 people were still racist in the 1980s there was kind of the golden age of stand-up comedy on that stuff there were so many standard comedians who get up and the tension that existed within american society you know from the the legacy of slavery and racism was tremendous then i think there was a lot of comedy a lot of kind of hit hollywood movies a lot of rap music responses okay there is no comparison like you know you think there's no difference between electing george w bush and electing al gore god damn look back at the history of the last century whenever you're watching this video some people may be watching this 10 years from now or 50 years from now you cannot imagine how the whole world would be a different place today if al gore had been president united states al gore published books about ecology al gore became vegan is he a good vegan are they good books about ecology i think what he has to ecology is kind of stupid okay why don't you compare that to what george w bush says about ecology george w bush did not write books of money compared to the actual policy and so on george bush had in his hand like you know the point is even if you think al gore is a second-rate ecologist and a third-rate vegan even you have a critical view of him this difference this is the way politics works right these kinds of real world differences really matter they're not just worth voting for they're not worth debating about they're not just worth having this discussion right now on on youtube about please hit thumbs up please share the link please like and subscribe whatever you know like i i do think this discussion is really important for the people who are going to have it right this is actually worth killing people for this is what civil wars get fought over okay the french revolution very briefly for a few years destroyed the power of the catholic church in france all right did they accomplish a hundred percent atheism did they replace a society that was intensely religious i mean france immediately before the french revolution it was just as religious as italy or whatever you want to say you know they broke the power of the church yes with violence you know are you shocked to learn that the catholic church was not going to give up its ownership of land worth the equivalent of billions of dollars today incredibly valuable land incredibly valuable states the catholic church was not just going to give up political power and economic power let alone you know religious power in whatever nebulous sense the catholic church was not just going to embrace this new era of enlightenment people defending the catholic church were willing to fight and die for what they believed in well the people who believed in an atheist society were willing to fight and die also and one side killed more people than the other all right and guys i have no illusions about the brutality and violence of the french revolution there was also money involved okay they would go to a property and they would declare so there's both um both a carrot and a stick here there's some bait on the hook as well as the immediate threat of mounts and they'd say to these monks so you'd have an estate a stereotypical estate in france at this time there are monks who are making wine or they might be making brandy or some other hard liquor there's monks who run a distillery and they have a farm and the guys are all wearing the robes and living in celibacy what have you and the french the french revolution show up and say hey look here's the deal the dark ages are over we are going to literally force you to get married you have to stop living in celibacy you have to get a wife and we're going to do a bunch of things to help you transition into a better life in modern society and for some of those monks you gotta whether it's ten percent of the guys if it was some of the monks this doesn't sound so bad you're gonna have a new life in the new society and guess what we're taking away this land and we're dividing it into parcels and we're basically auctioning off i believe it was mostly rental contracts it wasn't permanent sale but they would they would the government raised a lot of money by selling or renting or leasing uh farmland that they took away from the church so again you can see there's an element of greed there's an element of looting this is you know it's now some percentage of the monks respond to this by saying they were going to go get a sword and a gun and go fight for jesus fight to prolong the dark ages right not not surprising some percentage of them joined royalist groups and ultra catholic groups one of them was called the sons of jehu as i recall and that's been misremembered as the sons of jesus but it wasn't the sons of jehu and obscure there were but there were ultra catholic and pro-monarchists of terrorist groups who fought to go back to the dark ages and so on and again there are a lot of there are bad intentions on all sides okay you know if you are going to sit there let's say you were alive at that time you're going to cross your arms and say well we can never have a 100 atheist society we can never have a society in which nobody worships anything in which nobody believes in anything you don't think there's a difference between having a society in which all education is provided by nuns and a society in which none of it is this is a serious issue at that time in france was how do you provide sexual education they had no ability to deal with um sexually transmitted diseases i mean you know stds they had no ability to deal with this medically the main way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases was education right reliant they didn't have condoms or the condoms they had were not effective in this way your ability to cope with this you know venereal disease we're going to say right it really led to your ability to deal with unwanted pregnancy like you can't do this and one of the huge stumbling blocks was well guess what the only people providing education are nuns and most of them either don't know anything about sex or they're uncomfortable talking about sex or both or they're part of this insane uh you know part of this insane cult that is very sex negative attitudes great great suggestion from uh william mcgeehan in the audience william writes quote the monks were happily mgtow and making great some percentage of the monks were happily were alcoholics living in celibacy that's true but i think you can imagine some of the monks thought hey this is a you know this is this is an opportunity you know some of them didn't want to be there some of them were from a poor family that had too many sons and we're told look you got to go join the monastery because we have no better we have no better career in life for you or whatever their situation was sure some of them would have embraced the opportunity and to get married and have a more normal life and some of them are willing to fight and die for the future of an illusion for the future of you know this this idea of cat of christendom left over from the dark ages to perpetuate that forever okay an atheist was worth fighting for then and it's worth fighting for now let's let's cast our minds back to the year 2001. can you a lifetime ago a lifetime cut tragically short a lifetime ago 2001 an atheist society in afghanistan a truly secular society is it possible or impossible i think it's still a tall order to talk about an atheist society in vermont to talk about an atheist society in denmark we're still today in france france is still a deeply religious country how about italy right now in 2022 still catholic church has too much power the pursuit of an atheist society if you could transform afghanistan so that it goes from its current level of religiosity to being as atheist as italy is today that would be an amazing accomplishment right relative differences differences of degree matter even more than differences of kind in politics we're never talking about a hundred percent or zero percent racism is never going to be zero percent tooth decay is never gonna be zero percent right poverty is never going to be zero percent all right when the united states made it illegal for a property developer for a landlord of any kind to distinguish between black and white applicants for owning a home renting an apartment that really mattered okay were people still racist yes do you segregated neighborhoods still exist in the united states america yes i mean you can just look at a map of uh the state of georgia or you know atlanta or something you can say oh yeah white people live here and black people live here okay but formerly in the recent past in america there were legally overt forms of racism that involved the banks and property developers and landlords and very literal ghettoization where black people didn't have the option to live in this neighborhood versus that neighborhood now if you have a society where everyone's free to live wherever they want to but people are still racist and live in separate neighborhoods it's still a problem it's a different problem right so you know yeah look i'm doing this because each and every one of you is going to have somebody you love in your life somebody you care about enough to hold their hand and talk through this series of philosophical and political realizations right i mean i've always detested i made videos with this about five years ago i've always detested this habit of mind encouraged by other youtubers of just saying that's a logical fallacy and then shutting down and dismissing the other person that's an appeal to futility fallacy you know that's that's a trolley car fallacy that's this they memorize these thought-terminating cliches all right no deal with the fallacy that's also part of politics we have to really deal with fallacious reasoning you know people in afghanistan are all cutting off part of their penis they can go to heaven after they die okay we have to deal with there's no point you're not going to win anything by just saying that's fallacious or something you have to really wade into human nature you have to get dirty you know you have to think the way they think you have to use sympathy as an analytical tool you have to understand why they see it this way you have to reason things through their way and then hold their hand and help them reason their way out of it and guys i don't recommend doing it all the time i uh i just said the beginning of this statement i said some of you like okay i think all of you there's somebody you love there's somebody you care about enough to do what i'm doing in this video now to really break it down and talk it through with them and there's there's an infinite number of people there are more than six billion people where you don't care enough to do that and you just have to look at them and say yup you don't get it you're never going to get it and it's not my job to you know lower myself to your level to reason it through with you in your way right um [Music] you know the appeal to nature fallacy is real it's a dominant mode of thinking in our time the appeal to futility fallacy is real it's a dominant mode of thinking our time the belief that jesus christ was a superpowered zombie who came back from the dead we who even can speak of this in terms of a fantasy it's just ludicrous it's just ridiculous there's so many claims built into the the new testament that are just wildly historically improbable within patreon i i drew attention to this recently there's a passage that refers to jewish pig farmers having thousands of pigs on the banks of the sea of galilee all right and the geography makes no sense it's very obvious that whoever wrote that passage of the new testament was not really familiar with did not understand the geography of israel [Music] jewish pig farmers did jewish people in that period of time farm pigs on the sea of galilee and you can go through the archaeological record by the way that's in archaeology that's very well preserved like if you have cattle farms you can have 2 000 years of bone fragments from all the cows that live cows that were slaughtered there and cows that were farmed there you know that's true all over europe any inhabited part of the world you can tell what people were farming do you think do you think there were thousands of pigs being formed by jews and stupid like how do you why do you think the text was written this way there were all these unbelievably obvious hints at what the new testament really is all right like this is way beyond a logical fallacy right this is the wildly irrational passionate reality of what human reasoning is and if you love someone if you care about someone as a unique human being you are gonna hold their hand and walk through the fire with them you're gonna actually go through this [ __ ] with them because of the possibility that they can be freed that they can think their way out of you know the the wildly irrational beliefs they've thought their way into and that they're now committed to to justifying and making excuses okay now look sorry the particular guy writing into me i'll read you more of of what he says in my my response to it you know um okay a good question from freda i'll respond to that one second if any of you have anything intelligent to say right in if you have nothing intelligent to say [Laughter] it's up to you to judge decide if you have something intelligent enough for me to interrupt what i'm saying or uh or respond to that way okay look i do not know why this guy became vegan during his university years right but i'm gonna say this he probably had good reasons right like i don't think if he was vegan for four years i don't think it's for no reason all right he said he had a job at whole foods and during those years he was vegan whether his reasons were ethical environmental all right and yet this unbelievably trivial excuse he's giving now is a good enough reason for him to eat meat right for him to kill and eat the bodies of animals every day you know again relying on the idea of the possible and the impossible the thinkable and the and the unthinkable right now you know okay we can sit here and harshly condemn his character and by all means go right ahead you and you you may be in that situation with your boss at work you know there may just be people you know in your life you may know ex-vegans and so many they have the oh well i was i had acne you know like they stopped being being because they had acne so as if nobody who eats meat gets acne it's just ridiculous but that was that's who they are you know like if you knew someone who literally owned slaves and you offered you the excuse that a world with zero slavery is unattainable and a 100 emancipated world is unattainable therefore they're just going to go on owning and exploiting slaves they're gonna literally have people in chains and whip them every day pardon me on that that excuse that chalkboard excuse this doesn't tell me anything about slavery it doesn't tell me anything about politics tell us tell something about you right tell me something about this person and you can never dismiss that just mention maybe you guys encounter this attitude maybe you don't but i think one of the most potent and influential forms of stupidity in our time is the attempt to disassociate politics from the unique individual and to instead think in terms of systems abstractions on a chalkboard but also social systems on a grand scale i see so much pessimism about transforming individual people tied to a reckless revolutionary optimism about changing the system right you know there are reasons for that that i think are ultimately rooted in our system of education it's how people are taught in school maybe to some extent also how their how they're taught in religion people say again and again that you can't transform individual people but you can change the system okay and they're wrong all right the system consists of people it consists of relationships between people it consists of rules and traditions that are transferred between people the constitution of the united states of america is like a napkin at a bar you were supposed to meet your friend there you sat down to have a drink and there's an empty glass of beer with a note written down on it from your friend saying you had to go away for five minutes and then you sit there and find out your friend just died in a traffic accident and is not coming back okay a constitution a written law is nothing more than a jotted down note communicating something from one human being to another it's a thought it's a sentiment it's a tradition all right yes and you don't get to talk back to that person you don't get to change their mind you just get to choose whether you're going to take this napkin the last thing ever written down by your friend they're gonna meet you at the bar and whether you're gonna worship it you're gonna fetishize it you can put it in a frame and hang it on your wall and make a big deal of it carry it around forever you know or if you're going to crumple it up and throw it away and start with a new napkin okay melissa and i both read recently a court decision that was frankly a brilliant court decision in the united states it was just highly intelligent highly inventive um i think i read it out loud to you look i read it and the most interesting parts i read out loud to melissa and it was the high court decision in the united states about pacman the video game and this judge was trying to interpret legal precedent about theater about the performance of a play in the theater and applying it to what was then the brand new technology of video games so he was looking at legal precedents and decisions by courts before where one playwright sues another playwright saying hey you ripped off my story like they came up with a detective story let's just say it's a detective story where it turns out the butler did it like that's the plot twist you know and say well you you didn't give me any money you didn't pay me you you wrote your own script and even though it's different in some ways it's fundamentally my plot that you you ripped off my idea for the story he had to interpret court precedents about the theater and apply them to pac-man the video game and decide the limits at what point is a video game so similar to pac-man that you can win a court case on the basis of that similarity right because and it was brilliant it was highly erudite highly intelligent like well-intentioned courts like i enjoyed i was really impressed i'm not it was not stupid it was not trivial all right but that's what the law is that's that's the system you know like the system you're talking about they are just decisions made by particular people at one point in time to cope with one short-term crisis after another you know the unit the constitution united states of america was a set of decisions completely intended to solve a short-term crisis the the single most of the same crisis was a currency crisis by the way um i've written a whole book about it but if you understand what was really going on and what they were trying to solve hmm why doesn't it say one word about policing or police brutality the american constitution why doesn't it say one word about marriage why doesn't it say one word about privacy why does this say anything about abortion why doesn't it say anything about relations between black people and white people which you know later a civil war was fought over there are all these issues of obvious overwhelming importance why doesn't it define or discuss what it means by property you know or liberty or anything else there are these huge gaps in what you know in a very basic sense a constitution ought to do or needs to why does it say so little about the relationship between religion and government you know it does say something it doesn't say nothing at all but sort of judicious in its silence why does it say so little even about the relationship between the federal government and the states the 13 colonies as they then were and then judges and legislators you know members of congress and so on they're left to piece together these little scraps information these little napkins left behind at the bar from our great deceased ancestors and try to make a coherent picture and apply it to the problems of today you know the authors of the constitution did they ever ever consider the ethics of extraordinary rendition of arresting a teenager in afghanistan on the suspicion that they're somehow connected to terrorism transporting them to germany and then keeping them in a prison in cuba in guantanamo bay for years possibly for decades you want to have a court case where you sit there with these little napkins these little notes these decisions made about irrelevant things and some of those decisions are stupid and some of them are evil like some of them are really take a look at uh high court precedence on slavery in the united states of america many of the judges as individual people were unspeakably evil people i really mean that you know they're not they're not all like that pac-man decision they're not all erudite people you can kind of appreciate how about genocide against the indigenous people and the decisions about that you get into some real evil just in the court precedence and how these things are interpreted and applied oh another one is eugenics eugenics in the united states of america though you give me nightmares reading those really it'll give you nightmares those those core presidents you know so and frankly eugenics in europe goes back to plato nation greece and ancient greece there's a lot of discussions you have ancient greece and sparta they could have they could have dealt with eugenics in writing the american constitution wasn't a new idea you know and then the role of government and the parents and the trump could have dealt with all these things you know none of it's there but you're talking about people interpreting these utterly irrelevant scraps of information decisions you know and even when they're brilliant they're spurious and often enough they're stupid or evil or combination of the two all right um i just can't believe that i'm a member of a generation that believes that it's easier to change the system than it is to change individual people people can change once you change enough people they will change the system transforming people individually in hundreds or in thousands that is what's possible that's the change we can make here and now all right systemic change in the absence of violence on an unspeakable scale no offense but for people in the audience today for you it is probably an unimaginable scale in the absence of violence and coercion of a nature you can't even imagine right changing the system is utterly impossible compared to changing individual people dozens of people hundreds of people thousands of people i could use tons of examples here but one of them is afghanistan okay you want to write a new constitution for afghanistan it could be the same as the one from the french revolution declare the rights of man declare that you know of a secular society whatever you want okay you've got to change people and it's going to it may start with a dozen it may start with 100 may start with a thousand right like obviously in a case like afghanistan you have this extreme challenge in the transition to a secular society even if you just take uh you know the laws that france has today you could you could just translate the entire legal code of france uh and then impose it on afghanistan the american army could have done that what do you think the results would be you know this is a problem for france too they would continue to have a taliban country right where taliban values and taliban religious ideas were simply being exercised in a french-style court of law with french-style police so on and so forth you know guarding it no people the human element is what you can change right you change the people and then people change the system now again with the significant caveat that if you want systemic change without changing the people first that involves violence i've already described to you here the violence of the french revolution in some detail with some particular example of the the type of violence involved okay all right if you wanted to immediately and overnight eliminate circumcision in afghanistan so that no more boys and no more girls were being circumcised afterward imagine the type of violence imagine the coercion just for that one issue that one aspect of the muslim faith right to to enforce that and do it immediately not over decades or centuries of cultural transformation and personal transformation okay you can you can't do it but like i'm really saying to you i i've studied some incredibly dark chapters of history i haven't been involved in that kind of balance myself but i can imagine the type of violence we're talking about here if if you do the reading or you get out and have the kind of experience you may start to imagine it also all right but coercive cultural transformation changing the system first and not individual people that's that's what you're talking about right and um look i've written a whole book about this the other question we have to get into profoundly is the extent to which that transformation will always be phony will always be pointless will always be counterproductive if it is merely coerced right now religion is easier to visualize this with than veganism but you know you have to do both the purpose of this video all right if you convert someone to islam through brute force through the sword you know and they are only as muslim as they have to be as a result of that coercion right you have a thoroughly phony nominal convert to islam who doesn't believe in the religion who doesn't respect the koran doesn't pray or only prays in a public forum where he's forced to go through the motions due to this kind of courage right and that that exists it exists today historically when islam was an empire rapidly expanding a huge percentage of people had just been conquered by a muslim army they'd understand okay just to survive they have to convert minimally and anomaly right well you can have the same with atheism right you can have a society where people are nominally atheist where for example a communist dictatorship is forcing them to pretend to be atheists right i know that's going to sound absurd to you guys but that happened with communists in china forcing people to eat meat there were many people in china who were vegetarian it's a traditional aspect of many religions in china frankly it's not especially buddhist buddhism taoism confucianism in general all the chinese folklore traditions regarded vegetarianism positively this may sound ridiculous to you but chinese communism with tremendous violence tried to force people to be secular force people to be atheist and that included forcing people who had been vegetarian to eat meat you know and i think you can imagine like you might be someone is insincerely compelled to be vegan and they're just barely as big as possible and it's a historical reality the jet people were forced to eat meat and they were maybe maybe only eating as much meat as possible so again i've written a whole book about this and it's only uh 100 pages long so i have two books coming up my other book is longer and deeper and i think more emotionally exhausting most i find my books emotionally exhausting other people find them uh entertaining and uplifting which is a good sign i get a lot of positive feedback but for anyway i find this i find this stuff somewhat emotionally exhausting to deal with uh maybe that's why i write the books and don't and don't read them but other people seem to find it positively motivating but i have one book called veganism future of an illusion only 100 pages and then this much longer book no more manifestos they both they both deal with this but i'm just saying on the level of one-to-one relationships just you and one person you love in your life one person you respect one person you care about and on the larger scale of a society of of millions you know i mean okay let's bring this all the way down let's make this really tangible and easy to imagine uh i'm ethnically jewish in case you hadn't guessed i'm an atheist i'm a nihilistic atheist i have met some orthodox jewish women who were very attractive i have i have and some of those women found me very attractive what if i had been seduced by one of these women and she says to me that she wants to proceed with a relationship she wants to get married but i'm going to have to be jewish enough to make the marriage work i'm gonna have to be jewish enough to get along with her parents and grandparents let's say aunts and uncles to participate in certain ceremonies maybe to memorize and recite certain phrases in hebrew you know like she knows genetically i have enough jewish ancestry to make it work but i'm gonna have to adopt the religion conversely what if one of these women falls in love with me i say look you're going to have to be atheist enough you're going to have to be nihilist enough to suit me you're going to have to be vegan enough to sue me right and maybe it's both right maybe of a marriage or each it's not as simple as saying one party imposes his will on the other or one woman imposes her will on the man maybe each of us is influencing the other in a complex tug of war right maybe you get into a marriage where simultaneously you are forcing the person to have secular atheist nihilistic attitudes maybe you're forcing them to be vegan but maybe reciprocally they're forcing you to participate in religious ceremonies or something right okay like now i've said about a lot of things but i see your i see your comments coming in that's great if you want to comment more please do if a couple more people hit the thumbs up button that'll be great have as many thumbs up as we have people in the audience um okay i've said in this video repeatedly that having an atheist world is worth fighting for and worth dying for was worth it during the french revolution still worth it today i've said it about many things like look a world without slavery is worth fighting for and worth dying for and don't tell me it's impossible like see it's kind of irrelevant to say you could never have a 100 emancipated world you can never have a world with zero slavery you never rule with zero religion you can have a world that's 100 enlightened or 100 rational well guess what 50 just fifty percent democracy is worth fighting for them for we were looking up the ratings uh yesterday of the day before yesterday uh there's this website that ranks how democratic different countries are and it's a bit ridiculous but some of them when you're at the low end the difference between nine percent democracy and 18 democracy that's worth fighting a dive board the difference between 18 democracy and 50 democracy look at real world examples obviously you can calibrate this or measure this in different ways the assignation of numbers is a bit arbitrary but nevertheless oh yeah uh yeah guys the difference between living in thailand and living in saudi arabia is worth fighting for with dying for okay so you let me say that but all right is it worth fighting for someone to be an atheist if it's going to be utterly phony and coercive right like if i know my own wife like she's just in love with me and she's pretending to be atheist and pretending to be secular just just to be atheist enough to make this marriage work right vice versa she loves me let's say my i married someone who's an orthodox jew and she knows in my heart i'm an atheist and i'm just going through the motions i'm just doing these ceremonies to satisfy her and her parents and grandparents i'm just jewish enough i'm just tolerating this me because she's really beautiful maybe because she's the sex is really good something really shallow like this hey let's add maybe she's rich let's say she's paying my rent there you go let's add some more let's add some more variables to the matter maybe i'm financially dependent on her there you go now now you've got now you've got a real tug of war right and you've got some stereo okay so it's one thing to say this is worth fighting for this is worth arguing for this is worth having this live stream discussion for when it's something sincere and real right what about when it's utterly phony what about when it's insincere what about when it's coercive in nature and we all have to deal with that right some of us adopt beliefs and things just because of our our work or place of employment i remember talking to one guy who had become a professor at a christian university in japan and i i talked with them and i said oh wow okay i'm surprised you that and i was i was asking i said look i assume it's only as christian as the boy scouts or something like it's not too christian and i appreciate he took the time to write back to me and really describe how his life was made horrible every day because he was a professor at a university he was an atheist and they held prayer meetings every day and they drew you know stephanie they were supposed to hold hands and stand in a circle and close their eyes and pray and they prayed for their students there was all this religious content built into what was going on at the university you know and um yeah i'm going to say in a subtle way it was horrifying and coercive for him to deal with every day and anyway in ways you may or may not have examined all of us are subject to coercion in these ways okay so guys melissa if you want to say something melissa is also aaron as a member of the audience i'm not going to take a minute to to respond to what's the audience you don't think i've left anything unsaid [Laughter] yeah this is a bit of a paint roller approach this issue covering all the uh covering all the corners of the issue okay so so comment i understand um i understand your your uh concern or objection here so random dude in the audience is defending the importance of the american constitution so random dude you may really enjoy reading both of my books both future of an illusion and no more manifestos no more manifesto deals with this much more directly and explicitly okay now you know i have to ask you to what extent you attribute the positive aspects of american culture the positive aspects of america politically to this piece of paper as opposed to attributing it to people themselves there is certainly a religion in the united states of america that proceeds from the assumption that people are bad the human nature is bad and everything good about the united states of america is thanks to this written constitution a written law uh constraining and holding back the evils of human nature so this is human nature being like a lion on a choke chain a lion that has a chain going around its neck and without this constitution the people the united states of america would just be unspeakably barbaric or evil or terrible now that theory is so obviously flagrantly wrong that nobody really says it out loud but again i'm not saying this to ridicule you but this is an implicit part of your own argument of of what you've said to me here you seem to think the american people are are terrible people and i'm at the opposite extreme on that i think what's right with the united states of america is because of its people it's because of its culture and and so on and people just as as individual people it's the it's the product of a certain historical process created this culture uh i do not think that the american people are bad but their constitution is good my argument is very much the opposite that america is good despite its constitution and not because of it now correctly understood again you can read my books and you might you might enjoy it more than you think you do what i'm saying is profoundly flattering about americans really you should be flattered i'm saying there are really good things about america but what's good about you is not your court system it's not your police system it's not your corpus of written law you know that's not what's good about america and if you really just stop and reflect on it do you feel proud of your court system do you feel proud of your system of lawyers how do you feel about lawyers how do you feel about the people who charge such high fees who make so much money and you bankrupt people by taking your constitution and putting it into practice how do you feel about the legal system and many people will respond to this you know i don't know this was saying no no no somehow the constitution is this morally perfect thing that exists above that hovers above the reality of the legal system in practice no it's not it's one cog it's one wheel it's one part of the you know mechanism of this uh wind-up toy of you know the american legal system no you know the constitution you know this is this is ridiculous you know what's wrong with policing in america what's wrong with courts what's wrong with the legal system is what's wrong with the constitution and vice versa you know um the constitution is a linchpin aspect of a terrible legal system that most americans are ashamed of now look i'll just say so you know in many ways i'm really profoundly pro-american i think viewers in my channel actually are somewhat astonished at that i can give you a really quick contrast and it's going to be easier for you to visualize this because you don't you're not connected i'm sorry but it's obvious this person is american and they're some kind of american nationalist you know um you know uh what is good about thailand do you respect the constitution of thailand do you respect the legal system the courts the police is that what's good about thailand or is it that what's good about thailand is really good despite the legal system despite their political problems frankly you know and that's a country that has rewritten its constitution quite recently if you respect thailand as it exists today you respect the thai people that's really what your respect is for and you see the goodness of the thai people shining through despite their legal system that's how i feel about america and just another one that's a little bit less exotic but again you'll have detachment what's good about france have you ever read the constitution of france again i encourage you read the constitution of thailand read the constitution of france read the constitution of brazil read the constitution of russia today vladimir putin's russia read the constitution it's a big gap between what the constitution says and the reality of life in vladimir putin's russia god read the constitution of communist china it'll blow your mind the constitution of communist china says they have elections all the time they have no elections you know there can be a big gap in what the constitution is on paper really okay what is good about france now i could list off all the things i like about france there are things i really positively appreciate about france the french are ashamed of their court system they're ashamed of their lawyers as are americans they feel they have a terrible court system terrible lawyers and it really was exposed during the giles jean period and the george floyd period they're also ashamed of their police they have tremendous problems with police brutality you know it's somewhat different than america's situation you want to speak but yeah but i just say that's a very fundamentally different thing and you know i know you've stumbled into this it's something my own thoughts are very much gathered on because i've written two different books that deal with it especially no more manifesto skills this great depth and great passion she's she's wearing the t-shirt you can buy the t-shirt yourselves yeah go on yeah so my question concerns this issue of coercion versus you know genuinely doing something because you've thought thought it through and uh decided that this is the right thing to do so i know so go on yeah okay i know of a certain uh little girl who didn't want to brush her teeth yeah so yeah i think uh many people can relate to this uh on a family scale uh maybe you can even remember yourself when you didn't want to brush your hair when you didn't want to brush your teeth and um you know your parent had to coerce you to do that because they knew better they knew that if you didn't brush your teeth then you might get cavities and uh you know tooth decay is a real problem uh so on this scale i think i think we can all recognize that there is just a certain time and level of understanding that people have to go through before they can really understand why you're doing what you're doing why are you forcing them to do something that they don't want to do right so so i want to jump in i'm sure you have more okay but look i want to answer this immediately so when i was much younger when i was like 21 or something i was an optimist of a human nature because i thought okay when we start off we're all stupid teenagers but sooner or later when life gets on like once we're all in our 40s or 50s we've all like some of us sooner than others we've all attained a certain level of intellectual sophistication political sophistication philosophical sophistication ethical association because you know i was aware when i was a teenager and when i was say 21 years old i was aware that there was this gap between myself and basically everyone else my own age i can just pause being real with you it wasn't almost everyone else it was every other person i'd ever met who was my own age was far less intellectually sophisticated than i was that's luck partly right like i'm not saying i was the most brilliant person in the world but let me tell you i mean when you i was enrolled in political science at the university of toronto most of my professors really most nervous who are much older than me they were way less intellectually sophisticated than i was and knew less about politics and less about philosophy i dealt with that a lot it was horrifying to me i didn't feel happy about it i didn't wasn't on an ego trip it was totally bewildering but my optimism at that time was okay i look around at these other people who are 18 19 20 21 like okay there's a gap between us today i'm more advanced than you but sooner or later you're going to catch up with me and then we're all going to be let's say 50 years old and we're all going to be sophisticated and ready to take on you know the difficult questions over time that was my hope not that the number 50 wasn't my but i like i really felt i really felt that i was equal to these people and that we would become more equal with time all right the tragedy of my middle-aged life is really accepting that no we were unequal then and we have become more and more unequal over time like when i was 21 i was more advanced because i had five years thinking and worrying about politics philosophy ethics and all kinds of other substantive things worrying about art i'm worried about you know how to be a writer how to be an artist how to be a playwright how to be a comedian there were other things that i'd put my mind into but anyway just in general we can just say politics intellectual development ethical development emotionally so there was this inequality when i was 21 but rather than that inequality shrinking with time everyone catching up and becoming more equal right what i've seen instead is people becoming more and more unequal over time that the gap when we only have five years of adulthood behind us there's a certain gap and now we have 10 years now we have 15 years now we have 20 years and the gap is becoming wider and wider right i mean you know i know this is a small example but it's a very telling one i only had a certain amount of free time when i was taking care of my newborn daughter she was a baby and it was i literally spent a lot of time rocking just that action really you spend a lot of time doing it you know but you would have bits and pieces of free time every so often the baby takes a nap sometimes totally unexpectedly by the way all of a sudden the baby's asleep and maybe you have 15 minutes maybe you have half an hour to read something you know now i know i knew other fathers like you met other guys you know what it is you're going to the hospitals whatever whatever context you meet other parents with kids the same age when you're a parent generally you know and you know i also talked to guys who had been parents in the past their kids were now growing up you know there are other guys who when they get those 15 minutes they're running over the tv to press play and watch the football game watch the baseball game like that's what they're doing with their time and again it was very memorable to me that what i was doing i was reading thucydides i was reading herodotus i was reading the ancient great pardon me ancient greek works on uh politics and political philosophy and i was really i was still i was still asking myself hard questions that stereo stereotypically people associate with your with your teenage years right okay so long answer to your question but this is from me answering your question all right the problem with this mode of thinking you know like i totally get it it's the puzzle of i know better than you therefore i have to ask you to brush your teeth right even if you don't understand why you have to brush teeth because i know what's best and you don't okay the problem is when you let yourself get into this way of thinking in politics all right i look at alexandria ocasio-cortez i know most people regard her as a brilliant person and i see someone who's so stupid and so ignorant that they shouldn't even have the right to vote like my gap with aoc like i like sure if you let yourself think this way where it's like i get to decide who brushes their teeth you know who who does and doesn't have to be right but this is my point is politically like i totally understand both sides of it you know politically you can take rights away from some people or even the vast majority of people and say look you're not at a level of education sophistication enough to make this decision we have to make this decision for you right okay so as soon as you typically yeah it has been shown if you brush your teeth yes it leads to less fewer cavities and that this is an important healthy thing to do so it's very obvious that i'm doing the right thing when i am basically forcing isil's daughter to brush his teeth right her teeth you said yeah yeah sorry yes forcing isil's daughter to brush her teeth uh that right that and i can hold her hand because i i love her i'm not doing it in a mean way you know saying look i'm brushing my teeth let's brush our teeth together i even brushed her teeth for her yes you know so i'm just saying like that is very clear that it's very obvious but for other people it is not obvious that veganism is the right thing to do obviously because it's only such a small number salt small percentage of the population so in effect you're saying okay so i totally disagree with you because this is the problem sorry i'm just saying guys again this is something it's like it's shallow but it's really important so we just went through this uh globally in the united states america globally okay the people who refused to use vaccines within the last two years and this that also that phenomena has gone up for decades like already 20 years ago 40 years ago there were people who were super morally opposed to vaccines were they predominantly young were they predominantly teenagers like what i saw i saw a lot of middle-aged people a lot of elderly people were they you know predominantly but my point is it's very easy to say that it's scientifically self-evident that you should brush your teeth but it's a fact but i recognize there are still adults who don't right no no and they're committed there are people who believe fluoride is a yeah they have conspiracy right yeah they do uh you know you know there are people i mean with the vaccine thing that played out in dramatic fashion people can committed to this and some of them are highly educated i've seen people with phds i've seen some of them are highly educated a lot of them are elderly or middle-aged they're not just teenagers they're not just ignorant but like this is my point to me this is the same as alexander ocasio-cortez like to me she's still a baby she's still a little kid mentally aoc where someone like me can decide you gotta brush your teeth and her opinion doesn't like that's how i that's how i feel about it but like politically what you're committing to with democracy is precisely the openness to let those people come into the panics let those people come into the parliament let them have a have a voice no matter how stupid and misinformed no matter how anti-scientific or genuinely crazy that's the that's the gambit you're taking in politics in in in democracy yeah and i would just say you know part of the tragedy of non-democratic systems of government people might think that they're avoiding that but it's just as terrifying with aristocracy or we openly religious that you end up with a sample so you know i know i'm not i know i'm not driving at the same point as you but that's why i think it's so important say well this is this is the necessary implication of that right yeah i mean maybe it's a totally different point but i i do also have an awareness of just how much was discussed in ancient athens now and realizing that many of these issues were already discussed yes um including even vegetarianism but it's even more upsetting to think that we're still at this stage and you know when you talk about living in a place like afghanistan uh you know at what point will they be ready to see the light that circumcision is wrong you know right that's what point is just going to be that we don't need to force them to do this right they will just see that this is inherently the right thing to do is to stop circumcising infants you know like this is great but but at the current level of education in the united states and england we could we could include many countries in europe a huge percentage of people get circumcised in both the united states america and england i believe australia too i don't know i could look up maybe i'm wrong maybe australia is lower but you know my point is you can't say that if the level of education in afghanistan were raised to be equal to the united states and england that the problem would disappear right because circumcision as a problem is still dominant in the united states and in england that's correct yes yeah and you know i mean again i'm very explicit the book philosophizes about this at some length democracy involves coercion democracy absolutely involves you have a meeting you have a vote you have a referendum you have whatever kind of debate and then once you make this decision the implications are that it's enforced on other people and you know sorry to give a really good example you know sewage if you allow sewage to mix with drinking water people will die of quite a long list of diseases right a lot it's not instinctual people do not have a natural sense that they shouldn't pollute their own drinking water it's happened throughout history even within canada uh the statistic i remember um in the four years before world war one in canada more people died because of sewage being in the drinking water the i.e those diseases diseases that are communicated away then died in combat in world war one in the four years falling after that's from memory but obviously i read that in a book many years ago you know um so you know it's one thing to say look this is a simple scientific fact and sometimes it is you know something don't don't eat your own poo don't drink your own poop yeah it seems like a really scientific fact simple scientific effect but the political reality of that the type of coercion that ensues as you know you know it'll mean going on to people's farms and going into people's property the government enforcing sewage regulations what happens you know what we're then mostly outhouses you know that that kind of thing and the implications for farming you know cattle farming and pig farming those things over the the the long arm of the law reaching down into people's personal lives and really using coercion to end this kind of poisoning it's kind of self-poisoning of humanity politically like that sounds like a simple example but politically it's really complex but this is the point i put you isn't it marvelous if you can say to people we debated this at the pinnex we debated this democratically you had your chance to vote for it and guess what 65 percent of people voted like after we discussed it after everyone learned about this or learned about what percent 65 of people said we have to get rid of this sewage problem so [ __ ] you as opposed to will the queen decide yeah no that's it ultimately ultimately there's there's coercion involved right ultimately ultimately yeah but as opposed to saying well the queen decided this right so if you don't understand it you know yeah i will just say a good example that we recently looked into was the debate about abortion in ireland yes that this was a referendum a national referendum the idea that everybody was able to vote on this referendum i mean right not everybody did right but theoretically yes everybody in ireland could uh vote on this and they decided that abortion should be illegal yes you know this is this is an example of it's a very positive example and in case you don't know ireland is still catholic as hell okay yes yes um exactly so despite the fact that they're a catholic society right enough people yes and they decided on this thing that goes against catholicism right you know because they're able to think it through enough they've they've progressed past this certain point right um yeah well i just want to say something to take something implicit and make it explicit right the people make the laws the laws do not make the people and with that very simple example the people of ireland stood up and voted in a referendum so now abortion is legal rather than illegal okay it's the people making laws this is no there's more than one way to define democracy this is a crucial aspect of just republicanism generally whether or not it's democracy this is part of the idea of the republic and part of the problem with americans which again i address in this book is that they have it the wrong way around they think the laws create the people the constitution creates the people creates the goodness of the american people and it doesn't you know yeah oh no i agree that's a that's a good example where people can look back and say okay no in 2018 we decided you know people might still protest right people are still gonna hold signs up you know down at city hall but for the next 50 years it's probably something we've made this decision sure and if you want to put it into a vote again ten years from now we can more like i think more like 50 years now i don't think i don't think it'll be that recent that that soon that you'll have another vote yes but yeah but for the time being this is what the democracy decides we're going to live with right and look i mean again no one looks back on this as a lost um i don't know as a higher level of civilization than we've lost both athens and sparta the people directly voted before going to war when was the last time the american people voted on whether they wanted to go to war or not either for the start of a war or the universe it has never happened once never once in the united states america was there a referendum or any kind of direct vote on a war whether a war should start or stop so in this sense i mean this is just one of many criteria both athens and sparta were more democratic than the united states america and by the way reading salis salas is not that well-known a name to s-a-l-l-u-s-t if you search themselves to my channel salus describes the way war was voted on in rome rome was i feel that rome was to simplify rome was less democratic than than athens but still they had a significant amount of democracy and you actually get a sense of how the different bodies the different democrat semi-democratic bodies jockeyed for position and contest and decided whether or not they're going to war go on so i i wonder if this you know this idea of not being able to vote to go to war can kind of uh relate to this other idea that i was thinking of while i was listening to uh so um that is correct uh and you read about uh mcnamara's uh yes basically that the people who um were they shouldn't have been serving in the army because they were actually too um their iq was too low they shouldn't have been able to serve in the army uh this was during the vietnam war um so they did not have the ability to vote on whether or not they would actually go to war yet they were granted to go into the war and many of them you know had i'm sure terrible experiences in the army because if they were really not intelligent to understand like how to shoot a gun uh how to tie their shoelaces you know yeah that this is this is a real uh considerable problem and you know it got me thinking earlier when you were talking about how uh it's not impossible to play the piano and you want to sit down and like if you really love somebody you can sit down with them and say look it's not impossible for you one million people can learn to play the piano per year you can too right um so maybe not 100 of the population will be able to learn piano um but i think you said like 100 of the population could they could but they won't right 100 of people could be vegan and they won't right yes um yeah but it is just kind of shocking when you think about how many people really can't understand these things you are not ready to understand i agree yes at a certain point maybe uh two years old you're too young i agree but i'm being honest when i say i believe aoc can't do it alexandria crystal court is i literally believe she is not intellectually capable not emotionally capable not ethically capable of participating democracy that's my opinion like like obviously i think everyone admits there's some point at which you're too mentally disabled to participate in democracy like some some people are so mentally still they can't talk they can't read like you know they really you know that's that's how severe they're just i get it but i'm saying to you if i'm really being honest i perceive someone like alexander kaiser cortez who's celebrated in this way i look at her and i think you cannot participate in democracy and sorry i i don't really know these people very well but if you think of any kind of pop culture figure um logan paul you know is logan paul too stupid too immature because it's not just raw intelligence right like i mean i'm saying you could take any johnny depp can you like seriously can johnny depp go to the pinex can johnny depp participate in direct democracy or parliamentary dogs like johnny depp most people regarded him as highly intelligent and shrewd and sophisticated he you know he had a certain ambiance of being a sophisticated man until a few months ago or something and now all this testimony has come about the reality of his private life and how he lives you know like from my perspective my point is not that johnny depp is [ __ ] uh you know that that is not my point whether or not it's true i mean i don't know if if he can get a diagnosis for having limited seriously for a limited cognitive capacity because it turns out he's an amazingly stupid man but you know i'm just being honest with you like in terms of what does it take to do what for me is now effortless like playing the piano you work at it hard enough for long enough it becomes effortless well i wasn't born this way decades of hard work have made it effortless for me to to do what i'm doing right now what i've done in over a thousand youtube videos and guys i can stand up in parliament and do this and i can stand in front of in front of a corporate board of directors and do this like i you know and it's not just about talking it's about reasoning and all these other things go into it you know okay so it's become effortless for me but yeah i'm saying how many people can can do this on my level and look sorry george w bush is one of the most horrifying of all i mean you get someone so stupid in a position of power i mean aoc is stup who's stupid or george w bush or or alexander or casual cortez you know it's terrifying that you've had people so stupid in positions of such tremendous power yeah right and i i would be accepting of people like george bush and you know you made this comparison johnny depp or logan paul if they were able to vote in a referendum like in ireland that you know decided uh whether or not abortion should be legal yes but you know you're talking about actually leading the nation or leading uh sure being an order you know like this yeah you know that that yes of course uh you know that has demands uh you know more quickness uh alacrity intelligence you know than than just being a member of the voting public um so anyway uh uh i i guess i i yeah yeah i i don't know everyone so you know you see the image um you know of of forcing your daughter to brush her teeth when she doesn't she's not old or intelligent enough to understand why it's necessary to brush your teeth that is an image found in in ancient buddhism mutatus mutandus one of the standard images used in in buddhist philosophy in the ancient period is of what to do when your small child either an infant or a toddler is choking on something it's choking on food so i think people had this experience often enough that it was a vivid image they could relate to and it describes having to reach your finger down the throat of the child in order to remove an obstruction to stop it from suffocating or choking to death you know and that obviously the child doesn't enjoy this child may be terrified to have your hand or your finger go down their throat trying to to stop them from choking you know and indeed this may cause the child to vomit you can you can imagine but in the ancient world this was the kind of medical emergency and there is no 9-1-1 so on and so forth this idea of having the prerogative the privilege of being the adult who knows better and who therefore imposes their will on the child now you know um look i've written a whole book about this yeah you know so i mean i i could i could hear it frankly would be quite easy for me to give a philosophical lecture about it probably because i've rehearsed and gathered and organized my thoughts in in no more manifestos the one thing i would i would say you know so this isn't a multi-hour discussion of this aspect of democracy the one thing i'd say is this the more democracy you have because throughout this whole video we've talked about the fact that it's not zero or 100 it's not a binary it's not either you have democracy or you don't you have slavery or you don't you have veganism or you don't these aren't simple all or nothing situations but the more democracy you have the less lazy the power elite gets to be all right now just say you can imagine if um let's say you were in the position of winning the civil war in syria like within the next five years you personally end up being the dictator of syria on the basis of a huge pile of dead bodies you fought this war and the whole population that's just the body count has been so huge the civil war's going on for so long people step back and just say okay your unsure like people resign themselves to it your faction your military has dominated this society i think you can imagine at least for a 10-year period after the close of the civil war you would really be able to rule just by fiat whatever you say goes you don't have to explain your plans to people you don't have to reason them through you don't have to deal with questions and answers about the implications you don't have to modify your plans on the basis of feedback right so i'm just saying getting this is it generally is true whether it's 10 years or 5 years or 20 years very often after a really hard conflict you'll have a period where people are resigned to um totally arbitrary political power put it that way whether it's tyrannical or not right people just say okay we'll accept whoever's in charge because we're done with having so many thousands of people die per month frankly in a state of in a state of civil war okay but then compare that to if you were a genuinely democratic leader in a society where all the major decisions involve a referendum and where you really have to go out from town to town you have to go around in a van and give lectures and do q and a's from town to town across the country explaining to people why this referendum is important why your political position is correct why they need to understand this and again it could be for for a health issue like this it could be for something that's that's from your perspective is scientifically simple it could be from from your perspective this is just a simple scientific fact you know we must brush our teeth or we must abolish uh circumcision well you know okay for me as an atheist it's obvious that circumcision should be abolished for muslim people it's not obvious for for the majority of jewish and christian people it's not obvious too there's a really widespread phenomenon this idea that cutting off part of your penis is a really great idea guys well that you know imagine actually going from from town to town and you know look i think it's been a long time since that happened in in the united states of america i i think it's been a long time to happen in france we talk about different when was there that spirit of democracy going from town to town but you know a really touching a really moving example of that in american history uh was the basically coast-to-coast tour of lbj's wife so this is the president lyndon johnson his wife she really gave lectures going from town to town talking about why black people should have political equality basically that's what it was she was from the far south he was from texas and many of the crowds were very hostile you know you could hear it like you people came and you know people were sitting with their arms crossed it was really an error and this is a very contentious idea now in reality they didn't have a referendum they didn't have that kind of democracy it was decided from the top down it was one man made the decision lbj himself made the decision on an executive basis they were gonna have racial equality and he imposed it he imposed his will on everyone in america and the history of exactly how that was possible and the ways in which it's connected to the assassination of uh the guy who was president immediately before him there's a lot of interesting jiggery-pokery and how that was possible but i would just say even if you regard that just as political theater as a kind of circus or sideshow because the people didn't get to vote on it they didn't get to have a referendum and they didn't even elect lyndon johnson they elected another guy who was shot in the head you know so there are a lot of ways we're sending you know obviously most people today are very happy that lyndon johnson did what he did in relation to the status of african americans former slaves etc in america but my point is that there was that humility and willingness to go from town to town and engage people in that discussion whether you think of that as public education or what have you so that that's the point we say is i uh dictatorial power especially when dealing with a short-term emergency it may be very appealing it was in ancient rome also it was a crucial aspect about ancient roman government work basically whenever there was an emergency they they closed down the democratic society they gave all the power to one dictator and you know they had temporary dictatorship declared while they were fighting a particular war or some other some other crisis of this kind war civil war that kind of thing um however among the many problems of having you know fiat power in government is just power by decree whether it's a kingdom a monarchy an aristocracy or just a very corrupt system of democracy like very little democracy is that the elite becomes lazy you know and they become lazy in that most important way which is exactly i mean so you said you've you've seen me trying to compel my daughter to brush your teeth but you've also seen me explaining to her yes oh yeah you've also seen me right right you just say that you've also seen me intellectually right right and i'm preparing her for like it's like even if you're too young to understand this now you will you've seen me philosophically and politically educating my daughter where i'm having really sophisticated conversations slowly and in a way she can understand i'm asking her questions and she's replying so just say even that you know it's parallel to the laziness of a parent if you're a parent who just gives commands and just gives orders just as you don't understand you can't understand as opposed to being a parent who really reasons these things through kind of democratically even if you don't get equal votes you know what i mean where i said look i need you to understand so yeah there's a kind of laziness to be avoided there that really matters i think that is absolutely the strength of right that you should have when you are trying to uh coerce people into doing something that is the right thing to do um so i i guess just right yes so i just let's i'm to bring this back to the real world in a way that's that's very palpable okay within my lifetime where is coercive veganism possible so this is veganism by decree they just have a law or constitution saying within this territory there can be no animal slaughter there can be no meat butter salt it is possible i it is certainly possible for example with a small island where most of the money is made from tourism you know and any of them frankly you get a tiny island like tahiti or something one of these small island nations they could do it and you could imagine it really being a kind of market employee hey come to the only vegan country the whole island is vegan yeah it's fragrant sorry maybe whether or not you think tahiti is attainable my point is any small island that primarily relies on international tourism for its revenues the beauty of the island and where they market and say hey look we have tropical fruit we have all this wonderful things we want to make this a holiday destination for tourists that is not only possible it is plausible you know that you can have an island where it's eco-tourism and where they know that they have like there are beaches all over the world there are beautiful beaches everywhere and say hey we're the one island where all the food is vegan where the whole country is vegan even though it's a tiny bit yeah that's that's attainable um i would also say you could have particular provinces within india you know particular cities or particular provinces where for a small area within india it's declared 100 vegan and there's no meat can be bought and sold in no slaughterhouses uh within sri lanka hypothetically i doubt it'll happen in sri lanka just based on my knowledge of the place within an intensely but a society like myanmar um you know i think one you're familiar with it's hard to imagine but what about taiwan you know taiwan the majority of people eat huge amounts of meat but you could have a subculture within taiwan that gathers in one town you know where there's one little province okay within this province everything's going to be yes it's possible yes it's attainable you know what i mean um but again this relates back to everything i've discussed in this video okay but what will be the significance of coercive veganism of it when it when people don't understand that people don't accept it or 90 of you like maybe 10 of people in this island or in this world maybe 10 of people really support the polls and really understand it really understand why it's worth doing right but we're 90 of people it's like i described before if i married a religious person right and i'm i'm just coerced into being religious enough yes to keep the relationship going when she may be coerced into being just atheist enough to satisfy me in this relationship you know what is the value of having a society that is in this sense vegan enough through coercion and look again this isn't that hypothetical we just tested the waters we just saw having a society that's vaccinated enough right look well a lot of people don't accept the science behind the vaccine a lot of people challenge it yes and we saw crazy coercion each country was different the story of coercion in australia in france like it's it's really different if you guys watch the debate between macron and uh lepen this is the debate for who would be the next leader of france you will notice that at one point macron says to le pam he says it as if it's self-evidently ridiculous well if what you want is to enforce secularism i would say atheism but they say secularism in french if what you want is to enforce secularism are you comfortable with a police officer running down the street and arresting someone for wearing a head scarf a muslim headscarf and what she said back she's not a very witty or fast thinking woman what lepan said back was well haven't you noticed we just had the police running on the street to arrest someone over a mask over wearing or not wearing a mask you know this is not shallow this is not trivial so we've just lived through a great kind of test case for coercion and again i've made videos sorry about what happened in china with uh xinjiang it's another very interesting testament can you imagine it and if even one country had made it a vote like yes right yes vote on what we should sure should we shut down all gyms should we shut down yeah right right would that have been voted on by somebody well and imagine each city having a vote too like you say it doesn't necessarily have to be national uh colorado could have had a referendum like colorado city colorado i'm just saying each city or something could have had direct democracy on these things and i can imagine with that consequence yeah that's right that's right we were the city right now we have to live with the consequences there's right not going to be any past requirements right this is voted on we are the one place that is right and then some other place that would have voted another way and you'd get to compare the outcomes because of these i i really appreciate what you said about the short-term emergency and like that as you know this is how the legal system is operating in america that we're using these little scraps of paper that have are the results of short-term uh emergencies you know the decisions that were made at one time or another by people who are dead now and you know we don't have to be we don't have to be living under their influence forever you know this is this is yes well okay so you know i really dislike thomas jefferson as a person i'm not a fan of thomas jefferson but one of the things he said again and again is that laws are a way for the living to be bullied by the dead that our dead ancestors are bullying us are coercing us through laws now many people interpret this in terms of his own decision to not keep his promises to his deceased wife you know that when it's an interesting aspect he felt that the promises he made to his wife were only valid while she was alive this is apparently part of us now that she's dead he's got to do his own thing life is for the living so that was that was part of his philosophy you know whether or not that related to his own sex life and i guess another another story but politically it's interesting that he came to the conclusion he wanted all laws and all constitutions to be written anew i'm sorry i forget if it was every uh 30 years but it's something like that yet at times guys i think it was in dozens of years or something like every three dozen years i'm sorry the exact numbers i forget but he felt that laws should elapse and there should be new laws written and constitutions should elapse you have to write a totally new constitution every so many years that people should come together that it was really important not a lot not to allow the spirits of the dead to have coercive power over the living that that life is for the living and that law is for the living and to cut off this kind of endless cycle of bullying for lack of a better term yeah of coercion coercion across the generations should be cut off it should be for one generation only it's great that's a that's a great comment i think because and it makes me think how much more involved would people be if the that were if those were the stakes that every 30 years or however many years um you know that we had to come to this conclusion you know something that i was thinking about when you were reading the uh messages that you got the private messages um for somebody like that who had decided to be vegan for four years um or vegetarian you know i my ex-boyfriend he became vegan for me and the minute that we broke up he stopped being vegan so this happens my ex-wife similar story not exactly similar story i would like to think that if they were living if those two people this those two examples of people who at one time or another were you know believed in veganism enough right at least had thought through the principles enough that they agreed to live this way uh and changed their lifestyle changed how they made food in their homes and what they did when they were out and about you know what kind of places you can go and where you can eat like you know adding these restrictions to your life you know i if they had lived in a society that did coerce them into doing this you know do you think at some stage they would you know reach that level of acceptance and then even though they were coerced and do it at one point or another then they would realize that you know it's the right thing to do so that's good but i mean i think you know that you asked that one a marriage is a society of just two people and that's that's exactly what you're dealing with and you know the other is max sterner talks about this a lot too the type of obedience you get in society with law like in some ways talking about laws and constitutions is profoundly irrelevant to what we're talking about because we want to talk about the actual will of the people the will of the people is not the law it's not the constitution you know what i mean but the type of uh obedience you can extract is normally about as much as the obedience of traffic laws you know people will drive faster than the speed limit whenever they can i've never met anyone who believes in the principle of the speed limit they only respond to coercion they only respond to the threat of fines and imprisonment and in the 21st century this has changed because now there can be these hidden cameras you know now this is but in the past when i was a kid it was really like there were some highways where you could get away with speeding you know and many people i remember seeing adults sitting around and discussing it which highways you could drive what speed on because they would keep a mental map of where the police you know would arrest people and where they would and so on you know the de facto speed line so that is generally the type of um the type of obedience you can compel from people now with that having been said you know um if the existence of planet earth depends on it if we're talking about global warming we're talking about ocean acidification rising carbon levels in the atmosphere changing the chemical composition of the ocean and then this really bringing about a terrible doomsday scenario this is not the only problem with global warming but it's it's the one i choose to emphasize for various reasons that i've made videos talking about the past for really dealing with apocalyptic consequences maybe driving the speed limit you know maybe that is the kind of thing we have to work with but the emphasis i'm placing on in my analysis i'm placing emphasis on the laziness of the ruling class the laziness of the elite as compared to the intellectual dynamism that democracy fosters and again it's not a hundred or zero but by having more democracy you get more education and look i'm canadian my real sincere feeling is that canadians are so intellectually lazy because they can be because they can get away with it and i don't want that i want this kind of democracy that really really you know inspires and stimulates and motivates intellectual dynamism dynamism for the elite and where people frankly become elite because of their intellectual dynamism their active research and informed dependent because of what they can contribute positively to democracy in that way whether that's as intellectual dissidents or as conformists okay guys i'm catching up with your written comments now so with several people asking if my books are on sale i thought it was obvious from what i said before but um one of my books you can get on amazon right now for about one dollar in europe is exactly 99 cents in europe in america i believe it's one dollar and eight so i'm not trying to turn a profit on that book obviously you can get that on amazon the second book no more manifestos is not out yet but many chapters of it have been shared within patreon so again if you pay one dollar within patreon you could read several chapters of it and some people talk about it as if it has already been published because um because the chapters have been shared because they've read a certain number of chapters of it so here you go i will i will post the link in the chat and yes as with everything on amazon there's a separate page for each country so there's a canadian page an american page a japanese yeah i've seen it go to amazon japan and you can order japan so on and so forth great question i mean seemingly unrelated but profoundly related quote do you hold nicocado avocado solely responsible for the path he's currently on or do you consider him a product of coercion within a sick society of misaligned incentives so i'll give you my answer because you ask me i hold nicocado avocado 100 percent responsible and so solely responsible it's a good it's a good just well phrased your question yes i do um do we live in a society where the majority of people instead see him as the victim of you know outside forces or something that's probably a more important question but yeah i i see him absolutely 100 responsible now both melissa and i have people in our families who drink too much alcohol and whose lives have been ruined by alcohol i'm i'm not going to specify this but both melissa and i have for you in the audience most of you have probably one relative somewhere um [Music] do i hold those people solely responsible for being a drunk being an alcoholic the way in which alcohol has ruined their life yes yes i do i hold them 100 solely responsible and in as much as any of those people have ever talked to me that's what i've said to them face to face i've said it's on you now um i'll just give you a more complex example and look sorry why sobriety is something you do alone it doesn't rely on an institution it doesn't rely on having access to a library you know it doesn't rely on you having a teacher you know now learning to read braille to read braille by touch i have to specify because some people actually if you can see they learn to read but only by looking at braille i have been told i have both read descriptions of this and on youtube her descriptions you really need a teacher you really need a certain kind of institution to get the knack of using your sense of touch it's quite a complex process to master reading braille reading sign language using sign language okay if you ask someone look why haven't you learned to read braille why haven't you learned sign language that's much harder to put on one person right they may really be able to say look where i live i didn't have access to the institutions the resources the help the support i need to to learn braille or learn sign language right and i myself when you look at my life there are a lot of things that have gone horribly wrong where i can't say it's on me i can't say it's it's all my fault because there's this kind of institutional context that this kind of political contact context that's made what i might made what i wanted to do impossible um where it relied on other people and and what have you you know um but no these these kinds of examples it's 100 on that person i'm sorry i will return to you reading and replying to the the comments the comments that i'm leaving anonymous for that that inspired this video so so look here's a here's a great example sorry freda freda had a couple comments i wanted to respond to freda says quote even with applying sunscreen to prevent skin cancer many people don't know how this how important this is that's what frida says so freda i've done some scientific research on this and on purely on the basis of science i believe sunscreen meaning suntan lotion the lotion applied to your skin i believe it's a scam 100 based on scientific evidence not based on anything else and my claims are not crazy i mean if you want to do the reading you can i read one article about it that was in the ecologist magazine is a recall i think it was a dutch magazine that published in english i think that was a situation magazine if not maybe it was a british version of a dutch publication but it was this i read this completely well researched scientific factual article in no way in no way based on religious claims or whatever and it's like guess what you know what the world's most effective sunscreen is it's wearing a hat it's wearing a shirt made of solid cotton like this is a complete joke to think you can have a translucent liquid that you rub on your skin that's effective in preventing the damage of the sun and if you think you can rub this liquid on your skin then swim in the ocean with this and then get out of the ocean and it's still there invisibly blocking and reflecting the sun's rays there's a lot of wishful thinking so like my point is not to say uh you're wrong you're an idiot or something my point is you've raised this as an example of something that's scientifically simple and self-evident right i've done a little bit of research on it and i'm saying to you no you're wrong now if you have a good democratic process those kinds of things can come out all right it is obvious to me that antidepressant drugs like prozac don't work and it's so obvious i totally talk about it as a self-evident scientific fact right and i can't believe anyone who does the reading doesn't discover the same thing i do right well imagine if you really had a democratic process of debate to draw those things out to really engage the public in those arguments and like i completely admit back in 1985 probably everyone would have voted to make the antidepressants legal and have the government pay for them make them free for everyone who wanted to take them but like by 1995 by 2005 by 2015 like you know scientifically it becomes more and more evident that these drugs don't work and they have terrible negative effects so now none of us have experienced this nobody in the world lives in a society where even matters of scientific fact matters of science and health policy are decided democratically so there's a real sense in which we don't know what that would be like we do not know what it would be like in which the general public decides these things and not secret closed-door meetings between leaders of industry and a small number of government bureaucrats that's how it's decided not just the united states but in most countries in europe last description that kind of read i think it was in denmark i mean some of the supposedly good democracies in europe you read about the actual meetings that took place between these incredibly wealthy corporations and you know the representatives of the department for health and safety or whatever it was uh you know and there's there is in effect money on the table there's real patronage and you know it's just horrifying um the decisions that are made quote unquote in the public interest that are not democratic or not in the public interest and you know sorry it's now relatively well known i think in large part thanks to vegan activism um you know the way in which health policy was developed for the american diet the so-called food pyramid the role of lobbying of the meat industry the dairy industry and so on lobbying so yeah um how much democracy is enough democracy and what what would happen because guys i'm skeptical if you had more democracy maybe the health guidelines in america would be worse you know but but over time that would intensify the level of political education the level of political engagement like maybe at first more than 50 of americans just want to say cigarettes are healthy beer is healthy alcohol is healthy they like pork so they want to say pork is healthy and maybe that at first in the 1950s is what democracy is tending to us but maybe decade by decade you start to get again because the elite then has to work hard the elite can't just be fatuous and disengaged the elite gets out there and really engages people and says look these are the consequences of drinking alcohol these are the consequences of smoking cigarettes this is the consequence of having cholesterol in your diet whether that cholesterol comes from pork or cheese and then start to make laws that make sense you know um i'm not recklessly optimistic but the point is you know the choice you have to make is how democratic a country do you want to be again read my book read no more manifestos especially but you know i i do not believe that aristocracy is the way forward and i do believe that aristocracy is the system of government we now have i do want to say something but i don't do it do it dude it's a good time yeah i do want to say something about i want to get too off topic but it was just kind of amazing to me to think of the public health crisis that we've just gone through and all of the diseases that i know to be preventable because i'm vegan because i've done the research that there isn't coercion on this this scale you know there's there was so much you know about uh you know making sure that you're vaccinated making sure that you're wearing your mask closing down restaurants closing down gyms just the scale of uh you know coercion in this and where is it for heart disease where is it for uh diabetes you know and you know make a microcode avocado i'm sure he's diabetic now if if he hasn't been diagnosed i'm sure he will be soon you know this is a an example of somebody who went from being healthy to having these problems with obesity probably he's been hospitalized for heart disease you know it's it's yeah he is an example of just how quickly this can happen because you're not eating a vegan diet you know it's not like he's got some genetic predisposition to becoming obese and that's why he's you know experiencing or or heart disease or diabetes it's yeah it's the diet so anyway yeah well okay look she wants to see it for one second you know you say it's surprising there isn't more coercion on these issues but i think the very simple answer my response to that is to say where does coercion come from and where does it go in any of these societies now you know iraq has a democracy as a democracy that was introduced by the american military but they do they have votes they have elections so on and so forth um there is coercion of sunni against shiite shiite against sunni you know what i mean and they know what they're doing they know you know where the coercion comes from they know where it's going there's a sense of an objective right with something like health with something like education also right coercion is very rare in society because there isn't a clear sense of a particular outcome and there isn't a particular constituency demanding it right so you think about in politics where does coercion come from where is it going what do i mean is coercion normally arises when there is a definite constituency demanding it and where there is an objective however palpable or infallible well that that this constituency understands you know that that they desire that they they want to achieve so those are those are the normal political preconditions for for coercion so you know atherosclerosis if you don't know what atherosclerosclerosis means you should atherosclerosis an incredibly high percentage of americans have atherosclerosis it would only be a slight exaggeration to say it affects everyone basically everyone who is not vegan in the united states of america it's only a slight exaggeration it's a rounding error the vast majority of americans atherosclerosis is a problem atherosclerosis can result in damage to your heart it can result in damage to your brain and one of the most common also results in erectile dysfunction from that so it's not going to your whole circulatory system is impacted and of course it also can result in death premature death but the the loss of quality of life you lost your ability to think to lost your ability to walk upstairs atherosclerosis but you know is there one particular constituency and one particular outcome the benefit of addressing atherosclerosis is incredibly diffuse right and there isn't a concentrated particular special interest group pressing for it now guys sorry when you think special interest group many of you especially if you're vegan will start to think about the corrupting influence of the pharmaceutical industry this this kind of conspiracy thing with these things okay but i'm going to give you a positive example gay rights who was the constituency pressing for gay rights there was a very obvious special minority group special interest group right and it wasn't the majority it was a minority of people right what was the outcome what was the you know what was the destination so one of the examples i like to give is forcing school boards forcing the school system to be willing to hire and employ an openly homosexual teacher this is coercion because before none of them wanted to do it it was a very widespread prejudice that you couldn't have a gay or a lesbian teacher but especially gay men were excluded from this this kind of profession okay so this is this is coercion now again there are also some things with housing and rent that someone should be able to be openly gay and still rent to home have no no prejudice in this sense yeah which is still a federal right yeah yeah yeah it's still it's still legally an issue yes um but you know uh my point is to say there was a constituency there's a definite outcome or destination from this you know coercion arises so yeah that's i i think you know i'm sorry i mean for some of you guys this may be obvious but for some of you it's the first time you're thinking it through in your life um yeah that is interesting yeah to to make that comparison because right you know i can think of some campaigns that were ex exceedingly um prevalent when i was growing up uh for this one type of cancer for breast cancer yes breast cancer awareness uh you know it's i don't know if it's this it's not especially strange let me give you one more example some of you will relate to this viscerally know exactly what i'm talking about and some of you you'll have to use your imagination rats make people's lives miserable every day in the city and in the countryside being beset by rats being marauded by rats you may not know this but australia is a great example australia is totally infested with rats or plagues of rats millions and billions of rats huge numbers new york city is infested by rats in canada we have one province called alberta it's a huge area it's bigger than i think any country in europe but it's bigger than it's i'm sorry now some of you can google it how big is alberta compared to france metropolitan france how big is alberta comparison alberta has a lot of land mass it's not a small state like delaware or something it's a huge area alberta okay in alberta there are no rats zero because of a government policy this is attainable for alberta it's totally attainable for australia in case you didn't know australia is an island it's a you know australia as a whole in tasmania all right we can live without rats and in most of these places the rats are talking about are not indigenous they were introduced with the arrival of white people another great example by the way is hawaii you know rats okay but rats make everyone's life miserable we have rats not inside our apartment but here around our apartment building we see we see rats we live surrounded by rats and if you've had rats inside your home you know if you've had to live inside your farm or eating eating your veggies we have we've had rats eating the the plants we were farming okay now i'm using this intentionally because it's a very challenging example for vegans okay if we eliminate rats the way alberta did everyone will benefit every like literally everybody in society the rich and the poor rich people got to deal with it's horrible if you own a big property as a rich you can be a millionaire and you still have to deal with rats but of course poor people in the slums poor people in the ghetto right okay but there's no special interest there's no constituency and that outcome right who can see it who can visualize it who can measure it and quantify it and say look this is worth a billion dollars right like the improvement in our lives and indeed you could calculate how much will you save in agriculture costs even with the building we used to live in so nothing building me now but you know i talked to this in a youtube video five years ago or something but you know i remember talking to the manager of the building they had to have rat killers come every week they had a pest control company coming every week to check on on trap for rats cockroaches pigeons you know and i talked about this in terms of the contradictions of veganism that you know you pay rent you're paying someone to kill rats on your behalf that's you know you may say you don't kill rats well you rent an apartment in a certain percentage of your apartment absolutely my point is but if you calculate the benefit every apartment building in the in the com in the country paying for pest control every farm paying for pest control or somehow managing killing and poisoning rats right if this is worth billions of dollars this is a huge problem with the solution and nobody wants to solve it yeah so i i put it under that heading it's diffuse in its benefits yeah you would think that would be the case with you know hospitals i know i know with heart disease with atherosclerosis i know wait but look here's here's the problem alexandria ocasio-cortez can't talk like this all right i'm sorry but like this is the tragedy i listened to a lot of bernie sanders i had many youtube videos responding to bernie sanders bernie sanders is also not in my level it's like i wish i could tell you there are all kinds of brilliant political leaders i could look up to who have a nuanced understanding bob ray is not on my level holy [ __ ] let's get the canadian politicians who are numb like i wish i could tell you we have a culture that's crowded with dissident intellectuals like me or even conformist intellectuals who really like were able to do this is not scripted this is completely spontaneous to deal with these issues and start thinking about but we don't i have no contemporaries you know i'm all alone and just even being able to talk this stuff through with my audience okay great [Laughter] yeah this is why i like doing this as live stream because a lot of these issues i think they really are meaningful and important for whoever gets to hear this but they're not issues i would ever make a standalone video about like i wouldn't i wouldn't address i wouldn't sit to think down and record a video in the way guys if you have a second hit the thumbs up button please do it'll help more people discover discover this both while the conversation's going and after the fact um catching up with your comments [Music] um whoo here's a here's an irrelevant but interesting question clouds asked well cloud says quote i'm aware you're critical of the english translation of max sterner do you have any recommendations to learn about his philosophy despite the translation um i saw someone asking about this on reddit yesterday and i was tempted to to type out a whole essay um okay so really briefly if you guys don't know the philosophy who max turner is i have made videos in the past you can search just for the name search for a max i think he's the only person called max i've talked about but um i have made videos discussing the philosophy of mac sterner in the past there are basically three problems one is just the quality of translation itself two there's a special problem with the use of the conjunctive voices in german young thieves einstein you know um he sterner very often uses this sort of hypothetical voice it's not that it's impossible to translate but to my knowledge the available translations struggle with this um [Music] that sometimes makes it hard to understand sometimes means you'll lose the sense of humor or what it is he's getting at or why something things does but the third problem is understanding the historical context when max sterner uses the word liberal he's discussing what liberalism meant in germany at that time which is unbelievably different from what liberalism means for us here and now what it means in 2022 in miami florida or something so you know those are the problems and they're they're kind of three separate but related problems and you know what other languages do you speak i mean i don't know if the spanish translation is better of sterner i don't know if the russian translation is better you know i i suspect that it is um but all three of those problems as far as i know are impossible to overcome they're just something you can cope with i knew the political and historical context quite well when i started reading sterner i learned more while i read it but i'd already done a lot of research about that period you know to understand people like karl marx and these other people and then yeah i mean the other thing um to remember is you also to some extent need to know the people sterner is criticizing many of whom were much more famous and politically influential at that time than karl marx but they've now been forgotten you know and those names are in the book explicitly like it's not like i'm saying you have to imagine like he he names the people he's criticizing but to understand who they were many people read sterner and think that it's kind of crazy and over the top for those reasons like oh what he's saying about liberalism is completely crazy but they don't understand what liberalism meant at that time in that culture in that geographical and chronological context and once you do it's it's not so crazy and again his criticism of these other particular authors and thinkers when you've seen how crazy they are than what he's saying about them starts to make sense um but you know uh i just say i i i find it touching that there are young people on the internet today who are really moved by sterner and really motivate the change to change something in their lives but sterner is pretty much incomprehensible and unapproachable in modern english and from a 21st century perspective like unless you've done all this research on the political context and so like it's not with any egoism not with any egoism that i'd really recommend reading my own books instead i'd recommend i recommend watching my own videos about nihilism and my own videos about max turner too but reading a future of an illusion reading no more manifestos these are the two books i've just written within the last couple months or whatever um those i really think that's much more useful for everyone and you know okay but conversely it's brief statement sterner might as well wrap it up why is sterner worth reading well understanding sterner lets you understand karl marx and from obviously an anti-marxist perspective it really lets you understand that understanding sterner lets you understand hegel again from an anti-hegelian perspective so there were a lot of famous well let's understand emmanuel kant to some extent too it's not so much but indirectly you know a lot of these names from that period they've become these kind of unquestioned impossible to challenge giants in philosophy and specifically and especially in political philosophy it's insane i don't know why would anyone respect emmanuel kant's opinion about politics what would anyone respect what hagel has stable politics why would anyone respect what karl marx has to say about china what komarks has to say about india it's insane but those names have become towering so taking the time to understand sterner and the political context he wrote in and you know yes it's meaningful in that way um is part of the demolition of the the 19th century mystique hegel marx et cetera et cetera another specific example it's somewhat useful in understanding the origins of anthropology and how those are being contested some of the big tectonic changes that were happening in philosophy politics academia and yeah i mean sterner is also a voice in the political and philosophical response to economics economics emerging as a science and as a trade and then a lot of what went on in political philosophy for a hundred years was a was a response to that so you know yeah it's meaningful it's rewarding in in those ways but for you for your life for what you're going to do in the next five years again with no egoism i think my own writing is way more important and you know sterner can't compete with it for those reasons but understanding the time in which sterner was alive of sterner's writing is way better and again sterner it does just kind of shine this light on karl marx on hegel and uh feuerbach on these other philosophers at that time that then it's very mutually illuminating you can understand everything going on and you understand the way which people today misunderstand all this stuff oh right now uh how could i forget friedrich nietzsche i mean like that's the funny thing about sterner sterner without ever writing about nietzsche i mean nietzsche's work is partly derivative of sterner like it's my point is it's not the other way around sterner is not derivative nisha nietzsche red and was partly inspired by stern but sterner in effect debunks nietzsche even though this is chronologically impossible i would even say sterner debunks schopenhauer to some extent so a lot of what was going on in germany at that time and including after sterner's death you know the fame or flourishing of nietzsche being subsequent um a lot of it is kind of again this mutually eliminating way if you want to understand that period and some of those names are still important to some people um sure that's valuable but what you're doing with the next five years of your life what we're all going to do in the next 50 years i'm sorry it's not sterner it's you got to read eisel mazzard and i what am i going to tell you do i have a lot of competition who do you know who's better publishing books on veganism who do you know who's better publishing books about nihilism you know like you know political philosophy you know really radical dissident political philosophy i don't have a lot of competition guys like oh yeah if anyone writes into me saying you know i liked your book but compared to peter singer compared to gary francione you know i i have very little competition in both but yeah no but but legitimately like i'll say this both to flatter myself and to flatter sterner sure sterner is my competition he's absolutely a book on the same shelf with my books absolutely but you know ethically emotionally and intellectually i think my my books outclassed sterner sterner did what he could but he only took it so far as you know sterner wasn't vegan infamously he opened a milk shop [Laughter] he opened a milk shop on kind of quasi-communist principles kind of workers co-op workers collective milk shop to try to benefit the dairy farmers kind of thing and it failed [Laughter] but also his theory of politics and theory of democracy and so he could only take it so far he kind of takes the critique and its implications only up to this limited point and i go much further um but yeah i mean you know what can i tell you there's there's a reason why for so many centuries people have drawn a kind of motivation and inspiration from sterner and i absolutely aspire to that same position i hope that 200 years after i've died i hope people still really are finding a kind of inspiration and these in these two books i've written even if they're the last two books i ever write i certainly do not intend to ever write a second book comparable to no more manifestos i mean that to be my really final statement about politics and political philosophy that's why i've taken so much time with it to be this kind of definitive statement but there's all kinds of other writing i'd like to do i currently very much have in mind writing a comedy not a comedic novel or a novel that is a comedy um i'd like to do comedy writing there's a lot of other creative writing i'd like to do and i may go into filmmaking and i may go into standard comedy and so on but i do not see the rest of my life as being a reiteration of the principles set down in in no more manifestos nor reiteration explained in future of an illusion and again i've said this before but very briefly the material that is in my book future of an illusion it is not on this channel it is not repeating or reiterating what you will see or hear in any of my youtube videos oh is king of kanto here in the audience that's weird i guess king of king of kanto must have me blocked and then i can't see his or her comments that's kind of funny so i have people here were replying to king oh no oh there we go sorry so king of kanto asks here's a really deep question hey if i go vegan can i lose 86 kilos by december i assume i assume this is a joke so but i will i will choose to take this joke seriously um you can lose weight on any diet the question is what kind of person do you want to be if you ask me can you lose weight in a diet that consists of coffee whiskey and bacon the answer is yes you can what kind of person do you want to be i do not want to be the [ __ ] who lost 60 pounds on coffee whiskey and bacon okay i don't want to be the person who makes excuses for smoking cigarettes who makes excuses for drinking alcohol or makes excuses for you know raising pigs in captivity slitting their throats and eating their flesh that's not who i want to be okay can you lose weight on a vegan diet yes can you gain weight on a vegan diet yes ultimately either you're vegan or not because you're capable of understanding that it's the right thing to do you know um there are all kinds of fad diets that are well documented on the internet you know and all of them can work you know most other people had much more encouraging replies to that someone recommends smoothies with black green smoothies with black pepper and turmeric you ever put black pepper and turmeric in a smoothie man guessing that clears your sinuses so look henry gann says and by the way i don't take this as a stupid or shallow comment hamrigan says quote the eradication of smallpox points to the possibility of the world coming together in certain circumstances that's right that's right there are numerous examples of that and in a sense when you examine the political history of those they're they're more worrying than they are encouraging america made seat belts mandatory in a very peculiar political process was it democratic no a small minority of people who cared a lot about seat belts got this law passed you know it's it's interesting but when things have happened nominally in the in the public interest that are ushered into existence through small numbers of elites coming together to make it happen uh i'd mention also the real history of how workplace health and safety standards were past the united states in all 50 states it's interesting but again once you kind of scratch the surface once you really look into the process whereby these legal legal changes happen it's more worrying than it is encouraging but yes no there there are i mean i think you know obviously i don't know if anyone here thought i was pessimistic about democracy i'm just trying to really talk through the issues and all their implications and not in a shallow way um but it would be completely ridiculous for someone to say democracy never works or for someone to say that referendums never work and it's always amused me that the british will so shamelessly say that um you know they had a referendum in england so-called brexit referendum and you really got to see how aristocratic the british still are face to face i heard so many british people saying openly shamelessly well you see this is why democracy could never work this is why letting the people vote on these things could never really completely yeah and you know we also have to you know obviously you guys are entitled to draw your own conclusions tell me something did democracy work like look back at look back at brexit look what happened you know all the doomsayers and the economic forecasts all this [ __ ] that went on with brexit i mean you know um is brexit a positive example or a or a negative example so you know the british are incredibly uncomfortable with this and that's a problem that indicates a deep problem in their society that has to be addressed one way or the other um democracy in libya uh democracy in we just read an article about it the other day that's right yes thank you my sweet uh democracy in tunisia yeah i still think of it as tunis for some reason around the tunisia i don't know why i just might probably have read too many documents from my older era but yeah you know um [Music] yeah we have a lot of tough questions about democracy but it's it's as it's just as misleading to ignore the successes as it is to ignore the the failures and you know i mean every empire that ever existed used the excuse the people are not ready for democracy the people are not mature enough for democracy in the british empire they especially like to say that the people are not masculine enough that the people are still too effeminate that was really the wording used uh in in the british empire interestingly yeah the the men were still too effeminate to take up the very masculine responsibility of of democracy and so on um you know it's anyway people are they're quick to justify the notion that uh democracy one day but not yet oh sure but look even south korea that today is a very successful democracy um you know you can criticize democracy in south korea i'm not saying nothing's wrong with it but they had a long period of transitional dictatorship you know before they got to mars it was a real question how much democracy how soon would the south korean people be able to to handle you know so again someone called uh moonin smith says quote ssris are fundamentally dangerous to society in my opinion we have made many many youtube videos talking about this i have a playlist that is called anti-antidepressants i can get it for you but i just look it up i say we because my girlfriend really has been part of that but there are just many many many videos already discussing that and passionately on my channel so i'm i'm not going to get into it here but to say i am anti-antidepressants is an understatement i'm a i'm a passionate advocate on that issue and have been for i don't know more than 10 years whatever it is and look i just say melissa and i have talked about it like that's such an important issue soon as a conversation was like look do you want to let this take over our lives do you want to let activism or lobbying government or public education be our full-time like we can start a foundation and start collecting donations to make you know this our full-time profession but you know do you want to let this take over your life or not so no it's a tremendously uh tremendously important question um yeah white rice yellow lentils and a multivitamin are all you need so that this comment from mx2 in the audience so i just want to ask mx2 i don't know if he's still here he or she but it looks like he um have you ever lived that way because i have i have lived literally on nothing but white rice yellow lentils and a multivitamin and i didn't i didn't even drink fruit juice or drink soy milk i have lived for periods of time where that was all i ate was a multivitamin pill uh white rice and yellow lentils and there was a period of time when i had garlic also which was a delight you know to have garlic with it and then i had a period of time where there was no more garlic and it was just white rice yeah yeah and as you may be guessing correctly this was due to absolute scarcity uh when i was living in northwestern laos and i remember so these were very poor people in northwestern laos that's why we were there but um to be fair the people who were in the town were not the poorest of the poor like the poorest of the poor were living in caves in the wilderness living in a shanty and like the people who were in the town they're poor uh really their total income less than 15 us dollars a month but still they weren't the poorest of the poor there were people who didn't have homes or didn't have houses or weren't in the in the town who were even poorer than that but even as desperately poor as the people there were they all knew i was vegetarian or vegan however you want to put it like i'm just saying in their culture whatever they thought of this um [Music] you know and i remember this one moment i remember especially but there were there were a couple moments with this there's one moment where this woman who was herself a poor farmer um she saw me delighted to find a single mango that had dropped from a mango tree i hadn't eaten any fruit in such a long time i'd just been eating uh white rice uh yellow lentils etc and i was so happy to see this mango that i dropped from a tree and i ran over and picked it up and then i discovered you know it was absolutely inedible it was totally as hard as one of those mangoes that fell prematurely it was inedible and whatever the expression of my face was she found it heartbreaking she was totally emotionally moved by this and um she beckoned me over and she said here i forget what she gave me she had some kind of fruit or vegetable in her in her hovel that she got over because she reckoned she knew starvation she knew whatever the look on my face was and again in my case it wasn't absolute starvation i had white rice yellow lentils and a vitamin pill but i had nothing else nothing not even garlic anymore you know um so that was really uh an incredibly monotonous unlimited diet and if i didn't have the vitamin pills i would have died i'm sure you know so yeah that's the most extreme i mean it was forced by circumstances but yeah the other thing i could have eaten was meat right the other available food anyway i'm i'm sorry i don't remember what the fruit or vegetable was that she had to hand to me if i if i dug in my remember there was something she could give me some kind of but she she knew she knew i mean i think in their culture they just think of me as a buddhist vegetarian as this strictly buddhist vegetarian and what that meant to them you know i don't know yep but it's possible you can um you can live and you can thrive on on nothing more than that we have yet more praise for black pepper and turmeric in a green smoothie guys thumbs up if you want us to make a youtube video i don't mind i'm i'm kind of a fan of black pepper do we own teamwork i think we do we're not using we have turmeric to use up so we we could do i don't black pepper we have somewhere i think we don't have a way to crush it so that's the problem but yeah because i've lived in cambodia and stuff i'm a bit of a fan of black power my ex-wife was not a black pepper person just goes to show we never should have uh we never should have been together but yeah where do you stand on black pepper let's just get really deep here for me you're a black pepper already yeah i i don't you know a relationship i don't remember you eating a lot of black pepper but that's just circumstance yeah you do okay okay good good good yeah when i make pasta for you i don't remember you adding black pepper to it i'm not this is not cause i'm gonna do deep complain you know and black pepper is one of those things people think it all tastes the same and then you start developing a snobbery for good versus bad black pepper and you find out it doesn't all taste the same so yeah many things are like that in life there was such a thing as good and excellent black pepper and like i say i used to live in laos i used to live in cambodia so i have some sensitivities things um anyway where where today is the great homeland of black pepper you know i used to have a family living in the great homeland of of mustard dijon france that's another incredibly simple ingredient but actually has a range of flavor okay guys thanks for putting up with this digression this this episode has been sponsored by cambodian black pepper yeah i wish get me uh get me a sponge okay so return to reading this this comment from a viewer in the audience all right um i might as well read the whole thing again uh rapidly but you'll see about half of this you haven't heard yet i only read the first half quote as for being vegan i understand the health benefits i have been vegetarian and vegan while i worked at whole foods all the way through my college years but the conundrum i constantly i constantly ran into was this most vegans focus is to to refuse the use of animal products but i met very few who realized how nearly impossible it would be do they not eat fruit too because the skin is shined with the shellacking of dead insects do they build their own houses because the wood caulk used in linoleum uses some parts of horse glue do they not drink water out of the sink because some part of the water in some states is uh filtered using bone shards to clean the water which means bone char but still the bones of cattle etc that's charred and then used to filter some products and now i continue the quote this part you haven't heard before quote for one to truly never hurt any animal we would be living in houses we built ourselves clothes we sowed from scratch and eating veggies and fruits in gardens we ignored ourselves so pause the watering pause okay so that is not my definition of veganism but if that is your definition of veganism is that such a terrible thing are you describing a dystopia are you describing hell on earth when you say people stitching their own clothes again that's not my ideal but if i met someone who strove for that idea who just made their own clothes and so then built their i have known some people like that frankly i knew a guy who built his own house says no it's not worth telling the story you know i've known various i've known various people built their own house remember one guy who built it entirely using you know recycled tires you know we get old truck tires and you stack them up and then you fill it up with uh concrete you pour the concrete and then you make this very stable structure and so on i've known different eccentrics who did but like do you think you're describing hell on earth when you say this to me this is not my definition of veganism at all what you're saying here like from my perspective it's neither good nor bad it's irrelevant to veganism like you can be vegan and build your own house and you can be vegan and rent somebody else's rent an apartment like to me it's in this sense it's spurious it's irrelevant right but that doesn't doesn't mean it's good or bad if you are enthusiastic about architecture you can build your own house if you're enthusiastic about i've known people who made their own clothes it's not that uncommon if you're enthusiastic about fashion you can make your own clothes this is irrelevant to vegan okay but your implicit point is that not everyone can do it therefore it's impossible and as i explained it length earlier in the video when you say impossible what you really mean is it's unthinkable for you you can't think it through do you want to drive a fancy car do you want to own an italian car it's impossible for everyone to own an italian sports car a car made in it it's impossible china india europe america brazil not everyone in the world can own an italian sports car therefore how dare you does that make sense therefore it's impossible for you therefore it's unattainable for you and again we gotta calibrate these claims about impossibility learning to play the piano was really hard learning to speak chinese is hard to learn for me for me owning an italian sports car would be really hard guys it would be i can't say i'm now 43 years old if i made it my goal to own an italian sports card italian made sports car by age 53 you tell me you think i can do it some of you guys have done it some of you are driving an italian sports car right now you know support me on patreon okay if you can afford an italian sports car you should be paying five dollars a month on patreon as part of this youtube gym so i have basically zero money in the world now age 43. do you think i could have an italian sports car by 53 not easy i could do it it's not impossible i could do it what would it mean to say that it's impossible for everyone in the world to be a hundred percent italian sports car drivers like what's what's the point what's the salience it seems silly too that's why i'm dealing with it in such depth right like i'm not just going to ridicule them just oh it's a fallacy appeal to nature fallacy you know appeal the futility fallacy you know etc a lot of people want you to do this i'm really talking this through with you i'm holding your hand as you walk through it and some of you in the audience there's going to be someone you love enough someone you care about and if someone you respect enough to go through it like this right okay not everyone can be a medical doctor you can maybe not your brother maybe not your sister but you what if 100 of the population became medical doctors society would implode who would farm the food who would be a police officer who would join the army not everyone can be a medical doctor you can should you different question not everyone can own an italian made sports car should you is it a good idea like you know i'm open to the possibility maybe nobody should drive an italian sports car like maybe that's really the ethical conclusion is that no this is unfit for human being i feel nobody should gamble you know it's just an example so i'm totally opposed to i think nobody should gamble at a casino most people disagree with me they tolerate gambling to whatever extent right but maybe you make an argument that fancy sports car should be bad but i'm saying some people get on a sports car and there's just no contradiction in it right but okay what if we lived in a world where 100 of people were trying to own an italian sports car and at any given time 90 of them were failing does that sound a lot like life in the united states of america right now this isn't a lot like life in california or in detroit michigan where everyone lives this consumerist fantasy that they can be the next one to get rich they can be the next one to have that italian sports car it's not everyone in america a huge percent of the population in america a huge percentage of people in america they want to own that sports car they want to be rich and they want to show off their wealth those that set of cultural values and they know not everyone can win they know they're going to be winners and losers maybe 10 of people are gonna get that wealthy that they get to buy that italian sports car okay so what is it like to live in a society where a hundred percent of people have that impossible unattainable dream and where a hundred percent of people are striving for that impossible unattainable dream and ninety percent are failing is that hell on earth okay now i want to ask you what would be so [ __ ] terrible about living in a society where 100 of people want to make their own clothes as a hobby they just want to buy the cloth and stitch the clothes for their own ethical reasons to really what is so [ __ ] bad about living in a society where people want to buy an axe and chop lumber and build their own house you can i've seen it done i've seen people building a house with their own hands but one of my grandfathers built his own house i saw people in laos and cambodia doing it with no money in third world conditions you can watch youtube videos of people doing it's not impossible okay 10-year plan i'm 43 what's more attainable by 53 do you think i can learn to stitch my own clothing and and build up a wooden hut live like [ __ ] hori devi toro i can live like henry david thoreau make my own hut i can that's easy by 50 of course i could do that next five years ten five years next ten years you can make a plan you can too okay but i'm scaling it up here i don't know if i can buy a fancy sports car 10 years now that seems less likely to me right it just seems like a less attainable goal from now a hundred thousand dollars to the car up front and then you have all these costs after yeah whatever just say which one is more attainable you know you want to build a hut in the woods you want to stitch your own clothing you can do it but this is my point what if you lived in a culture again these are not my values it's not my dream what if you live in a culture where 100 of people idealize that outcome that's the goal they're working towards they wish they could make their own clothes they wish they could build their own house they wish they could be ethically responsible for the food they eat and the wood that makes up the walls of their house and they try they try the best they can the same [ __ ] way 99 of people today are trying to get rich or die like they're trying to get rich and they don't care whose neck they have to step on to get it they're trying to get rich and they don't care how much damage they do they don't care about the consequences so many people with this attitude get rich or die trying get rich and they don't care who they rip off or who gets poor because they're getting rich so many people want that italian sports car you want to do any unethical thing for it all right that's the dystopia we live in now what is so [ __ ] bad about living in a society about living in a dystopia living in a terrible site where 100 of people are striving for this ideal you describe of being 100 vegan as you define it not as i define it being 100 responsible for the wood that's in the rafters of your house and of making your own clothes all right that would not be so terrible at all and yeah it costs money okay i've i've done it i've bought cloth and gone to a tailor and it's sat there and watched as the tailor may close out of the cloth once you've got the neck down it doesn't take very many minutes only take a few minutes to make a shirt or a jacket out of a piece of cloth you can sit there and chit chat with a tailor well they make now the reason it's easy for them they've done it a thousand times before this is someone who's their hands and their mind has practiced this a thousand times they take a piece of chalk and a ruler and they sketch it out this is you'd be amazed how quick it is it's why you can do it in a factory too right do churn out thousands of shirts okay you could you can do that all right it would cost you some money you have to own a pair of scissors you have to own a big flat table i'm just talking the reality i've seen a tailor do this for myself so it's basically she had she had a a metal ruler a heavy ruler to hold the fabric flat a pair of scissors a piece of chalk a needle and thread that costs less than buying an italian sports car it probably costs less than one vacation one beach vacation anywhere in the world to buy everything you need to make your own clothes i knew another woman who made her own clothes and dyed them too so what did she own she owned a bucket for the die she owned a sewing machine what does a sewing machine cost compared to a car second hand sewing machine versus a second hank are you kidding me second answering machine compared to a fancy sports car this costs nothing it's totally attainable it's attainable for the working poor you have a job at a factory and live this fantasy you're talking about so even if i think it's a stupid [ __ ] fantasy even if i myself am totally comfortable buying items made in a factory you know produced under ethically dubious conditions i may be comfortable with all kinds of ethical compromises this is not my ideal of veganism this is not my ideal of a morally responsible life but if it is your ideal one it's attainable for you and two our society is not going to become a dystopia if 100 of people start yearning and striving for it and 90 of people fail live their whole lives frustrated there'd be a beautiful society you're describing society i'll never know okay what if you lived in a society where the ideal was for everyone to be a medical doctor ninety percent of people fail maybe ten percent of people come medical doctor but every kid going through school they're competing and studying the exams they're trying to know as much as possible about the history of medical science they all know the names of the scientists who make great discoveries and breakthroughs and the people they look up to and admire are the foremost surgeons the foremost health researchers the foremost experts in society and and maybe 90 of people have their heart broken because they have an incredibly competitive system where only the best of the best can become medical doctors and everyone's proud if they become a medical doctor those are your cultural values is that is that a dystopia is that a terrible site it's impossible for 100 of people to be doctors it's not impossible for 100 up for 100 of people to want to be medical doctors democracy it's impossible to have a hundred percent of people participate in democracy it's impossible to have 100 of people participate as equals specifically it's right we can get into a lot of different more specific definitions of democracy and talk about the ways in which it's impossible to have a hundred percent maybe it's even impossible to have 55 percent of people right okay but you can have a society where a hundred percent of people strive to have that kind of democracy where that's the ideal 100 percent of people want they want to live in that democracy they know the difference between life in thailand and life in myanmar they know the difference between life in thailand and life in laos between life in thailand life in cambodia and say look here we are in thailand we have some democracy some and we're surrounded by countries that have none that have zero and hey hey guys let's get motivated we should all be willing to fight and die to have as much democracy as possible and maybe thailand within my lifetime can become just as democratic as japan just as democratic as south korea maybe just as democratic as switzerland can pick different models right can it be as democratic as ancient athens or something we can get into get into real questions this way all right um yes you can have a society where a hundred percent of people try to participate in democracy as equals and ninety percent fail and you have a wonderful society as a result you fail and fail and fail as individuals and collectively as a society as a whole you succeed right and the fundamental thesis one of the fundamental theses i think of bernie bernard demandeville's fable of the bees is to to get you thinking in this way the way in which as a society in its economic totality right everyone can be lying and cheating and stealing and everyone can be failing and yet you know the economy as a whole your republic as a whole your society as a whole or whatever it is it flourishes like it flourishes the aggregate of all these bad intentions can produce something positive and there is if you go to los angeles right now i think there's a sense even if it's a really cynical sense right it's a really cynical sense in which you can say the dynamism of los angeles is created by all these people who want to get rich they may have terrible motivations and they all want to own that italian sports car they don't want to drive down uh sepuldeva boulevard in their their italian sports car it's a terrible motivation and yet a certain kind of positive dynamism comes out of it wanting to be ethically responsible for the construction materials your house is made up is a wonderful motivation to have and wonderful things come out of it wanting to be a medical doctor in some ways it's wonderful in some ways it's horrible okay how does that compare to a society where everyone just wants to get rich and they don't care who they have to stab in the back who they have to lie to cheat or steal who's neck that's stefan said you know politics is centrally about impossible things peace is impossible the only peace you're ever going to have is in the shadow of war politics is entirely about creating and sustaining peace no matter how phony insincere tragic self-advocating the basis is you know something as simple as that equality is impossible in a million ways sorry if you don't have brothers and sisters you can't visualize this i'm not equal to my brothers and sisters we have you know the same genetics approximately i've more genetically in common with my brothers and sisters than anyone else on planet earth so far as i understand the science right even a half brother right even a half sister i have more in common with them genetically than anyone else on the planet they're not my equals and they can't be and they won't be i don't even want to try to be my equals and some of you know what this is like some of you don't you have brothers and sisters who are alcoholics or whatever you know let alone when you you look at society as a whole just think about your your grade six class the kids you used to sit down in the classroom with in grade six you're not all equals right you can yearn for equality right you can try for the impossible you can aim for the impossible you can have a society of people who desire equality right and and work toward that impossible goal and a lot of positive things can come out of trying and failing right you can have a whole society that yearns for atheism yearns for a secular or scientific society but i'm just going to say atheism because i think it's more honest we're never going to have 100 atheism you know i've met people there are people who are born and raised atheists they have atheist parents and they nevertheless go out on their own and join a crazy cult and become you know it happens all the time my point is like reinventing the wheel people will reinvent barbaric notions okay we can yearn for we can strive for a 100 atheist society instead of resigning ourselves to right the darkness of the dark age is going on forever and so much that's positive will come out of that yearning that trying that that failure right so the impossible it's not some kind of footnote in political science politics is really centrally and integrally about the impossible two types of impossible things thinkable and unthinkable and what people like me try to do dissident intellectuals creative artists right is to take things that are unthinkable and make them thinkable to take you hand in hand and ask you to step with me into the truly unknown to get you asking yourself questions you've never asked before to get you coming up with answers you've never thought of before right it's very easy to think it's impossible to have an atheist society right again during the french revolution think about how new and different this was right it's very easy for people to resign themselves to the thought that a vegan society is impossible everything everything seems impossible when you haven't done it before in the year 1850 a society with fundamental equality between black people and white people seemed impossible a society that was fundamentally accepting of homosexuals seemed impossible okay a hundred years later in 1950 still for the vast majority of americans for the vast majority of people in western europe those things seemed impossible political equality for blacks and whites political equality for homosexuals and heterosexuals in 1950 in europe look at how many countries women could even vote in in europe right it seemed unthinkable right and people like me had to make it thinkable right but some of these things you're talking about as impossible they're not just possible they're thinkable and they're very they're very powerful in shaping uh political discourse in our times all right guys if you guys have another question you have a comment now is a good time to leave it you can hit thumbs up the rest of what this guy wrote to me under this heading i'm going to turn off my phone now i don't think there's anything more worth reading the rest of what he said very much fell into our great european tradition of judge not lest you be judged and i'm talking about this because it's linked in his mind and i think it's linked in the minds of many people in the modern world um so point one is veganism is impossible all right an unattainable ideal for individuals and scaling it up for society as well that's the claim i've just refuted this or responded this thoroughly for three hours solid um okay and then linked to this is this great canard in our civilization of judge not lest you be judged you shouldn't think you're morally spirit anyone else you shouldn't think your ethical ideas are better than anyone else's we're all just poor sinners etc etc now guys i don't have to repeat myself there is a moral difference between george w bush and al gore all right and you do not have to believe that al gore pardon me you do not have to believe that al gore is a good person you do not have to believe he is a great person al gore was a better person than george w bush and that difference you may think of as quite subtle or hard to see like it's it's not obvious at first glance it's not just worth voting for it's not just worth talking about it's worth fighting and dying for okay i think the american people should hang their heads in shame that there wasn't a civil war when it was revealed as a matter of fact that the elections in florida were fraudulent that year okay now i mean this is an objective fact there was fraud it was an illegitimate election in the state of florida not the whole united states america in one state in florida it was a manipulated election and that one state decided the outcome where it was very close election who was willing to stand up and fight and die for democracy who was willing to stand up and fight and die for al gore nobody all right and i've got to tell you something there's a real sense in which that's the death of democracy in america because it reflects the profound inertia the profound indifference towards democracy that continues to be prevalent to this day far be it for me to suggest that every problem in democracy can be solved by civil war or violence but you know you should read machiavelli's discourses on this not machiavelli's the prince machiavelli's discourses two different books mickey village discourses are really the important one but machiavelli was one of those guys who was really willing to be honest about the extent to which if you want to have a republic you have to be willing to pay the price in blood not just once every generation again and again and again i think there are a lot of people in afghanistan right now who are hanging their heads in shame asking why didn't more of us fight for democracy and by the way that will include a lot of moderate muslims there are a lot of people in afghanistan who are muslim they're just less muslim than the taliban less religious than the taliban who are now hanging their heads in shame saying look we had a better society we had the possibility of a much better society flourishing and growing out of it but we were not willing to pay the price and blood there were not enough heroes among us who stood up to fight and die for that now i'll give you a parallel in western europe in case you didn't hear at one point france got conquered by the nazis remember that now eventually with time you know there was this grassroots guerrilla movement that resisted the nazis that developed but guys the reality of the extent to which the french elite and french institutions just began working for the germans the extent to which the french became a colony of the germans and became implicated and part of the fascist history of of germany you know is it's such a source of national shame that you will nowhere see it mentioned in any french history textbooks you know the extent to which france and germany from that point on were on the same side in world war ii people like to say the vichy regime the ichy if you don't know the history of it it's worth it's worth looking at and france has had to hang its head its head in shame ever since the french have had to be aware there just were not enough heroes in france there were not enough people willing to fight and die for the future of democracy um so this is my response to the trope all of you are going to have to deal with it even if you're watching this and you're not vegan this trope who are you to judge you know this idea that ethically we're all equal okay no we're not george w bush is not ethically equal to al gore all right um field marshall patan the man who took over france and ruled it on behalf of the nazis handed love with with the germans he's not ethically equal to having a democratically elected president and prime minister et cetera in a french society he's not the difference between peyton and the democratic alternative to payton however you want to think of that whether you think of it as the prime minister had to flee for his life or you know think of it as whoever i mean whoever would have hypothetically replaced bethan after a revolutionary war civil wars fought against peyton and patanisma and fought against vichy or something okay no it really matters okay i mean again whatever with germany again there's no easy personality to oppose to adolf hitler the difference between adolf hitler whoever would have ruled germany hypothetically if you had a democratic society you had elections stalin and whoever would have hypothetically ruled russia if you had a real working democracy in elections the dictator of north korea right now and if you want to say compare it to the reality of government in south korea or again the hypothetical government they could have no ethically we have to deal with fundamental inequalities great and small some people are stupid some people are lazy some people are ignorant and some people are cowards all i can ask you is what about you what kind of person are you going to be and what now what next in the next five years in the next 50 years with that self-knowledge with that awareness of your own specialness relative to george w bush relative to alexandria ocasio-cortez certainly relative to the imbeciles we've had leading to the vegan movement every single one of you in this audience is more intelligent than james aspie i suspect most of you are more intelligent than aoc uh ocasio-cortez i suspect maybe i'm wrong like but every single one of you is smarter than durianrider every single one of you is smarter than james aspie i go on and on every single one of you is smarter than nina and randa nelson right none of you are taking away the leadership role from them right none of you are leading the positive ecological and ethical change we all know we desperately need as we count down the years towards irreversible damage due to climate change so we count down the years with billions of animals being tortured to death and all this other stuff right it's really easy to think oh hypothetically what you would have done if you were alive in france during world war two hypothetic it's not hypothetical right the revolution is now it's happening all the time or it's not happening all the time because of your laziness your indolence what happened back in the year 2000 elections with george w bush taking over the government when there was fraud in florida who stood up who fought who showed some backbone who said democracy is worth fighting and dying for you refused to be ruled by a government that wasn't legitimately elected due to palpable fraud legally i mean palpable there was physical evidence of the fraud i don't want to get all the details here okay it's not a matter of opinion there was palpable irrefutable evidence of the fraud that happened in the in the state of florida all right through your silence through your conformity through your complicity you too become part of the problem and when people look back on those events just as they look back on what happened in france during world war ii right what's most astonishing of all is the ease and comfort of continuing in your bourgeois existence instead of rising to the challenge instead of pressing for the fundamental social culture and political change that we all know is necessary i'm addressing this video to those who will be heroes whether they know it or not