Veganism: Despised Minority, or "New Technology"?
03 December 2017 [link youtube]
There are many false assumptions built into the view that veganism is "a new technology" in the process of being adopted (by the masses) on a predictable "curve" (increasing exponentially from "early adopters" to the great majority). To a very limited extent, veganism may be compared to a a new technology, but it can also be compared to fringe religious groups —and to failed fringe religious groups, especially. Should we be planning for "a vegan future", meaning an vegan majority, or should we, instead, be planning for a long-term future as a despised minority, seeking to lobby for social change, even if we only represent 1% of the population? :-/
A topic proposed in reply to ModVegan's video, here: "Veganism & the Innovation Adoption Curve"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80YXIbbRpMs
Youtube Automatic Transcription
- yen we don't have a lot to offer we're
not the new iPhone ten or something veganism is not a technology that's offering to make your life easier it's an ethical burden with very real political demands in your time and very uncertain very dubious you know future positive outcomes and this is kind of a bell curve with people on one end the early adopters on one end and the laggards on the other end and this this bell curve is something that we see all the time especially with technological innovation and adaptation to new technologies but we see it with all kinds of innovations it doesn't have to be a scientific innovation necessarily doesn't have to be a technological innovation this can also be changes in the way that we live and they tend to follow a very predictable pattern and that's why we see this curve everywhere but most of us are still in that early two-and-a-half percentage range and that's kind of where veganism is at this point and we want to think about what can happen to make that take off the type of failure we have to plan for is precisely that of being an ethically defined minority over the long term of forming you know of organizing effective modes of lobbying effective ways of influencing the government if long-term we may never do better than 2% we may never do better than 1% in terms of people who are ethically motivated vegans how to be effective how to influence the future course of society knowing that in a lot of ways we have less growth potential than some of these pathetic cult groups Transcendental Meditation groups or you know Scientology or something like this because fundamentally we have a lot less to offer people yes aside from saving the planet what is the situation in Israel and was the situation in Taiwan so these are I think the two unique important examples of societies that have large percentage of people who've become vegan I don't think we could look at the example of Israel and say that the these gains this expansion of veganism could be transferred from Israel to Egypt's next door right right away if you say oh so if this is the precision people were vegan Israel don't you think in the next five years Egypt is gonna catch up well do you or don't you how about Syria on the border right right away just asking that question we stop and think Oh actually there are a lot of really unique really peculiar factors about Israel now meanwhile in Taiwan we're talking about a mixed Buddhist Confucian Chinese culture but a culture where Buddhism is one major religious voice among many Taiwan has a I think the largest and most vibrant vegan community or vegan communities plural in the world okay I think they're actually ahead of of Israel however do you think that any of the gains made in Taiwan could be transferred to the Philippines no chance the Philippines is divided between Catholics and Muslims at this point right those are the next Island South look at a map it's not that far you can say oh yeah yeah such a large percentage of people in Taiwan have become vegan and you know and this is the early adopter curve this is the thing I drew so therefore the next stop is the Philippines right this little this will take off this will take off in all of Southeast Asia you've got to be joking I think of that from the perspective of someone who sees veganism as a failure and if someone's going to continue to fail or we're gonna continue to be a small despised minority within Western society 2% is optimistic I think but we're a small despised minority that happens to be right about some of these issues and where we can lobby we can have our voices heard in a Western pluralistic Democratic Society we can't have big impacts baños yen so just a couple of days ago my girlfriend and I watched a Gary francais on a video that's exactly the same as all the other Gary franciotti videos I mean no shade no hatred but I mean I I turned on this video and I was fast-forwarding through it wondering is this exactly the same as every other lecture I've heard from Gary Francey Oh Nate or not and it was basically the same Gary France Tony is the leader in the frickin movement in case you guys don't know a major leader and when he got to this point I commented to you I comment to my girlfriend well watching it one aspect of this guy's philosophy that's really kind of sweet and naive and touching is that he still just really believes in veganism being spread one at a time person-to-person and he got to this point in lecture we just often make optimistically says the audience it's a Canadian audience he says well let's say there are 40,000 vegans in Canada this year if just one of you goes out you know and converts a friend to veganism this year if every one of us goes out and converts what were forced to be then next year there will be 80,000 vegans the next year 160,000 and you know he actually projected on the screen getting to millions and then getting to be vast majority of Canadians so that this kind of optimistic thinking we wouldn't we both laughed out loud I mean it's not really haha funny but we both laughed you're in France Theo and I say this this kind of optimistic thinking is common to all ideologies and to all religions especially new religions I'm you know the Catholic Church may not think they have the power to double the number of Catholics in a year whereas new cult groups do again and again and I lived through this between say 1965 and 1985 Hinduism with the United States by which I mean specifically white people converting to Hinduism was a big story it was on the cover of Time magazine it was at every Airport there used to be all these jokes from stand-up comedians about being hassled by white Hindus at the airport white people who converted into them trying to get you also to convert to Hinduism and the Transcendental Meditation groups the Hari Krishna's there were a number of different neo Hindu Hindu groups to the United States doing this and they did I mean if if you have this preconceived notion that new technologies new cultural movements new ideas go through these these early adopter phases they also thought of themselves as being optimistically in this early adopter phases they were the first few percentages of the population to convert in what was going to be a mass movement and it wasn't it failed but it's really important to say I've said this on my youtube channel maybe closer to two years ago it's really to recognize they actually got much further than veganism has gotten to date it's definitely in the United States the osho followers formally incorporated their own city in Oregon so you may know this story there is some hilarious and and chilling anecdotes in that you can find documentaries about this within YouTube so they called it Rajneesh pardon me Rajneesh Purim so you know the city of rajin issues is a metonym for osho they're they're one of the many names used by the sky osho whom they were devotees of and they did actually get to the the kind of critical mass and level of organization and level of affluence to start doing genuine community building activities within the United States more than just creating temples or what-have-you they really did build communities incorporate them cities now I'm not saying I'm not presuming that that is the desired modus operandi of vegans we see some claiming they're gonna do it though we were just looking at the new manifesto from direct action everywhere there are compassionate cities programs it comes pretty close to Rajneesh a lot of their stuff is pretty culty but a lot of what they're calling for it establishing alternate communities with alternate transportation systems and so on there's a lot to be right in to the vagueness of their claims and their promises but in terms of this imaginary slope that you're gonna go from early adopter to mass-market similar to the patterns seen by some technologies it was easy for white Hindus in America to delude themselves into thinking that they were the early adopters going up the slope and this was going to become a mass phenomenon the Hindu ization of America and from their perspective why not from their perspective they have a technology that fundamentally makes their lives better especially the people who believe in transcendental meditation they do believe in it as the technology they do market it as a technology and vegans likewise I think we do deserve to be criticized we may regard what we're doing as a new technology that makes other technologies obsolete but it's not there's an e deck versus emic perception here you know from a meat-eaters perspective there is no sense in which broccoli makes beef obsolete I mean I may feel that way I think that you passionately but there's no sense in which the tofu is gonna make a beef obsolete as a technological level in some ways yes the progress of veganism can be compared to technological progress and in some ways it can't in some ways it has to be compared to a grubby little cult like the followers of Osho who set up this crappy City you know set up their little their cult out in Oregon you do by the way eventually got involved in some illegal terrorist activities and what-have-you there's a whole thing's got correct as is so regular the case with cult groups things got out of control and arrests were made and the the community was more or less broken up and today that community is a Christian run like Bible Camp like yeah so you're missing out on the facial reactions you're like oh but anyway uh it's sort of like a day camp for Christians because they they built up all these facilities and they ended up selling them selling the property all right to whoever could pay the the market price anyway yeah so there are a lot of false assumptions here I want to challenge this so what is it within anthropology the diffusion s model that mod vegan is referring to here has been totally discredited it's not just unfashionable it has been discredited and it's interesting that those concepts really originated in the 1960s looking primarily at anthropological and agricultural abstractions how technology was adopt new farming technology was adopted this this kind of thing but today we think of this idea this growth curve the early adopter phase and then mass-market based primarily in terms of digital technology and that is very misleading now almost nothing can be compared to digital technology this came up in my book review of the book that was called half earth I'm sorry I forgot the author's name you can find that in the book review playlist but that's an interesting book and among the kind of dangerous allusions is that this guy presents the case that the whole economy is going to behave like the digital economy like the computer economy the same way that you could have doubling and quadrupling of productivity without using more resources while actually use fewer resources less resources being more efficient that in the same way the whole human economy was gonna behave this way and therefore we would need less and less land use and so on now of course I'll arias Lee the switching to a vegan diet is one of the exceptions to this so as you do a vegan diet does make us more efficient we use far less land far less water etc but I don't know so we're doing this on a wooden table if you want a man manufacture wooden tables doesn't matter if using wood from an Indonesia or wood from Canada or something the advent of computer technology it may make the design process more efficient they may make sanding the table we're efficient or something but there's no sense in which you can say oh we're gonna use half as much wood and make twice as many tables next year thanks to digital technology it does not work that way in a very meaningful sense nothing operates the way digital technology does and this is an important point in terms of this curve of mass adoption of technology the functions achieved by a computer this word computer is already a little misleadingly vague those changed fundamentally for the 1970s 80s and 90s there was a time when and I can remember this cool people look down their noses at computers as being just for nerds well what did computers do at that time what were the actual functions what were the things you could achieve with a computer then 10 years later the computer was taking over the functions that were formerly done by while a typewriter obviously but there was an early stage when you couldn't even do that in a computer when you could do mathematical operations and so on but word processing was really not possible on a computer in the early days so it was taking over the functions of what used to be a typewriter take people taking over the functions what used to be a telephone and then a big one took over the functions of what used to be a VCR you could play movies on a computer so you can do this chart of the population adopting computers but the early adopters were using computers for functions that are fundamentally different from and fundamentally alien to what the mass-market used them for so you know the average person today owns a computer and they use it to watch movies use Skype make phone calls to their friends for all social media applications or what have you however if you say oh this is a situation where the early adopters people were doing you know advanced mathematics on a computer you know for example the sending a man to the moon the early space exploration there had these incredibly primitive computers that they've relied on for complex mathematics that human lives depended on you know it's it's amazing with what they could do but you know if you think about who is using a computer for those functions the functions a computer could do in the period of say 1975 to 1980 that's still an incredibly small part of the population and it's really misleading to look at this mass adoption because in a sense you can say it's the same technology but it's the same technology being used for fundamentally different things veganism is not like that and again I say maybe in a very meaningful sense nothing else is like that maybe these are unique properties of computers and no other technology now again diffusion ism was really discredited within contemporary anthropology it's it's an outmoded and a much despised model but it did lead people to think in terms of things like the the spread of religious ideology a new religion or what have you in these terms in these diffusion as terms as if this was a new technology being adopted by people and again I mean I can say to some extent there's some truth to that but it's it's really this is why it became a fashionable look at the spread of Islam within Indonesia do you really want to describe this as a new technology being appropriated by people it doesn't that remove completely the human tragedy of what happened as these people lost their own culture and lost a lot of their independence and freedom of thought and sexual freedom and this complete transformation of the the culture whether you're talking about northern Africa spread of Islam in northern Africa or the spread of Islam in Indonesia yes you can try to code it in these I don't know say - to represent this as if the spread of an idea is people adopting a technology but it is I think you know deeply dishonest and deeply misleading and obviously mod vegan has only good intentions here but likewise I would say it's deeply dishonest and misleading to talk about veganism this way right now okay come back to point one we might as well hear Gary Francey own a and him talking about doubling and doubling how many people are vegan which again an ideological Hindu could have said back in 1965 back when the Beatles briefly got involved with Hinduism and that was big News the Beatles were on the cover of every magazine meditating and wearing flower garlands and going to India it seemed like Hinduism was really gonna be hip in the white western world about 65 to 85 right think about any group of people you know I mean you can think about your own family but that's misleading I've just been a student at University of Victoria in British Columbia and I knew this came up earlier I actually knew a lot of my classmates better than Melissa did Melissa had classrooms of 400 people or something but I you know I really did have pretty small classes where I knew a lot of the people if I just visualize one of those classrooms you know from when I was a university student and then I really think about those people who you know I have some face-to-face knowledge of can I imagine 50% of that class becoming vegan within the next 10 years you know there's that guy's the guy and if I'm just being awesome so but I've just think about those people I know you know maybe one or two of them would become vegan but even that would be a surprise and no I can't imagine this whole classroom becoming vegan I can't more I can't imagine half of them becoming vegan and all of them have spent a couple of years talking to me and some of them looking at my youtube channel or what have you you know it's not it's not a new idea I wouldn't British Columbia and living in a city where veganism is visible I mean this kind of human calculus is is very humbling I think to these these ideological claims I don't believe my own family members are gonna become vegan but I mean that can be misleading you may be related to people who have a lot in common with you so maybe within your own family you do feel a lot of your relatives you know can become vegan you're very optimistic that way but whether you think about your co-workers at the workplace or people who happen to be assigned to the same class with you in high school there people have to be assigned the same class to you in university I was sitting in university classrooms the people who were doing Asian Studies these were disproportionately people who are very familiar with the history culture and languages of Asia people who are studying Buddhism and Hinduism and things like that a few you know these were if anything you might think I'd have a ludicrously optimistic a few of this based on just who was in the classroom me but I don't I look at them you know just in my own mind's eye looking back at that classroom and people I study with I don't even know if there's one person in that classroom who has the potential to become vegan and computer tech know Mogi is not like that converting to Islam is not like that I mean it may sound strangely they don't have what it takes you know to be vegan but that's that's really what I mean and I'm really being sincere in in saying that um so as misleading as it is again if you were living in the United States from 1965 to 1985 even in Australia I've heard about these groups the Transcendental Meditation groups in Australia where they thought they were taking over Australia because they were getting white people to confer and donate money this is another big factor that the religions were an advantage their religions have over veganism is the donation side of the game because you can get huge donations just by promising people that go to heaven after they die veganism doesn't have that edge we only promise you you have a 70% lower chance of getting heart attack getting cancer etc but after you die that's that's your problem we can't help you but anyway it was easy for people inside those cult groups to think this is growing exponentially or this is going through an early adopter phases and the chart is we're gonna take over the the whole mass market another example sometimes that you hear these things from people who are racist sometimes not for people were just sincerely concerned in Canada all the time I hear from people that they think the Chinese are taking over Canada all right no sorry I'm currently living in China this is being recorded right I speak enough Chinese have no study the Chinese claim for several years I like Chinese people you know this is not this is not my point why do some white Canadians perceive this because they see Chinese restaurants on the streets I mean Chinese restaurants I've mentioned this in my manifesto video what was the video hultafors on community my vision festive video community you know one of the one of the sort of most low-key but durable and impactful forms of activism for gay rights and for veganism and for Chinese food is just having permanent institutions there when you live in a city that has permanent gay nightclubs that lets people know you know homosexuals are a permanent part of this community it just says hey we have a gay community or we have a significant number people were gay this isn't a fad this isn't something's gonna disappear this is also true of Chinese restaurants now if you live in a city like Victoria BC Canada or Toronto or mantra or what-have-you some people just they see Chinese restaurants everywhere and they think wow the Chinese are taking over well the Chinese are taking over what are the Chinese taking over minimum-wage jobs that have to compete with McDonald's even then I would only say maybe I mean I think if you look at the market fundamentals I don't think it's easy at all for Chinese restaurants to compete with McDonald's in Chipotle and to provide their people with wages and retirement benefits and what-have-you I think that's a really tough racket I think it'd be really easy to say maybe the number of Chinese restaurants hits a peak and then a lot of them are going out of business where I just was there were a lot of empty Chinese restaurants in in Victoria BC it looks like something to me that peaked in about 1992 and now a lot of them are going out of business but the fact that there are even if you live in a city that's full of vibrant economically successful Chinese restaurants that are paying their employees minimum wage and competing with McDonald's this way does that mean that the Chinese are taking over City Hall doesn't mean that the Chinese taking over provincial Parliament does it mean that the Chinese are taking over the Congress or the Senate or whatever the elected offices are in your country I doubt it I mean take a look at British Columbia's Parliament or Canada's you know federal parliament or the American Senate what have you the fact that you have something visible in this way at this low level it may be significant that some people like the Chinese food when it's once in a while but it neither means that the Chinese population is taking over the country nor does it mean in another sense that white people are being taken over by Chinese culture it really doesn't and this comparison is sadly very meaningful for veganism the fact that you have successful vegan restaurants doesn't even mean a significant percentage of their customers are vegan it doesn't mean a significant percentage of their customers are becoming vegan it can't be compared to adopting a new technology it can't be compared to adopting a new culture or a new religion or anything else it's just another niche in the free market competing with McDonald's and where the same people who eat at a vegan restaurant once in a while may indeed be eating at McDonald's once in awhile I was like I'm not going to get into in this video and in depth but you know that the delusion that veganism is a superior technology I think it also rests on health claims that are shaky that are weak I wish I could tell you that the health benefits of veganism you only get by being a 100% principled vegan but I think we all know what's not true I've mentioned this before at least have mentioned form conversation my girlfriend but you know I was um I was at this school and could Ming and there was an American guy and he had basically switched from an American standard diet to a Chinese standard diet I saw what he ate because we were in the same school every day so I saw what he ate for breakfast and lunch every day he was eating meat three meals a day but he had all the benefits of a vegan diet I mean I assumed cheese had disappeared from his diet and he switched from eating steaks and and hamburgers to eating a typical Chinese style that were there little bits and pieces of meat so it's radically less meat but all the stuff that the vegan doctors boast about you he was on high blood pressure medication and he suddenly had to stop taking the high blood pressure he had all these health conditions that were reversed and he had to be taken off the medication so if you've watched the monologues through different vegan doctors they all boast about that I wish it would be very convenient for me if you only got those health benefits from being an ideologically consistent ethical vegan but you don't you can get those health benefits by eliminating dairy and cheese from your diet and by eating a reduce Italian diet or what have you so regarding this as a technology again I mean instead you could just stop eating at McDonald's and start eating at the local Chinese restaurant or what have you this is this is another element of this that is misleading now finally I appreciate that maude vegan mentions just one example one real-world example which is Israel of a country that is a high level a high percentage of vegans a significant vegan population but even there would be really misleading to assume we're looking at an inevitable upward curve what is the situation in Israel and was the situation in Taiwan so these are I think the two unique important examples of societies that have large percentage of people who become vegan in both Israel and Taiwan there are extraordinary religious circumstances extraordinary military and political circumstances and even extraordinary ecological circumstances that have led a significant population to become vegan now Israel is incredibly ethnically diverse internally this is not just the division between Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis or between Palestinians and and Jews or what have you within the Jewish population you're talking about Iranian Jews and North African Jews and Eastern European Jews and like British and American and French Jews it is an incredibly internally diverse fractious and fragmentary culture it's very difficult to generalize and say that this could become a mass phenomenon within Israel you know we have to be open to the possibility we can't look at these examples where they can't fail mentality we have to open the possibility that it's already reached its maximum in Israel or that it's even going to decline after hitting a peak which is of course what happened with Hinduism and many these other examples but further I don't think we could look at the example of Israel and say that these these gains this expansion of veganism could be transferred from Israel to Egypt next door right right away so if this is the percent of people were vegan Israel don't you think in the next five years Egypt is gonna catch up well do you or don't you how about Syria on youth reporter right right away just asking that question we stop and think oh actually there are a lot of really unique really peculiar factors about Israel now this includes the challenges if you talk to Israelis about why so many Israelis have become vegan there's a unique role for the kosher diet and Jewish dietary laws and maybe we don't want to admit that to ourselves as vegans maybe we want to think you know all of our fellow vegans are vegan for ethical reasons as you know a huge percentage of vegans are vegan because they got you know the doctor told they're gonna have a heart attack if they don't change their diet the vegan for purely health reasons or what have you well it may be hard to imagine if you haven't spent time around you know Orthodox Jews or Jews you take those laws seriously there really are Jewish people who became vegan because they found it a simpler way to live by Jewish dietary laws now you can also of course meet Israeli Jews who become vegan who have contempt for the kosher dietary laws but believe me this is an impossible to imagine for outsiders factor in terms of why so many Jews became vegan in Israel this was a and another factor as a very large terms of Jews are lactose intolerance so if you're someone who's struggling with Jewish Jewish dietary laws you can't drink milk products anyway guess what guys that was the thin edge of the wedge for why veganism took off in a culture and in a religion that is actually completely hostile toward veganism now meanwhile in Taiwan we're talking about a mixed Buddhist Confucian Chinese culture but a culture where Buddhism is one major religious voice among many Taiwan has a I think the largest and most vibrant vegan community or vegan communities plural in the world okay I think they're actually ahead of of Israel however do you think that any of the gains made in Taiwan could be transferred to the Philippines no chance the Philippines is divided between Catholics and Muslims at this point right those are the next islands South look at a map it's not that far you can say oh yeah yeah such a large percentage of people in Taiwan have become vegan and you know and this is the early adopter curve this is the thing I drew so therefore the next stop is the Philippines right this little Bissel take off this will take off in all of Southeast Asia you've got to be joking all right the extent to which Taiwan's veganism is based on Buddhist traditional culture and I want to say this openly for outsiders may be hard to imagine but in the same sense that Jews individual Jewish people may be disillusioned with Judaism and be disillusioned with the kosher diet and therefore adopt veganism in Taiwan when I talk to serious like vegan activists face to face very often they were people disillusioned with Buddhism disillusioned with what was going on in the religion who became vegan for that reason so it's not that there are such Orthodox Buddhists that they become vegan again that wouldn't make any sense at all within Judaism it's not like oh you're such an Orthodox Jew you choose to be vegan but it's actually sense of frustration with their religion not living up to its espoused goals and in Taiwan it was very often feeling that Buddhism had become disengaged from the ecological struggle but also from animal rights and other concerns and seeing hypocrisy and corruption and Buddhism and then veganism being an alternative that was not in those ways corrupts and what have you so that's part of the kind of religious psychology of people adopting veganism in Taiwan but one generation dies and is replaced by another everyone knows this in Taiwan the new generation growing up is way less religious than the old generation on its way out and the religion here we're talking about is Buddhism miscellaneous Confucianism what-have-you so it's entirely possible we're not looking at the early adopter phase that Taiwan is an example of country that's maxing out about now with veganism or even in fact in you scrub it that will then decline because of these unique factors these unique factors that led them to a high level of veganism guys I think it is really dangerous to think in a with a what's called they can't fail mentality of veganism from this perspective I will go so far as say veganism can fail and veganism will fail what we have to plan for is not gary francais oneís fantasy of the number of vegans doubling every year take over the country or take you over the whole world okay it's not a plan for we what we have to plan for is not mod vegans fantasy that we're in the early adopter curve and we're gonna become an absolute majority of the population in no time in the same way that cellular phones were there was an early adopter phase back when they were largely useless and then they took over the whole population as they became you know more functional more affordable etc etc when they became more than just a status symbol for the wealthy that was an early phase of a phone to like that the type of failure we have to plan for is precisely that of being an ethically defined minority over the long term of forming you know of organizing effective modes of lobbying effective ways of influence of the government if long term we may never do better than 2% we may never do better than 1% in terms of people who are ethnically motivated vegans how to be effective how to influence the future course of society knowing that in a lot of ways we have less growth potential than some of these pathetic cult groups Transcendental Meditation groups or you know Scientology or something like this because fundamentally we have a lot less to offer people yes aside from saving the planet I'm sorry to say but that just doesn't motivate people the same way that you know converting to a new religion and being promised in mortal life after death or being offered all the benefits of community and what-have-you that you get to that we don't have a lot to offer we're not the new iPhone 10 or something veganism is not a technology that's offering to make your life easier it's an ethical burden with very real political demands on your time and very uncertain very dubious you know future positive outcomes so you know with that being said I love it I'm in the movement long term myself and I'm looking around saying hey who else's is with me not vegan and I agree about a lot of things I just want to put this isn't as a as a Caboclos in the video the last time I talked to her you know I pitched her a couple of ideas including saying look you know within Canada why don't we form a special lobbying group just on leather something like PCRM so PC arm is Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine they're lobbying in American health issues linked to veganism but we could have a specialized group just lobbying government and doing public education and outreach in schools and across the board just dealing with leather I think leather is an example of an obsolete technology leather has been made obsolete by progress of science and now Nike shoes are just exhibit that leather and so on and we can try to educate the public hey you know what leather actually contains chromium hexane it's bad for your health it's bad for the human health of the people involved in the manufacturing process it's bad for the health of the cows that are tortured and suffer horribly I think leather is a unique example where some of this technological thinking thinking to reside obsolescence works and it's a strong suit we can press forward on however I think of that from the perspective of someone who sees veganism as a failure and if someone's going to continue to fail we're going to continue to be a small despised minority within Western society 2% is optimistic I think but we're a small despised minority that happens to be right about some of these issues and where we can lobby we can have our voices heard in a Western pluralistic Democratic Society we can have big impacts and there are tons of examples of tiny minorities who have had big impacts and you can watch my videos about them I think that's the strategic focus for how we need to move forward and that any other notion of this being a new technology that's going to take over the mass market is ultimately a dangerous and self-defeating delusion about us yen
not the new iPhone ten or something veganism is not a technology that's offering to make your life easier it's an ethical burden with very real political demands in your time and very uncertain very dubious you know future positive outcomes and this is kind of a bell curve with people on one end the early adopters on one end and the laggards on the other end and this this bell curve is something that we see all the time especially with technological innovation and adaptation to new technologies but we see it with all kinds of innovations it doesn't have to be a scientific innovation necessarily doesn't have to be a technological innovation this can also be changes in the way that we live and they tend to follow a very predictable pattern and that's why we see this curve everywhere but most of us are still in that early two-and-a-half percentage range and that's kind of where veganism is at this point and we want to think about what can happen to make that take off the type of failure we have to plan for is precisely that of being an ethically defined minority over the long term of forming you know of organizing effective modes of lobbying effective ways of influencing the government if long-term we may never do better than 2% we may never do better than 1% in terms of people who are ethically motivated vegans how to be effective how to influence the future course of society knowing that in a lot of ways we have less growth potential than some of these pathetic cult groups Transcendental Meditation groups or you know Scientology or something like this because fundamentally we have a lot less to offer people yes aside from saving the planet what is the situation in Israel and was the situation in Taiwan so these are I think the two unique important examples of societies that have large percentage of people who've become vegan I don't think we could look at the example of Israel and say that the these gains this expansion of veganism could be transferred from Israel to Egypt's next door right right away if you say oh so if this is the precision people were vegan Israel don't you think in the next five years Egypt is gonna catch up well do you or don't you how about Syria on the border right right away just asking that question we stop and think Oh actually there are a lot of really unique really peculiar factors about Israel now meanwhile in Taiwan we're talking about a mixed Buddhist Confucian Chinese culture but a culture where Buddhism is one major religious voice among many Taiwan has a I think the largest and most vibrant vegan community or vegan communities plural in the world okay I think they're actually ahead of of Israel however do you think that any of the gains made in Taiwan could be transferred to the Philippines no chance the Philippines is divided between Catholics and Muslims at this point right those are the next Island South look at a map it's not that far you can say oh yeah yeah such a large percentage of people in Taiwan have become vegan and you know and this is the early adopter curve this is the thing I drew so therefore the next stop is the Philippines right this little this will take off this will take off in all of Southeast Asia you've got to be joking I think of that from the perspective of someone who sees veganism as a failure and if someone's going to continue to fail or we're gonna continue to be a small despised minority within Western society 2% is optimistic I think but we're a small despised minority that happens to be right about some of these issues and where we can lobby we can have our voices heard in a Western pluralistic Democratic Society we can't have big impacts baños yen so just a couple of days ago my girlfriend and I watched a Gary francais on a video that's exactly the same as all the other Gary franciotti videos I mean no shade no hatred but I mean I I turned on this video and I was fast-forwarding through it wondering is this exactly the same as every other lecture I've heard from Gary Francey Oh Nate or not and it was basically the same Gary France Tony is the leader in the frickin movement in case you guys don't know a major leader and when he got to this point I commented to you I comment to my girlfriend well watching it one aspect of this guy's philosophy that's really kind of sweet and naive and touching is that he still just really believes in veganism being spread one at a time person-to-person and he got to this point in lecture we just often make optimistically says the audience it's a Canadian audience he says well let's say there are 40,000 vegans in Canada this year if just one of you goes out you know and converts a friend to veganism this year if every one of us goes out and converts what were forced to be then next year there will be 80,000 vegans the next year 160,000 and you know he actually projected on the screen getting to millions and then getting to be vast majority of Canadians so that this kind of optimistic thinking we wouldn't we both laughed out loud I mean it's not really haha funny but we both laughed you're in France Theo and I say this this kind of optimistic thinking is common to all ideologies and to all religions especially new religions I'm you know the Catholic Church may not think they have the power to double the number of Catholics in a year whereas new cult groups do again and again and I lived through this between say 1965 and 1985 Hinduism with the United States by which I mean specifically white people converting to Hinduism was a big story it was on the cover of Time magazine it was at every Airport there used to be all these jokes from stand-up comedians about being hassled by white Hindus at the airport white people who converted into them trying to get you also to convert to Hinduism and the Transcendental Meditation groups the Hari Krishna's there were a number of different neo Hindu Hindu groups to the United States doing this and they did I mean if if you have this preconceived notion that new technologies new cultural movements new ideas go through these these early adopter phases they also thought of themselves as being optimistically in this early adopter phases they were the first few percentages of the population to convert in what was going to be a mass movement and it wasn't it failed but it's really important to say I've said this on my youtube channel maybe closer to two years ago it's really to recognize they actually got much further than veganism has gotten to date it's definitely in the United States the osho followers formally incorporated their own city in Oregon so you may know this story there is some hilarious and and chilling anecdotes in that you can find documentaries about this within YouTube so they called it Rajneesh pardon me Rajneesh Purim so you know the city of rajin issues is a metonym for osho they're they're one of the many names used by the sky osho whom they were devotees of and they did actually get to the the kind of critical mass and level of organization and level of affluence to start doing genuine community building activities within the United States more than just creating temples or what-have-you they really did build communities incorporate them cities now I'm not saying I'm not presuming that that is the desired modus operandi of vegans we see some claiming they're gonna do it though we were just looking at the new manifesto from direct action everywhere there are compassionate cities programs it comes pretty close to Rajneesh a lot of their stuff is pretty culty but a lot of what they're calling for it establishing alternate communities with alternate transportation systems and so on there's a lot to be right in to the vagueness of their claims and their promises but in terms of this imaginary slope that you're gonna go from early adopter to mass-market similar to the patterns seen by some technologies it was easy for white Hindus in America to delude themselves into thinking that they were the early adopters going up the slope and this was going to become a mass phenomenon the Hindu ization of America and from their perspective why not from their perspective they have a technology that fundamentally makes their lives better especially the people who believe in transcendental meditation they do believe in it as the technology they do market it as a technology and vegans likewise I think we do deserve to be criticized we may regard what we're doing as a new technology that makes other technologies obsolete but it's not there's an e deck versus emic perception here you know from a meat-eaters perspective there is no sense in which broccoli makes beef obsolete I mean I may feel that way I think that you passionately but there's no sense in which the tofu is gonna make a beef obsolete as a technological level in some ways yes the progress of veganism can be compared to technological progress and in some ways it can't in some ways it has to be compared to a grubby little cult like the followers of Osho who set up this crappy City you know set up their little their cult out in Oregon you do by the way eventually got involved in some illegal terrorist activities and what-have-you there's a whole thing's got correct as is so regular the case with cult groups things got out of control and arrests were made and the the community was more or less broken up and today that community is a Christian run like Bible Camp like yeah so you're missing out on the facial reactions you're like oh but anyway uh it's sort of like a day camp for Christians because they they built up all these facilities and they ended up selling them selling the property all right to whoever could pay the the market price anyway yeah so there are a lot of false assumptions here I want to challenge this so what is it within anthropology the diffusion s model that mod vegan is referring to here has been totally discredited it's not just unfashionable it has been discredited and it's interesting that those concepts really originated in the 1960s looking primarily at anthropological and agricultural abstractions how technology was adopt new farming technology was adopted this this kind of thing but today we think of this idea this growth curve the early adopter phase and then mass-market based primarily in terms of digital technology and that is very misleading now almost nothing can be compared to digital technology this came up in my book review of the book that was called half earth I'm sorry I forgot the author's name you can find that in the book review playlist but that's an interesting book and among the kind of dangerous allusions is that this guy presents the case that the whole economy is going to behave like the digital economy like the computer economy the same way that you could have doubling and quadrupling of productivity without using more resources while actually use fewer resources less resources being more efficient that in the same way the whole human economy was gonna behave this way and therefore we would need less and less land use and so on now of course I'll arias Lee the switching to a vegan diet is one of the exceptions to this so as you do a vegan diet does make us more efficient we use far less land far less water etc but I don't know so we're doing this on a wooden table if you want a man manufacture wooden tables doesn't matter if using wood from an Indonesia or wood from Canada or something the advent of computer technology it may make the design process more efficient they may make sanding the table we're efficient or something but there's no sense in which you can say oh we're gonna use half as much wood and make twice as many tables next year thanks to digital technology it does not work that way in a very meaningful sense nothing operates the way digital technology does and this is an important point in terms of this curve of mass adoption of technology the functions achieved by a computer this word computer is already a little misleadingly vague those changed fundamentally for the 1970s 80s and 90s there was a time when and I can remember this cool people look down their noses at computers as being just for nerds well what did computers do at that time what were the actual functions what were the things you could achieve with a computer then 10 years later the computer was taking over the functions that were formerly done by while a typewriter obviously but there was an early stage when you couldn't even do that in a computer when you could do mathematical operations and so on but word processing was really not possible on a computer in the early days so it was taking over the functions of what used to be a typewriter take people taking over the functions what used to be a telephone and then a big one took over the functions of what used to be a VCR you could play movies on a computer so you can do this chart of the population adopting computers but the early adopters were using computers for functions that are fundamentally different from and fundamentally alien to what the mass-market used them for so you know the average person today owns a computer and they use it to watch movies use Skype make phone calls to their friends for all social media applications or what have you however if you say oh this is a situation where the early adopters people were doing you know advanced mathematics on a computer you know for example the sending a man to the moon the early space exploration there had these incredibly primitive computers that they've relied on for complex mathematics that human lives depended on you know it's it's amazing with what they could do but you know if you think about who is using a computer for those functions the functions a computer could do in the period of say 1975 to 1980 that's still an incredibly small part of the population and it's really misleading to look at this mass adoption because in a sense you can say it's the same technology but it's the same technology being used for fundamentally different things veganism is not like that and again I say maybe in a very meaningful sense nothing else is like that maybe these are unique properties of computers and no other technology now again diffusion ism was really discredited within contemporary anthropology it's it's an outmoded and a much despised model but it did lead people to think in terms of things like the the spread of religious ideology a new religion or what have you in these terms in these diffusion as terms as if this was a new technology being adopted by people and again I mean I can say to some extent there's some truth to that but it's it's really this is why it became a fashionable look at the spread of Islam within Indonesia do you really want to describe this as a new technology being appropriated by people it doesn't that remove completely the human tragedy of what happened as these people lost their own culture and lost a lot of their independence and freedom of thought and sexual freedom and this complete transformation of the the culture whether you're talking about northern Africa spread of Islam in northern Africa or the spread of Islam in Indonesia yes you can try to code it in these I don't know say - to represent this as if the spread of an idea is people adopting a technology but it is I think you know deeply dishonest and deeply misleading and obviously mod vegan has only good intentions here but likewise I would say it's deeply dishonest and misleading to talk about veganism this way right now okay come back to point one we might as well hear Gary Francey own a and him talking about doubling and doubling how many people are vegan which again an ideological Hindu could have said back in 1965 back when the Beatles briefly got involved with Hinduism and that was big News the Beatles were on the cover of every magazine meditating and wearing flower garlands and going to India it seemed like Hinduism was really gonna be hip in the white western world about 65 to 85 right think about any group of people you know I mean you can think about your own family but that's misleading I've just been a student at University of Victoria in British Columbia and I knew this came up earlier I actually knew a lot of my classmates better than Melissa did Melissa had classrooms of 400 people or something but I you know I really did have pretty small classes where I knew a lot of the people if I just visualize one of those classrooms you know from when I was a university student and then I really think about those people who you know I have some face-to-face knowledge of can I imagine 50% of that class becoming vegan within the next 10 years you know there's that guy's the guy and if I'm just being awesome so but I've just think about those people I know you know maybe one or two of them would become vegan but even that would be a surprise and no I can't imagine this whole classroom becoming vegan I can't more I can't imagine half of them becoming vegan and all of them have spent a couple of years talking to me and some of them looking at my youtube channel or what have you you know it's not it's not a new idea I wouldn't British Columbia and living in a city where veganism is visible I mean this kind of human calculus is is very humbling I think to these these ideological claims I don't believe my own family members are gonna become vegan but I mean that can be misleading you may be related to people who have a lot in common with you so maybe within your own family you do feel a lot of your relatives you know can become vegan you're very optimistic that way but whether you think about your co-workers at the workplace or people who happen to be assigned to the same class with you in high school there people have to be assigned the same class to you in university I was sitting in university classrooms the people who were doing Asian Studies these were disproportionately people who are very familiar with the history culture and languages of Asia people who are studying Buddhism and Hinduism and things like that a few you know these were if anything you might think I'd have a ludicrously optimistic a few of this based on just who was in the classroom me but I don't I look at them you know just in my own mind's eye looking back at that classroom and people I study with I don't even know if there's one person in that classroom who has the potential to become vegan and computer tech know Mogi is not like that converting to Islam is not like that I mean it may sound strangely they don't have what it takes you know to be vegan but that's that's really what I mean and I'm really being sincere in in saying that um so as misleading as it is again if you were living in the United States from 1965 to 1985 even in Australia I've heard about these groups the Transcendental Meditation groups in Australia where they thought they were taking over Australia because they were getting white people to confer and donate money this is another big factor that the religions were an advantage their religions have over veganism is the donation side of the game because you can get huge donations just by promising people that go to heaven after they die veganism doesn't have that edge we only promise you you have a 70% lower chance of getting heart attack getting cancer etc but after you die that's that's your problem we can't help you but anyway it was easy for people inside those cult groups to think this is growing exponentially or this is going through an early adopter phases and the chart is we're gonna take over the the whole mass market another example sometimes that you hear these things from people who are racist sometimes not for people were just sincerely concerned in Canada all the time I hear from people that they think the Chinese are taking over Canada all right no sorry I'm currently living in China this is being recorded right I speak enough Chinese have no study the Chinese claim for several years I like Chinese people you know this is not this is not my point why do some white Canadians perceive this because they see Chinese restaurants on the streets I mean Chinese restaurants I've mentioned this in my manifesto video what was the video hultafors on community my vision festive video community you know one of the one of the sort of most low-key but durable and impactful forms of activism for gay rights and for veganism and for Chinese food is just having permanent institutions there when you live in a city that has permanent gay nightclubs that lets people know you know homosexuals are a permanent part of this community it just says hey we have a gay community or we have a significant number people were gay this isn't a fad this isn't something's gonna disappear this is also true of Chinese restaurants now if you live in a city like Victoria BC Canada or Toronto or mantra or what-have-you some people just they see Chinese restaurants everywhere and they think wow the Chinese are taking over well the Chinese are taking over what are the Chinese taking over minimum-wage jobs that have to compete with McDonald's even then I would only say maybe I mean I think if you look at the market fundamentals I don't think it's easy at all for Chinese restaurants to compete with McDonald's in Chipotle and to provide their people with wages and retirement benefits and what-have-you I think that's a really tough racket I think it'd be really easy to say maybe the number of Chinese restaurants hits a peak and then a lot of them are going out of business where I just was there were a lot of empty Chinese restaurants in in Victoria BC it looks like something to me that peaked in about 1992 and now a lot of them are going out of business but the fact that there are even if you live in a city that's full of vibrant economically successful Chinese restaurants that are paying their employees minimum wage and competing with McDonald's this way does that mean that the Chinese are taking over City Hall doesn't mean that the Chinese taking over provincial Parliament does it mean that the Chinese are taking over the Congress or the Senate or whatever the elected offices are in your country I doubt it I mean take a look at British Columbia's Parliament or Canada's you know federal parliament or the American Senate what have you the fact that you have something visible in this way at this low level it may be significant that some people like the Chinese food when it's once in a while but it neither means that the Chinese population is taking over the country nor does it mean in another sense that white people are being taken over by Chinese culture it really doesn't and this comparison is sadly very meaningful for veganism the fact that you have successful vegan restaurants doesn't even mean a significant percentage of their customers are vegan it doesn't mean a significant percentage of their customers are becoming vegan it can't be compared to adopting a new technology it can't be compared to adopting a new culture or a new religion or anything else it's just another niche in the free market competing with McDonald's and where the same people who eat at a vegan restaurant once in a while may indeed be eating at McDonald's once in awhile I was like I'm not going to get into in this video and in depth but you know that the delusion that veganism is a superior technology I think it also rests on health claims that are shaky that are weak I wish I could tell you that the health benefits of veganism you only get by being a 100% principled vegan but I think we all know what's not true I've mentioned this before at least have mentioned form conversation my girlfriend but you know I was um I was at this school and could Ming and there was an American guy and he had basically switched from an American standard diet to a Chinese standard diet I saw what he ate because we were in the same school every day so I saw what he ate for breakfast and lunch every day he was eating meat three meals a day but he had all the benefits of a vegan diet I mean I assumed cheese had disappeared from his diet and he switched from eating steaks and and hamburgers to eating a typical Chinese style that were there little bits and pieces of meat so it's radically less meat but all the stuff that the vegan doctors boast about you he was on high blood pressure medication and he suddenly had to stop taking the high blood pressure he had all these health conditions that were reversed and he had to be taken off the medication so if you've watched the monologues through different vegan doctors they all boast about that I wish it would be very convenient for me if you only got those health benefits from being an ideologically consistent ethical vegan but you don't you can get those health benefits by eliminating dairy and cheese from your diet and by eating a reduce Italian diet or what have you so regarding this as a technology again I mean instead you could just stop eating at McDonald's and start eating at the local Chinese restaurant or what have you this is this is another element of this that is misleading now finally I appreciate that maude vegan mentions just one example one real-world example which is Israel of a country that is a high level a high percentage of vegans a significant vegan population but even there would be really misleading to assume we're looking at an inevitable upward curve what is the situation in Israel and was the situation in Taiwan so these are I think the two unique important examples of societies that have large percentage of people who become vegan in both Israel and Taiwan there are extraordinary religious circumstances extraordinary military and political circumstances and even extraordinary ecological circumstances that have led a significant population to become vegan now Israel is incredibly ethnically diverse internally this is not just the division between Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis or between Palestinians and and Jews or what have you within the Jewish population you're talking about Iranian Jews and North African Jews and Eastern European Jews and like British and American and French Jews it is an incredibly internally diverse fractious and fragmentary culture it's very difficult to generalize and say that this could become a mass phenomenon within Israel you know we have to be open to the possibility we can't look at these examples where they can't fail mentality we have to open the possibility that it's already reached its maximum in Israel or that it's even going to decline after hitting a peak which is of course what happened with Hinduism and many these other examples but further I don't think we could look at the example of Israel and say that these these gains this expansion of veganism could be transferred from Israel to Egypt next door right right away so if this is the percent of people were vegan Israel don't you think in the next five years Egypt is gonna catch up well do you or don't you how about Syria on youth reporter right right away just asking that question we stop and think oh actually there are a lot of really unique really peculiar factors about Israel now this includes the challenges if you talk to Israelis about why so many Israelis have become vegan there's a unique role for the kosher diet and Jewish dietary laws and maybe we don't want to admit that to ourselves as vegans maybe we want to think you know all of our fellow vegans are vegan for ethical reasons as you know a huge percentage of vegans are vegan because they got you know the doctor told they're gonna have a heart attack if they don't change their diet the vegan for purely health reasons or what have you well it may be hard to imagine if you haven't spent time around you know Orthodox Jews or Jews you take those laws seriously there really are Jewish people who became vegan because they found it a simpler way to live by Jewish dietary laws now you can also of course meet Israeli Jews who become vegan who have contempt for the kosher dietary laws but believe me this is an impossible to imagine for outsiders factor in terms of why so many Jews became vegan in Israel this was a and another factor as a very large terms of Jews are lactose intolerance so if you're someone who's struggling with Jewish Jewish dietary laws you can't drink milk products anyway guess what guys that was the thin edge of the wedge for why veganism took off in a culture and in a religion that is actually completely hostile toward veganism now meanwhile in Taiwan we're talking about a mixed Buddhist Confucian Chinese culture but a culture where Buddhism is one major religious voice among many Taiwan has a I think the largest and most vibrant vegan community or vegan communities plural in the world okay I think they're actually ahead of of Israel however do you think that any of the gains made in Taiwan could be transferred to the Philippines no chance the Philippines is divided between Catholics and Muslims at this point right those are the next islands South look at a map it's not that far you can say oh yeah yeah such a large percentage of people in Taiwan have become vegan and you know and this is the early adopter curve this is the thing I drew so therefore the next stop is the Philippines right this little Bissel take off this will take off in all of Southeast Asia you've got to be joking all right the extent to which Taiwan's veganism is based on Buddhist traditional culture and I want to say this openly for outsiders may be hard to imagine but in the same sense that Jews individual Jewish people may be disillusioned with Judaism and be disillusioned with the kosher diet and therefore adopt veganism in Taiwan when I talk to serious like vegan activists face to face very often they were people disillusioned with Buddhism disillusioned with what was going on in the religion who became vegan for that reason so it's not that there are such Orthodox Buddhists that they become vegan again that wouldn't make any sense at all within Judaism it's not like oh you're such an Orthodox Jew you choose to be vegan but it's actually sense of frustration with their religion not living up to its espoused goals and in Taiwan it was very often feeling that Buddhism had become disengaged from the ecological struggle but also from animal rights and other concerns and seeing hypocrisy and corruption and Buddhism and then veganism being an alternative that was not in those ways corrupts and what have you so that's part of the kind of religious psychology of people adopting veganism in Taiwan but one generation dies and is replaced by another everyone knows this in Taiwan the new generation growing up is way less religious than the old generation on its way out and the religion here we're talking about is Buddhism miscellaneous Confucianism what-have-you so it's entirely possible we're not looking at the early adopter phase that Taiwan is an example of country that's maxing out about now with veganism or even in fact in you scrub it that will then decline because of these unique factors these unique factors that led them to a high level of veganism guys I think it is really dangerous to think in a with a what's called they can't fail mentality of veganism from this perspective I will go so far as say veganism can fail and veganism will fail what we have to plan for is not gary francais oneís fantasy of the number of vegans doubling every year take over the country or take you over the whole world okay it's not a plan for we what we have to plan for is not mod vegans fantasy that we're in the early adopter curve and we're gonna become an absolute majority of the population in no time in the same way that cellular phones were there was an early adopter phase back when they were largely useless and then they took over the whole population as they became you know more functional more affordable etc etc when they became more than just a status symbol for the wealthy that was an early phase of a phone to like that the type of failure we have to plan for is precisely that of being an ethically defined minority over the long term of forming you know of organizing effective modes of lobbying effective ways of influence of the government if long term we may never do better than 2% we may never do better than 1% in terms of people who are ethnically motivated vegans how to be effective how to influence the future course of society knowing that in a lot of ways we have less growth potential than some of these pathetic cult groups Transcendental Meditation groups or you know Scientology or something like this because fundamentally we have a lot less to offer people yes aside from saving the planet I'm sorry to say but that just doesn't motivate people the same way that you know converting to a new religion and being promised in mortal life after death or being offered all the benefits of community and what-have-you that you get to that we don't have a lot to offer we're not the new iPhone 10 or something veganism is not a technology that's offering to make your life easier it's an ethical burden with very real political demands on your time and very uncertain very dubious you know future positive outcomes so you know with that being said I love it I'm in the movement long term myself and I'm looking around saying hey who else's is with me not vegan and I agree about a lot of things I just want to put this isn't as a as a Caboclos in the video the last time I talked to her you know I pitched her a couple of ideas including saying look you know within Canada why don't we form a special lobbying group just on leather something like PCRM so PC arm is Physicians Committee for Responsible medicine they're lobbying in American health issues linked to veganism but we could have a specialized group just lobbying government and doing public education and outreach in schools and across the board just dealing with leather I think leather is an example of an obsolete technology leather has been made obsolete by progress of science and now Nike shoes are just exhibit that leather and so on and we can try to educate the public hey you know what leather actually contains chromium hexane it's bad for your health it's bad for the human health of the people involved in the manufacturing process it's bad for the health of the cows that are tortured and suffer horribly I think leather is a unique example where some of this technological thinking thinking to reside obsolescence works and it's a strong suit we can press forward on however I think of that from the perspective of someone who sees veganism as a failure and if someone's going to continue to fail we're going to continue to be a small despised minority within Western society 2% is optimistic I think but we're a small despised minority that happens to be right about some of these issues and where we can lobby we can have our voices heard in a Western pluralistic Democratic Society we can have big impacts and there are tons of examples of tiny minorities who have had big impacts and you can watch my videos about them I think that's the strategic focus for how we need to move forward and that any other notion of this being a new technology that's going to take over the mass market is ultimately a dangerous and self-defeating delusion about us yen